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so slightly. Last week, Vice President Joe Biden announced a White House proposal to pour $35 million into testing backlogged rape kits and bringing sex offenders to justice. That’s good news—the unprocessed evidence constitutes a disgraceful failure of law enforcement. Anti-rape activists are quick to point out that, although one-third of women experience sexual violence in their lifetimes, only 3 in 100 rapists will ever spend a single day in jail. And as Tara Culp-Ressler of ThinkProgress observes, it’s a question not only of low reporting rates, but also of the slipperiness of defining and prosecuting sexual violations: “Of the rapes that are reported to the police,” she writes, “only about one out of four leads to an arrest—and of those arrests, only about one out of four leads to a conviction.” (And that’s not because many of the reports are false: As my colleague Amanda Marcotte has noted in the past, false rape accusations are rare.)
These elusive convictions matter not just because they bring victims closure, but because, unlike some other types of perps, rapists tend to strike again and again. Processing the kits makes a huge difference, as Nora Caplan-Bricker of the New Republic notes:
After New York City processed its 17,000-kit backlog in 2001, the arrest rate for rape cases jumped from 40 percent to 70 percent, reports Erin Delmore at MSNBC. In Ohio, going through 4,000 kits led to 58 cases, and in Detroit, where an 11,000-kit backlog remains, analyzing the first 10 percent of kits led law enforcement to 46 serial rapists.
At a press conference on Monday, Hargitay pointed to yet another reason to prioritize the sets: “One would assume that if someone endures a four- to six-hour invasive examination, that that evidence would be handled with care.”
But reader, I doubt you need much convincing that processing rape kits represents a worthwhile use of police time and resources. The real question is: Why the foot-dragging? How did we get to a place where hundreds of thousands of sex-crime puzzle pieces are shut up in storage lockers and forgotten?
There’s the easy answer and the hard one. Easy is that rape kits cost a lot to analyze—anywhere between $500 and $1,500 each. But on closer investigation, this excuse, floated by police departments, reveals its big flaw: Interpreting evidence in general is a wildly expensive process; digital forensic analysis—of a single computer—might set a department back $5,000, while the average cost of processing any case with DNA evidence is $1,397. Despite this, I’m guessing murders and other instances of nonsexual violence don’t get shoved down into the collective subconscious quite the way rapes do.
A bleaker and more compelling explanation is that, for a long time, our culture has refused to call sex crimes what they are: crimes. When a sense of blame or responsibility clings to the victim, it’s easier for cops to set her case aside. And the blurriness (or perception of same) surrounding a lot of rape allegations doesn’t inspire much optimism among prosecutors that they can score a conviction—so, overworked and underfunded, they don’t even try. I wonder, too, whether hypermasculine values in law enforcement have created a mini bro climate. The Village Voice reported two years ago on NYPD officers who urged street cops to manipulate crime statistics by downgrading reports of sexual assault. One man was able to commit six attempted rapes (“misdemeanors”) before he was apprehended mid-seventh. I like to imagine those cops reporting back to Olivia Benson.
It’s sobering to compare TV’s fantasy sheriffs with the actual detectives who may not regard sex crimes as a big deal. But perceptions of rape and anti-woman violence do seem to be shifting. Caplan-Bricker provides a rundown on the various bills working their way through legislatures across the country: laws in Colorado, Illinois, and Texas requiring police to process their languishing kits, and bills in Tennessee and Maryland requiring new evidence to be analyzed within strict time limits. It’s too bad that police departments need laws to force them to process criminal evidence, but until our perceptions around rape change, I’ll take it.Texas A&M cornerback Deshazor Everett will miss the first half of the Aggies' upcoming game against Sam Houston State after being ejected from Saturday's 52-31 win over Rice because he was called for a targeting foul.
Everett, a junior cornerback, made contact with Rice receiver Klein Kubiak with 3:40 remaining in the fourth quarter of Saturday's game. But it appears that Kubiak, the recipient of Everett's hit, felt the contact was legal.
After the game, Kubiak posted a pair of tweets to his Twitter account indicating he disagreed with the officials' call on the field.
“@SportsCenter: Deshazor Everett was ejected for targeting. How would you call it? http://t.co/wNxiQ16XhF” looked clean from my angle... — Klein Kubiak (@Klein_Kubiak_84) August 31, 2013
Later, he tweeted at Everett with a similar sentiment and even employed a hashtag, #FreeDeshazor, that has been circulated by Aggies' fans who disagreed with the call.
@DeUcE2NiNa9 solid physical football hit in my book. I'll even support #FreeDeshazor. Good luck rest of the year bro — Klein Kubiak (@Klein_Kubiak_84) September 1, 2013
Texas A&M coach Kevin Sumlin challenged the call after the ruling was made, but lost the challenge upon further review by the officials.
"It's a learning experience," Sumlin said after the game. "I would imagine there were a few of those called [in college football] today. That's the enforcement of the new rule, that's what's going to happen. We have to adjust as coaches and players because that's the way it's going to be called. There's nothing you can do about it. Because it happened in the second half, the way I understand it, he's out the first half of next week."
When asked on whether he got an explanation of the call because video replay appeared to show that Everett did not strike Kubiak in the head or neck area, nor did he lead with the crown of his helmet, both aspects that by rule, would lead to a targeting call and potential ejection, Sumlin didn't elaborate much.
"I challenged the call," Sumlin said. "That's all I can say. I wouldn't have challenged it if there was a question."This latest bit of news comes after a particularly tough week for Project Ara. First, the Project Ara group announced it was "re-routing" its planned pilot launch in Puerto Rico this fall, and then it announced that hardware was delayed entirely until 2016. Given that "not falling apart" is one of the most important features a smartphone can have, we're thinking it's a good thing that the Ara team went back to the drawing board on this one -- even if it does mean we'll have to keep waiting for our modular smartphone dreams to come true.
We are testing a signature experience to attach/detach modules. #ProjectAra #HopeYouLikeIt — Project Ara (@ProjectAra) August 19, 2015
Update, 8/20/15, 3:53PM ET: Apparently, the team running the Project Ara Twitter feed are a bunch of jokesters. A day after tweeting that a failed drop test was the reason behind the switch from electropermanent magnets, the Ara team is pulling back and claiming that was just a "joke." The team now says that the magnets worked fine, but it has a new solution that'll be even better. At least we know now not to take anything the Ara team tweets too seriously. The team also tweeted that a better battery and camera are on the way -- hopefully they weren't joking about that.Image copyright AFP Image caption The 'right to be forgotten' has been a point of contention between Google and EU privacy authorities
Tech giant Google says it will hide content removed under the "right to be forgotten" from all versions of the search engine when viewed from countries where removal was approved.
Under the "right to be forgotten" ruling, EU citizens may ask search engines to remove information about them.
Now, removed results will not appear on any version of Google.
EU privacy regulators previously asked the firm to do this.
Until now, search results removed under the "right to be forgotten" were only omitted from European versions of Google - such as google.co.uk or google.fr.
The French data protection authority had threatened the company with a fine if it did not remove the data from global sites - such as google.com - as well as European ones.
This filtering will be applied whenever a European IP address is detected - so users outside the country where the removal request is filed, and indeed all users outside Europe, will still see a set of unedited results.
The BBC understands that the change will be in effect from mid-February.Veeam has always been a great product for backup and replication, and in the recent past, they had introduced Cloud Connect, as a way to have integrated offsite backups to a hosted provider. What makes Cloud Connect really special, is that all communication to the cloud provider is over a single port. No need for VPNs or advanced networking.
There are many Cloud Connect providers as well, all competing for your business. Some offer just basic storage offsite, while others offer redundant storage replicated to another geographic region.
Also, Cloud Connect Enterprise is available, providing the Enterprise datacenter to have Cloud Connect internally, as a way to manage remote Veeam Installs as well as their offsite backups back to a central location.
So, Let’s get started with the setup on the Service Provider side of things! First thing’s first – you’ll need a valid license key to unlock the Cloud Connect capabilities. I’ll assume installing Veeam Backup and Replication is not an issue, or it has already been installed. Once the Veeam license is applied, the Cloud Connect area will now show up on the left-hand side.
Prerequisites:
Before we can get starting, let’s get some things setup first. Veeam Backup and Replication is installed and licensed, so we can check that off the list. Next, we will need a Repository configured under Backup Infrastructure, so we can present that storage to the Cloud Connect clients. In my case, I have a Data Domain setup using DD Boost. In my lab, I’m using the VBR server for all the roles. However, in a real-world deployment, we would want to have some other Windows VMs spun up to handle the roles of Cloud Gateway and WAN Accelerator. Be sure to add the WAN Accelerator role to a VM under Backup Infrastructure and configure for heavy use. The WAN Acceleration page from the Veeam Best Practices guide has some excellent info on the subject.
Configuration:
Certificates:
Veeam Cloud Connect uses encryption to get the data between sites. (In fact, in any Veeam environment, if Veeam detects that the non-private IP ranges are used, it automatically encrypts backup traffic across that link!) To setup the Encryption, we will want to import a valid SSL certificate that has been signed by a trusted authority. In this lab environment, I’m simply going to choose the option to use a self-signed certificate, which Veeam can generate. Luca Dell’Oca also recently published a great post on using Let’s Encrypt with Veeam.
Cloud Gateway:
Next up is configuring a Cloud Gateway. This role is what the client will communicate to from the outside world. Our Cloud Gateway(s) typically will be separate VMs that either have a WAN IP assigned to them, or are behind NAT with TCP port 6180 passed through to them. All the clients will use TCP 6180 to connect to the gateway and pass all it’s backup traffic through into the Repository space assigned.
Like many other Veeam roles, we will want to first add the server as a managed Windows server into the Veeam console, and then we can select it for the Cloud Gateway role.
In my lab, the Cloud Gateway is behind NAT, and I have 6180 translated in, so I selected the appropriate option. Be sure to have a valid DNS name for clients to connect to. While IP is an option, if for some reason your IP changes, you would have to update all the clients, instead of just an A record in DNS.
Tenants:
Now that we have the underlying infrastructure in place (Veeam, Repository, Cloud Gateway) it’s time to setup some tenants. A Tenant can be setup with sub-tenants as well, however, we won’t be covering that in this post. In the navigation tree, select Tenants, and create a new Tenant. Assign a username and a strong password, or allow Veeam to generate a new password for you.
Choose “Backup Storage” under assigned resources. This will allow a cloud repository to show under the tenant’s Veeam console once they authenticate. The other option, “Replication Resources” is for cloud providers who allow Veeam to replicate into their environment, providing a full DR site, where virtual machines can be spun up in a disaster scenario.
Last, you can choose if this agreement with the Tenant expires at a certain point, or leave unchecked for it to never expire.
Next, we can choose what types of limitation we have in place for this tenant. For maximum concurrent tasks, this value will vary depending on whether or not WAN Accelerators will be in use. As the description shows, WAN Accelerators will handle disks sequentially, while not using them will allow disks to process in parallel.
Be sure to setup bandwidth limitations for each Tenant as well, which will prevent one tenant from overwhelming the pipe, and possibly affecting the speeds of other tenants.
Last, we want to assign the Backup Repository to the Tenant. The Cloud Repository Name, is the name that will show in the Tenant’s VBR console, so be sure to name appropriately. Then, select what physical repository will be used, and how much that Tenant is allowed to consume of it. Some providers will want to present multiple repositories to their Tenants, such as a deduped repository, or one backed by different RAID levels or protection methods.
Finally, we are going to use our Wan Accelerator that we setup as a prerequisite. With Veeam, the WAN accelerator allows for reduced WAN traffic, as redundant blocks are not copied across the link, since they already exist in the cache on the accelerator. If the tenant is licensed for WAN acceleration, 99% of the time, it will be beneficial to use.
Final thoughts
At this point, the tenant can now connect and start sending backup data to the cloud environment. Continue creating additional tenants in the same manner. When acting as a service provider, you will want to verify capacities. Repository capacity, Bandwidth capacity, and also the capacity of disk space assigned to the WAN Accelerators.
As a service provider, you can also monitor the jobs that are targeting the Cloud Connect environment, but for security purposes, the details will not be visible – only sucess and failure.
Setting up Cloud Connect from the Client Side:
Be sure to follow along with fellow Veeam Vanguard Matt Crape in his post on how to connect a client Veeam Backup and Replication installation to a cloud provider. Be sure to browse his blog for many other great Veeam related articles!In 1906, Alfred Henry Lewis stated, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” Since then, his observation has been echoed by people as disparate as Robert Heinlein and Leon Trotsky.
The key here is that, unlike all other commodities, food is the one essential that cannot be postponed. If there were a shortage of, say, shoes, we could make do for months or even years. A shortage of gasoline would be worse, but we could survive it, through mass transport or even walking, if necessary.
But food is different. If there were an interruption in the supply of food, fear would set in immediately. And, if the resumption of the food supply were uncertain, the fear would become pronounced. After only nine missed meals, it’s not unlikely that we’d panic and be prepared to commit a crime to acquire food. If we were to see our neighbour with a loaf of bread, and we owned a gun, we might well say, “I’m sorry, you’re a good neighbour and we’ve been friends for years, but my children haven’t eaten today – I have to have that bread – even if I have to shoot you.”
But surely, there’s no need to speculate on this concern. There’s nothing on the evening news to suggest that such a problem even might be on the horizon. So, let’s have a closer look at the actual food distribution industry, compare it to the present direction of the economy, and see whether there might be reason for concern.
The food industry typically operates on very small margins – often below 2%. Traditionally, wholesalers and retailers have relied on a two-week turnaround of supply and anywhere up to a 30-day payment plan. But an increasing tightening of the economic system for the last eight years has resulted in a turnaround time of just three days for both supply and payment for many in the industry. This a system that’s still fully operative, but with no further wiggle room, should it take a significant further hit.
If there were a month where significant inflation took place (say, 3%), all profits would be lost for the month for both suppliers and retailers, but goods could still be replaced and sold for a higher price next month. But, if there were three or more consecutive months of inflation, the industry would be unable to bridge the gap, even if better conditions were expected to develop in future months. A failure to pay in full for several months would mean smaller orders by those who could not pay. That would mean fewer goods on the shelves. The longer the inflationary trend continued, the more quickly prices would rise to hopefully offset the inflation. And ever-fewer items on the shelves.
From Germany in 1922, to Argentina in 2000, and to Venezuela in 2016, this has been the pattern whenever inflation has become systemic, rather than sporadic. Each month, some stores close, beginning with those that are the most poorly capitalised.
In good economic times, this would mean more business for those stores that were still solvent, but in an inflationary situation, they would be in no position to take on more unprofitable business. The result is that the volume of food on offer at retailers would decrease at a pace with the severity of the inflation.
However, the demand for food would not decrease by a single loaf of bread. Store closings would be felt most immediately in inner cities, when one closing would send customers to the next neighbourhood seeking food. The real danger would come when that store also closes and both neighbourhoods descended on a third store in yet another neighbourhood. That’s when one loaf of bread for every three potential purchasers would become worth killing over. Virtually no one would long tolerate seeing his children go without food because others had “invaded” his local supermarket.
In addition to retailers, the entire industry would be impacted and, as retailers disappeared, so would suppliers, and so on, up the food chain. This would not occur in an orderly fashion, or in one specific area. The problem would be a national one. Closures would be all over the map, seemingly at random, affecting all areas. Food riots would take place, first in the inner cities then spread to other communities. Buyers, fearful of shortages, would clean out the shelves.
Importantly, it’s the very unpredictability of food delivery that increases fear, creating panic and violence. And, again, none of the above is speculation; it’s a historical pattern – a reaction based upon human nature whenever systemic inflation occurs.
Then … unfortunately … the cavalry arrives
At that point, it would be very likely that the central government would step in and issue controls to the food industry that served political needs rather than business needs, greatly exacerbating the problem. Suppliers would be ordered to deliver to those neighbourhoods where the riots are the worst, even if those retailers are unable to pay. This would increase the number of closings of suppliers.
Along the way, truckers would begin to refuse to enter troubled neighbourhoods, and the military might well be brought in to force deliveries to take place.
But why worry about the above? After all, inflation is contained at present and, although governments fudge the numbers, the present level of inflation is not sufficient to create the above scenario, as it has in so many other countries.
So, what would it take for the above to occur? Well, historically, it has always begun with excessive debt. We know that the debt level is now the highest it has ever been in world history. In addition, the stock and bond markets are in bubbles of historic proportions. They will most certainly pop, but will that happen in a year? Six months? Next week?
With a crash in the markets, deflation always follows as people try to unload assets to cover for their losses. The Federal Reserve (and other central banks) has stated that it will unquestionably print as much money as it takes to counter deflation. Unfortunately, inflation has a far greater effect on the price of commodities than assets. Therefore, the prices of commodities will rise dramatically, further squeezing the purchasing power of the consumer, thereby decreasing the likelihood that he will buy assets, even if they’re bargain priced. Therefore, asset holders will drop their prices repeatedly as they become more desperate. The Fed then prints more to counter the deeper deflation and we enter a period when deflation and inflation are increasing concurrently.
Historically, when this point has been reached, no government has ever done the right thing. They have, instead, done the very opposite – keep printing. A by-product of this conundrum is reflected in the photo above. Food still exists, but retailers shut down because they cannot pay for goods. Suppliers shut down because they’re not receiving payments from retailers. Producers cut production because sales are plummeting.
In every country that has passed through such a period, the government has eventually gotten out of the way and the free market has prevailed, re-energizing the industry and creating a return to normal. The question is not whether civilization will come to an end. (It will not.) The question is the liveability of a society that is experiencing a food crisis, as even the best of people are likely to panic and become a potential threat to anyone who is known to store a case of soup in his cellar.
Fear of starvation is fundamentally different from other fears of shortages. Even good people panic. In such times, it’s advantageous to be living in a rural setting, as far from the centre of panic as possible. It’s also advantageous to store food in advance that will last for several months, if necessary. However, even these measures are no guarantee, as, today, modern highways and efficient cars make it easy for anyone to travel quickly to where the goods are. The ideal is to be prepared to sit out the crisis in a country that will be less likely to be impacted by dramatic inflation – where the likelihood of a food crisis is low and basic safety is more assured.
Editor’s Note: Unfortunately most people have no idea what really happens when a currency collapses, let alone how to prepare…
We think everyone should own some physical gold. Gold is the ultimate form of wealth insurance. It’s preserved wealth through every kind of crisis imaginable. It will preserve wealth during the next crisis, too.
But if you want to be truly “crisis-proof” there's more to do…
How will you protect yourself in the event of a crisis? New York Times best-selling author Doug Casey and his team just released a video that will show you exactly how. Click here to watch it now.Heck yeah, somebody has gotten their hand on a AMD FX 9590, the 5 GHz CPU processor called AMD FX-9590 comes with 8-cores and is clocked at 5 GHz. A VR-Zone forum user called “MacClipper” got his hands on a retail sample of the AMD FX-9590 and wriote up a quick preview of the 5 GHz processor from AMD. The FX-9590 is based off the same 32nm HKG process used on Piledriver and Bulldozer, so this is the same stuff as the FX processors, yet clocked faster and eating away a lot of power.
The 8 cores processor has 8 threads and 8 MB of cache The CPU actually isn't clocked at 5 GHz clock but the Turbo core 3.0 technology increases its clocks higher from the base clock of 4.7 GHz towards ineviteably 5 GHz. Retail samples have shown 'leaked, but at a rough price in the range the $800 marker, which is around the same as the Core i7-3960X.
More interesting is the fact that the chip runs idle on 1.4GHz at 0.875V but when it turbo's towards 5 GHz it requires an amazingly high 1.513V. We're not even sure all motherboards can deliver that stable enough. So that will consume a lot of power and sure, you would need extravagant cooling alright. So only select high-end AM3+ motherboards would be able to sufficiently support the 5 GHz lineup.
AMD FX-9590 AMD FX-9370 AMD FX-8350 Architecture Piledriver Piledriver Piledriver Family Vishera Vishera Vishera Manufacture 32 nm SOI HKMG 32 nm SOI HKMG 32 nm SOI HKMG Cores 8 pcs. (4 pcs. Modules) 8 pcs. (4 pcs. Modules) 8 pcs. (4 pcs. Modules) CPU Clock Base 4.7 GHz 4.4 Ghz 4.0 GHz CPU Turbo Core 5.0 GHz 4.7 GHz 4.2 GHz L2 cache 4 x 2 MB 4 x 2 MB 4 x 2 MB L3 cache 8 MB 8 MB 8 MB Max. DDR3 1866 MHz 1866 MHz 1866 MHz TDP 220 W 220 W 125 W Base AM3 + AM3 + AM3 +
The processor features the same size and die as the older FX-8350 and the only difference between the two chips is that the 5 GHz chip is highly binned and comes with higher clock speeds. MAcClipper tested it with the ASRock 990FX Extreme9 motherboard which is considered as the flagship AM3+ motherboard in their lineup. While the gigahertz race went out of fashion years ago, it’s still nice to see AMD putting up competition against Intel. But the price... it is too high as well as the power consumption.If you have been following me for a while you would've seen the digital development of this piece as it evolved from rough color thumbnailinto its final compositionand here is the finished colored pencil piece.This piece is a Patreon reward for who saved up two years of rewards, and for all the hours of work he's done to help make my Picarto stream as successful as it is. In fact we unveiled this piece on the stream last night.At 19" x 27" this is one of the largest colored pencil pieces I've done, and with the Strathmore 500 series vellum Bristol Board taped to a support/work board it's also at the ragged edge of what I can do on my drawing table. In fact I had to stand up to work on the piece at times just so I could have enough reach. Another measurement of how much of a effort went into this project is the fact that it generated 3 cups of pencil shavings from my electric pencil sharpener.Due to the nature of the composition this piece was almost entirely done in colored pencil and Prismacolor Art Stiks, with just a little bit of technical pen and gouache. Another thing that was a challenge with this piece was keeping Celestia clean and free any of the background colors. Especially since I used a lot of indigo blue in this piece. Indigo is a pigment that will lift relatively easily from the working surface, even if your using tracing paper as a barrier between your hand and the picture. This is especially true if you've been blending indigo blue with OMS.As a result I was constantly monitoring whether any little bits of indigo pigment were getting on her and gently removing them with a Tombow Mono eraser. Indigo blue is what I refer to as a Bully Pigment. If not handled with respect it will often overwhelm and smother other colors when it is blended with OMS. Since Celestia is a very pale pink. Yes that is correct, she's not white. In fact there is only one point of pure white and that is the glow at the tip of her horn. Also there is not as much black as you might think in this piece.I plan to sell prints of this piece at Bronycon this year along with some other color pieces of mine.I hope you like what you see. Please help make more art like this possible by supporting me at PatreonThe Impacts of Reduced Access to Abortion and Family Planning Services on Abortion, Births, and Contraceptive Purchases
NBER Working Paper No. 23634
Issued in July 2017, Revised in December 2017
NBER Program(s):Children, Health Care, Health Economics, Law and Economics, Public Economics
Between 2011 and 2014, Texas enacted three pieces of legislation that significantly reduced funding for family planning services and increased restrictions on abortion clinic operations. Together this legislation creates cross-county variation in access to abortion and family planning services, which we leverage to understand the impact of family planning and abortion clinic access on abortions, births, and contraceptive purchases. In response to these policies, abortions to Texas residents fell 20.5% and births rose 2.6% in counties that no longer had an abortion provider within 50 miles. Changes in the family planning market induced a 1.5% increase in births for counties that no longer had a publicly funded family planning clinic within 25 miles. Meanwhile, responses of retail purchases of condoms and emergency contraceptives to both abortion and family planning service changes were minimal.
The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email.
Supplementary materials for this paper:
Acknowledgments
Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX
Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w23634
Published: Stefanie Fischer & Heather Royer & Corey White, 2018. "The impacts of reduced access to abortion and family planning services on abortions, births, and contraceptive purchases," Journal of Public Economics, vol 167, pages 43-68. citation courtesy of
Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded* these:BART is taking steps to slow down trains at more than three dozen hot spots where hazardous — and in some cases, deteriorating — track conditions could jeopardize the safety of thousands of riders.
That includes a location in Concord that has been the site of two derailments in the past five years — including a February 2014 incident that left the front end of an empty, 10-car train dangling off the edge of the elevated rails.
Track troubles on the 42-year-old system already prompted the shutdown beginning Sunday of the elevated stretch between the Oakland Coliseum and Fruitvale stations. It will be closed for an unprecedented 11 weekends spread out over the next few months while workers replace 1,000 degraded wooden ties and 3,000 feet of worn rail.
Trains have been limited to 50 mph along that stretch since January, after a track tie crumbled as an inspector stepped on it.
The Coliseum-Fruitvale work is only the beginning. In the coming months, partial or full shutdowns are planned near the Daly City, San Leandro and Bayfair stations — all on elevated crossover rails where the trains switch tracks, known as interlockings.
“They are afraid a tie could come loose, cause a derailment and send a train plunging off the tracks,” said a BART insider, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to go on the record.
Worries over track conditions have already led the transit agency to reduce train speeds between the West Oakland station and the transbay tube, where repair work has begun, and between the Richmond Station and a nearby maintenance yard.
The derailment threat is very real, as the Concord accidents show. Train speeds at the spot where two trains jumped the tracks, just south of the Concord Station, have been capped at 18 mph, down from the previous 27 mph limit.
Officials traced the first derailment in March 2011 to uneven wear on a track section and flawed maintenance on a train wheel that slipped off the rails. Sixty-five people were safely evacuated from the train, and there were no serious injuries.
After last year’s accident at the same location, officials concluded that “a slight jog in the track” at the interlocking might have played a part in that derailment. It took more than a day for crews to haul away the dangling train cars after that incident, in which the operator escaped injury.
Now, according to BART officials, plans are in the works to slow speeds at 37 other interlockings because of concerns that trains might otherwise jump the tracks.
One member of BART’s Board of Directors, who asked not to be named for fear of upsetting management, said the agency faces an “awful dilemma” about how much information to disclose about the extent of its safety issues.
“If we put out everything that’s a problem, people are going to have second thoughts about riding the system,” the director said.
Assistant General Manager Paul Oversier said BART has made no secret of the need for repairs.
“We have been saying this for a couple of years now and have been trying to warn the board and tell them that we need to do maintenance in a different way,” Oversier said.
That “different way” means more extensive repairs than can be made during BART’s normal overnight shutdowns, Oversier said. The more far-reaching repairs unavoidably disrupt service.
At a board workshop in January, acting chief engineer Tamar Allen showed off a piece of rail whose head — the part where the train wheel sits — had been worn down by at least a half inch.
Only about 20 percent of BART’s track has been replaced since the system opened in 1972. A recent Federal Transit Administration-funded report says tracks’ normal life span is “assumed to be on the order of 25 years” for rapid transit agencies. BART says its rails are typically good for 20 to 35 years, depending on their location.
Officials say deferred maintenance is not unique to BART — rail upkeep is an issue nationwide. Chicago, for example, shut down its Red Line in the south part of the city for five months in 2013 for a $425 million track replacement project — the first time it has been closed for an overhaul in 44 years.
In BART’s case, the emphasis on expanding the system — including this year’s planned opening of a 5.4-mile extension to the Warm Springs section of Fremont — has come at the expense of maintenance to its core lines. Increased pressure from directors and the public to run the trains for longer hours — both on weeknights and weekends — threatens to put an even greater burden on the system.
BART officials say that what’s really needed is a complete overhaul, and they are quietly preparing to go to the ballot in November 2016 with a potentially multibillion-dollar bond measure to pay for at least some of it. The bond would go before voters in San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa counties.
“We know we need $4.8 billion,” said the BART director. “The bigger question is, how much will the public be willing to support?”
San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross appear Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays. Matier can be seen on the KPIX TV morning and evening news. He can also be heard on KCBS radio Monday through Friday at 7:50 a.m. and 5:50 p.m. Got a tip? Call (415) 777-8815, or e-mail matierandross@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @matierandrossThe video will start in 8 Cancel
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Leicester have sacked Craig Shakespeare after a dismal start to the season at the King Power.
The Foxes are in the bottom three after just one win from their opening eight Premier League games.
Monday night's 1-1 draw at home to West Brom was the final straw for Leicester chiefs.
Shakespeare landed the Foxes job on a full-time basis following a successful spell in caretaker charge following the dismissal of Claudio Ranieri.
However, he has followed Ranieri out of the door and leaves the King Power after 26 games at the helm.
(Image: Getty)
Leicester have won 11 games since Shakespeare took over from Ranieri in February, drawing six and losing the other nine.
However, they have endured a torrid time this term and Foxes chiefs have decided to wield the axe.
Riyad Mahrez's late equaliser rescued a point against West Brom as their home hoodoo against the Baggies continued.
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Leicester City Vice Chairman Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha said: “Craig has been a great servant to Leicester City – during his spells as an Assistant Manager and since taking over as Manager in challenging circumstances in February. His dedication to the Club and to his work has been absolute and the contribution he made to the most successful period in Leicester City history is considerable.
“However, our early promise under Craig’s management has not been consistently evident in the months since and the Board feels that, regrettably, a change is necessary to keep the Club moving forward – consistent with the long-term expectations of our supporters, Board and owners.
“Craig is and will remain a very popular, respected figure at Leicester City and will be welcome back at King Power Stadium in future, both professionally and as a friend of the Club.”
Leicester's decision to give Shakespeare the boot hasn't gone well with club legend and Match of the Day host Gary Lineker.
He tweeted: "Craig Shakespeare sacked by Leicester. Bring back Claudio.
"Was always a miracle, but it’s even more remarkable really that Leicester won the league given the ineptitude of those that run the club."The state and Verizon New Jersey have hammered out an agreement to settle a dispute on how the telecom company will comply with a two-decades-old law requiring it to provide high-speed broadband service to all of its customers.
But will it fly?
The |
B.C., foresees a doubling of the smaller cruise ships that will come ashore at the port on the cruising route near the Alaskan border.
"For Prince Rupert, a community of 14,000 people, it's a significant driver to the economy. When a cruise ship sails into Prince Rupert, it increases the population by about 13 per cent so it has a huge impact on the local economy," said port CEO Don Krusel.His “message discipline” game is on point. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks on Nov. 9, 2015, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Sen. Bernie Sanders needs to win New Hampshire if he wants any shot at the nomination. It neighbors the state he’s represented in Congress for two-dozen years and is populated, on the Democratic side, with delightfully ornery white liberals. He’s topped polling averages for the state just long enough to solidify the expectation that he must win it. This isn’t just me popping off. Take it from Sanders’ own New Hampshire director, Julia Barnes. “I wake up every morning and tell myself that New Hampshire is a must-win,” Barnes told MSNBC over the weekend. “No one is going to say that it’s not a must-win.”
One excellent means of solidifying his New Hampshire chances would be to win, or at the very least, surpass expectations in Iowa. The latest Des Moines Register survey of the Democratic race—conducted by Selzer & Co., considered the gold standard of Iowa polling—finds Hillary Clinton ahead but not insurmountably so, with 48 percent to Sanders’ 39. When the Register last polled the state in October, while Vice President Joe Biden was still included in polling surveys, Clinton led 42 to 37 percent. If Clinton blows out Sanders in Iowa, it could tilt New Hampshire in her favor; if Sanders either wins or gives Clinton a righteous scare in Iowa, he could preserve his New Hampshire edge, assuming he still possesses it through January.
Let’s say Sanders comes from behind to beat Clinton in Iowa and solidly wins New Hampshire. The question, then, is: Will that change anything?
Clinton has two firewalls immediately following Iowa and New Hampshire. Her strong support among Latino voters and organized labor positions her well for a win in the Feb. 20, 2016, Nevada caucuses. Her dominant support among black voters, who comprise a majority of South Carolina Democratic voters, has helped her maintain a roughly 50-percentage point lead over Sanders in the state that hosts its primary on Feb. 27. Three days later is Super Tuesday, featuring numerous states in which black voters similarly exercise a major role.
Rudimentary calculations would suggest that Sanders still needs to expand his voting base beyond young people and white liberals and into minority voters, who comprise a large and growing part of the Democratic base. Otherwise, even the ideal kickoff of twin victories in Iowa and New Hampshire would be for naught, and Clinton would cruise through the South to the nomination after losing the first two nominating contests—just as her husband did in 1992.
And doesn’t the Sanders campaign just know it! After a campaign start in which Sanders clashed with Black Lives Matter activists and carved out little room in his messaging for racial justice concerns, Sanders changed his ways. He began talking about racial justice matters on their own terms instead of as a subsidiary to economic justice concerns and released his own racial justice platform. He’s stepped out of the national news cycle, to a degree, to focus on introducing himself to black audiences he’s never before had to court. During a trip through the South in November, he addressed black churches in South Carolina and then headed to Atlanta, where he met with Bernice King, daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., before hosting a large rally at which he was introduced by rapper Killer Mike. (Video of the introduction went viral, and deservedly so.) Just last week, Sanders toured Baltimore with black pastors to reflect on the murder of Freddie Gray and the riots that ensued.
But just as Sanders was getting criticized earlier in the year for sticking to his economic inequality talking points and not addressing racial justice concerns, now he’s being questioned for sticking too closely to those talking points and not speaking about, well, whatever the media wants him to talk about. For the moment, that means ISIS and national security threats.
At an event in Baltimore last week, Sanders’ (unrelated) press secretary, Symone Sanders, kicked up a bit of drama by telling reporters not to ask about ISIS during their scrum with the candidate. “Don’t ask about ISIS today,” she told them. “I mean, it’s not on topic. If it comes up, and he wants to talk about it, the senator will let you know. But I’d appreciate it if y’all would stay on topic today.” You can understand her point—let’s talk about the very important issues on which our Baltimore visit was based, while in Baltimore! But it’s also not a good look to dictate to reporters what they can’t ask about when they get face time with a candidate.
The episode played into a popular perception about Sanders: that he just doesn’t like talking about national security or foreign policy. It’s always a decent bet in American politics that people will freak out about foreign policy for a hot minute or two but will ultimately vote according to their wallets. But right now, the fear of ISIS following the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino gives an advantage to Clinton, based on her foreign policy experience and fluency on the issues. If Sanders showed more of a willingness to discuss these issues, he could both boost his own credentials and feast more directly on Clinton’s questionable record of foreign policy decision-making—and not just on Iraq.
One of the most commonly cited traits that political handicappers use to weigh a candidate’s viability is “message discipline.” By that metric alone, Sanders is far and away the best candidate in the field. It’s gotten him quite far already, positioning him well in the first two nominating contests of the year. That winning those two contests might get him nowhere else, though, shows the downsides: It prevents him from coming across as an acceptably well-rounded candidate, with wide audiences in each of the party’s major constituencies, who can respond ably to changing events.Roxane Gay Pulls Book, Protesting Breitbart Editor's 'Egregious' Book Deal
Enlarge this image toggle caption Jay Grabiec/Grove Atlantic Jay Grabiec/Grove Atlantic
It seems readily apparent that the writer of a book titled Bad Feminist would register significant disagreement — to put it politely — with a writer who has called feminism "bowel cancer."
But when Roxane Gay realized she was to be published on the imprint of the same publisher that recently signed Milo Yiannopoulos to a six-figure book deal, she made that disapproval quite clear.
"I can't in good conscience let them publish it while they also publish Milo," Gay told BuzzFeed News on Wednesday. "So I told my agent over the weekend to pull the project."
That project, currently titled How to Be Heard, had been set to publish through TED Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint.
Yiannopoulos, a tech editor at Breitbart News, has drawn significant backlash for consistently provocative statements on the conservative website — and for getting banned from Twitter last year. That ban followed his prominent role in the gamergate controversy and a campaign of racist and abusive messages directed at Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones.
Yiannopoulos, for his part, has dismissed the criticism as politically motivated and as an attempt to silence dissenting opinions.
Late last year, another Simon & Schuster imprint — Threshold Editions, which is geared toward conservative readers — agreed to a book deal with Yiannopoulos worth $250,000, according to multiple media reports.
That news didn't sit well with a lot of Simon & Schuster authors. So much so, in fact, that the publisher's president and CEO sent a letter reassuring them that "we do not support or condone, nor will we publish, hate speech."
Others in the publishing industry also voiced their distaste with the deal. Dennis Johnson, head of the independent publisher Melville House, explained his reasoning to NPR's Lynn Neary:
"Nobody in the protest is saying, 'You have no right to be published. You have no right, Simon & Schuster, to publish this guy, and this guy, you have no right to be published' — nobody's saying that. "What they're saying is, 'We're shocked and we're outraged that you would stoop so low to make a buck as to publish this purveyor of vile hate speech.' "
It didn't sit well with Gay either, she said in her statement, but at first she thought she didn't have anything to do with it — until she remembered TED Books' association with the publisher.
"I was supposed to turn the book in this month and I kept thinking about how egregious it is to give someone like Milo a platform for his blunt, inelegant hate and provocation," Gay said. "I just couldn't bring myself to turn the book in."
Though she acknowledged that TED Books and Threshold are different imprints, with different staffs and intended audiences, Gay said the link between them through Simon & Schuster was still too much for her.
She found herself "fortunate enough to be in a position to make this decision" — so, she said, "I'm putting my money where my mouth is."
Gay said she has not yet found a new publisher for her project.OK, we get it. When the world ends, resources will be scarce, plants and animals will die out, human beings will eat each other and everyone will dress like a tramp. Years of popular fiction - games, novels and films - have rammed this home to such an extent that it blankets the world of pop culture like its own sort of nuclear winter. It's a shroud under which I Am Alive runs around doing interesting things for the five or six hours it takes to finish.
As one of only a few scattered survivors of an apocalyptic event referred to by everyone as The Event, you start the game by arriving at the fictional American city of Haventon where you used to live with your wife and daughter, following a long trek from coast to coast to reach them. Unfortunately, the city is in poor shape and your family home is deserted, so you set out through the streets looking for signs of life, recording a series of video messages on your camcorder which allow developer Ubisoft Shanghai to advance the plot.
Right from the start, resources are scarce - even your own health and stamina. You do have the classic video game hero's prodigious climbing skills, allowing you to scale twisted skyscrapers and collapsing suspension bridges like there's no tomorrow (which I suppose there isn't), but you have to take a breather quite often or else you will do yourself serious damage and potentially collapse and die.
You also get a gun, and a machete for close encounters, but you rarely have much ammo at all, so you have to be quite wily when confronted by desperate scavengers. Faced with a group of three enemies early on, you wait for one to approach before slicing his throat without warning, then force another to his knees at gunpoint and pistol-whip him into unconsciousness, before shepherding the remaining bad guy towards a precipice and booting him off. They weren't to know your gun was empty.
I Am Alive doesn't add a lot to the post-apocalyptic conversation. It's mostly set against a backdrop of ideas you've read or seen before - so much so at times that you start to check them off. Oh look, there's the ship stuck in the middle of a city from The Day After Tomorrow, and here's a bit from The Road, and here's a bit from I Am Legend. It's rendered in every shade of grey and brown, filled to the brim with debris and decay - and occasionally quite stunning, like a descent through a train carriage hanging over a crevasse. But it rarely replaces the memory it's borrowing from your bookshelf.
Price and Availability Platforms: Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network
Release date: 7th March (XBLA), Q1 2012 (PSN)
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What I Am Alive lacks in originality, though, it makes up for in execution, because it really nails the tone. The developers aren't shy about how horrible things will probably be when everything turns to rust and ash, and they usually express their thoughts using the 20 other survivors you can optionally locate and save throughout the adventure. One of them is being used as bait to lure you in, another wants a last cigarette before dying and one of them - a young girl - is bound up and about to be raped when you intervene. It's often chilling, but never gratuitous, even when things get really serious.
At least you're not always alone. I won't explain what happens, but not everyone you meet is an adversary or a bonus objective. One of the best characters is a little girl called Mei, a toddler who is brought to life on screen by superb animation and voice acting. The writing is clichéd (at one point, someone tells you to hang onto your dignity and integrity because that's all we have left) but it's all part of a convincing scenario. Before long, you curse yourself for having to use a bullet, no matter the situation. You're really there.
I Am Alive is not completely without its own ideas either, like a thick, choking dust that storms through the city early on and remains for the rest of the game. Once the dust falls, as well as bluffing and climbing your way around old hospitals, hotels and unfinished apartment blocks, you're constantly balancing the need to push forward against the need to get above the cloud by climbing drainpipes, scaffolding and advertising billboards. If you descend to street level then you can't afford to stay there for long, because exposure saps your stamina and eventually your health.
With that said, on occasion your will to live may also be tested outside the game world by some of the mechanics and paraphernalia. The items you collect are always ringed by halo effects, the game constantly prompts you about which buttons to push, and there's an extra lives system that seems to exist purely to increase longevity (without really managing it). It all takes you out of the experience, and good ideas like the fight-or-bluff confrontations don't evolve except for the addition of more and tougher enemies.
There's also a slightly bizarre and incongruous high-score system, which may be another attempt to encourage replay value. This isn't a game that needs that sort of thing. It would have been nice if Ubisoft Shanghai had had the courage of its convictions, left it out and let the adventure stand for itself. This is about survival. It's not about whether I got 100 per cent.
Perhaps I sound a bit detached about I Am Alive. I think that's probably because it can be very bleak, and like the best survival fiction, that's also why you really should experience it. Everything isn't going to be OK. The last bits of humanity are pretty much going to hell all around you and you're just a guy with a couple of bottles of water and an empty gun. Maybe you will escape with your dignity and integrity, but you probably won't. You and the game know it.
It's not a new message, but I Am Alive delivers it as well as anyone ever has in a game.Want to have a little fun with Google today? Ahead of the forthcoming release of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” Google has teamed up with Lucasfilm and Disney to build out a new tool that lets you theme its suite of apps, including Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Chrome, and many more with either the “Light Side” or “Dark Side,” based on your personal preference. The changes, once they take place, will appear across your devices, including iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac, Windows and Chromebook, expect for Chrome, Gmail and YouTube which will only work on the desktop, says Google.
Effectively a brand advertisement of sorts for the highly anticipated new film, Google says that the idea came about from a number of Stars Wars fans at the company who wanted to work on a Google tribute to “Episode VII” as soon as they heard about the movie.
Even if you’re not a huge Star Wars fan (the horror!), playing around with the new tool is still fun, as this is the first time that you’ve been able to theme all of Google’s apps with just a click. In the past, themes have been more limited – Gmail has its own themes, for example, as does Chrome (by way of the Chrome Web Store), but these things were never tied together in any way.
But now, after you choose your side, you’ll soon see a new look-and-feel for a wide range of Google products including Android Wear, which gets a new watch face; Google Chrome, where movie scenes appear when you open new tabs; Chromecast, which gets new backgrounds; plus themed version of Gmail and Inbox’s email apps, and more.
But it’s not just backgrounds and themes, as it turns out.
Your Google Calendar will fill with Star Wars-related events, for instance.
In Google Maps, the “pegman” becomes a First Order Stormtrooper or Resistance Pilot, and flies to your destination in either a TIE fighter or X-wing.
C-3PO can offer you voice guidance in mapping app Waze, where R2-D2 and BB-8 will also be featured.
Elsewhere, standard loading or seeking bars like those found in YouTube and Gmail turn into lightsabers.
Even Google’s virtual assistant, “Google Now,” gets filled with “this day in Star Wars history” trivia.
More goodies are on the way between now and the movie’s premiere, too, including a virtual reality experience for Google Cardboard and a Star Wars Chrome experiment.
Fans are encouraged on the site to post their choice of sides to social media using the hashtag, #ChooseYourSide, which will help to power the indicator on the homepage that shows the balance of the forces.
And if you want to change sides, you can do so at any time after returning to the Google Star Wars page at google.com/starwars.The team has been hard at work preparing 4.17 for public release, and we’ve just made the first Preview build available on the launcher. Get a first glimpse at what is to come in the full release including major updates to Sequencer, production support for Audio Streaming, and a new plugin for help with real-time compositing pipelines, Composure.
To get Unreal Engine 4.17 Preview 1, head to the Library section on the launcher, select “Add Versions” and choose 4.17 Preview 1.
For a more comprehensive list of what to expect in this build, head over to the post on our forums from Stephen Ellis. Remember, Preview releases are meant to provide a look at what is to come and are not quite production-ready. We encourage you to wait until the full release of 4.17 before upgrading your projects to this version of the engine.
Happy development!“Is everything a conspiracy? No, just the important stuff.” — Jeff Wells, Rigorous Intuition
Nicholas West
Activist Post
Pandemics, Aliens, and Asteroids — Oh My! It appears that the corporate-government-media has recently become the number one propagator of conspiracy theories. That is, of course, as long as the fear campaign pushes the right buttons for the agenda.
The dumbed-down public will always be led by fear until they realize that no major events happen by mistake in the matrix. All major events, reactions, and proposed solutions are thoroughly orchestrated and performed by the power players. They hit all the right notes, all of the time, save for some minor tuning as needed.
It’s convenient for establishment leaders to claim that major events are mistakes. For example, we’re told the attacks of September 11th were a massive failure on the part of the intelligence community. Additionally, we’re told that the “idiots” on Wall Street did not see the housing collapse coming, or predict the 2008 financial meltdown, or the recent currency wars, or the recent gold and commodity rush.
It’s the typical story told to the public when catastrophe strikes: whoops, who could have seen that coming? Even some of the most enlightened minds that predicted these events still call the people in charge “stupid” for not seeing or adapting to it. Perhaps many of the useful idiots who run the gears of the system don’t know the fundamentals well enough to predict events, but the true controllers know exactly what they’re doing, what reaction they will get, and what calculated solution will ultimately give them more power and wealth.
We all witnessed the incredible consolidation of wealth and power orchestrated by our corrupt state since the 9/11 attacks, all at the expense of the common man’s treasure, blood, and rights — all caused by 19 (U.S. funded) extremists with box cutters who came from caves. Only scared little sheep could believe that theory, especially given what has transpired to date.Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will reportedly make a major announcement this Thursday regarding the department’s stance on Title IX.
According to BuzzFeed’s Tyler Kingkade, DeVos will reportedly speak about the college campus gender equality policy that’s “centered around equal opportunity and equal protection for all” at George Mason University’s Law School in Arlington, VA.
One impactful directive on campus sexual violence is the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter, a comprehensive set of guidelines that clarifies what schools’ responsibilities are under the law to enforce Title IX. According to BuzzFeed, insiders expect DeVos to discuss Obama-era policies on campus sexual violence such as the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter on Thursday, and potentially roll them back.
Managing Director of End Rape on Campus Jess Davidson explained to HuffPost that if DeVos rescinds the Dear Colleague Letter, it will send a strong message to both survivors and universities.
“I’m very concerned about what it means for the federal government’s view on sexual assault, and their view on survivors, for them to possibly rescind a guidance that is critical in helping students understand what their own rights are,” Davidson said. “That is a very bad leadership signal and I believe it would have a trickle-down effect to university presidents and to other community leaders. If the government doesn’t think that this is important than why should they?”
I’m very concerned about what it means for the federal government’s view on sexual assault and their view on survivors for them to possibly rescind a guidance that is critical in helping students understand what their own rights are. Jess Davidson, Managing Director of End Rape on Campus
So... What Is The “Dear Colleague Letter”?
The Dear Colleague Letter is essentially a reminder to universities and Title IX administrators that schools need to follow the Title IX law.
Alexandra Brodsky, a civil rights attorney and co-founder of anti-sexual violence organization KnowYourIX, told HuffPost that if DeVos were to rescind the letter it would not change the law.
“If DeVos stands up on stage on Thursday and says that the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter is rescinded, the law hasn’t changed at all. Survivors have the same rights, schools have the same responsibility,” Brodsky said.
Davidson and Brodsky agreed that rolling back the Dear Colleague Letter would simply make the campus sexual violence reporting process that much more confusing ― for survivors and universities.
“It helps students understand what their rights are,” Davidson said. “But it’s not just survivors who are really going to struggle with this. The people who use the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter the most ― or are supposed to use it the most ― are Title IX administrators, the people who are conducting these investigations on campuses across the country. It’s going to be really hard for them to do their jobs effectively if they don’t have this kind of guidance. Schools need more clarification, not less.”
In July, DeVos met with three groups to discuss sexual violence on college campuses in separate 90-minute roundtable discussions. The groups included survivors and advocates, university representatives and attorneys, and ― by far the most controversial ― students who had been falsely accused of assault.
Brodsky, who was at the July meeting, said that in those discussions with DeVos the overwhelming consensus from universities and legal representatives was that the department should not rescind the Dear Colleague Letter.
Davidson, who was also in attendance at the July meetings, noted that most of the “wrongfully accused” advocates were from Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) groups. These groups tend to believe that sexual violence is over-reported, and that false accusations happen more often than they actually do. (According to research, 2 to 10 percent of reported rapes turn out to be false.)
“Among communities that believe [survivors cry rape], I think they see rescinding the Dear Colleague Letter as a win because they believe that it will help prevent kangaroo courts,” Davidson said.
The Dear Colleague Letter, however, does include guidelines to help both parties ― the victim and the alleged attacker ― navigate the reporting process fairly.
“A lot of this conversation arranged around the Dear Colleague Letter is that it’s a threat to the procedural rights of accused students,” Brodsky noted. “But actually the Dear Colleague Letter and Title IX provide more robust protections than are available under the U.S. Constitution.”
If we rescind the guidance... it makes it harder for students to stand up for their own civil rights. Jess Davidson, Managing Director of End Rape on Campus
On a more granular level, rescinding the Dear Colleague Letter would impact the ability of survivors to ensure their schools are following Title IX procedures.
Davidson said that when she was a college student going through the Title IX process, she was able to access the Dear Colleague Letter online and hold her university accountable.Stephen Curry was told his whole life that he would never make it to the NBA. He wasn’t tall enough. He wasn’t strong enough. He would be crushed by his competition.
As a high school sophomore, Stephen was a mere 125 pounds and only 5’ 6″ with a baby face. When he graduated high school, he had no offers for college basketball. He was the epitome of an underdog.
Cut to now, 2015, Stephen Curry won the NBA Championships with the Golden State Warriors and was crowned Most Valuable Player.
So how did he do it? How did he rise up through the ranks to prove everyone wrong by going from playing at a small liberal arts college, to the NBA, with the world and even his genetics seemingly against him?
Alan Stein, highly esteemed strength and conditioning basketball coach, shares his experience of working with Stephen Curry before anyone knew his name.
“Several years ago I had the honor of working the first ever Kobe Bryant Nike Skills Academy. Nike invited the top 20 high school shooting guards and the top 10 college shooting guards in the country to this camp with Kobe, and it’s kinda funny now that I look back on it, how many of those players are now household names in the NBA.
The least recognised player there was Stephen Curry, but I knew immediately that he was the most impressive and that thinking long term, he was going to be a future NBA superstar, and here’s how I knew that: it was all because of his work habits.
Now those skills academies, we’d have two workouts a days for three straight days. Thirty minutes before every single workout, most players were still in their flip flops and would have on their headphones and Stephen Curry had already started doing some form shooting. He’d already started taking game shots from game spots in game situations. By the time the workout officially started he’d probably already made 100–150 shots, almost in a full sweat.
And then probably the most impressive thing that he did, was as soon as every workout was over, he would not leave the court until he swished five free throws in a row. You know how hard that is? But that’s the level of excellence he holds himself to.The moral of that story, is that success is not an accident, success is actually a choice. Stephen Curry is one of the best shooters on the planet today because he has made the choice to create great habits.”
Your success in life is the sum of the habits you create. If you look at the most successful people in the world, you will see that they have habits that they practice everyday.
People are rewarded in public for what they practice for years in private.
— Tony Robbins
If you create a habit of going to the gym, you’re going to be in shape. If you create a habit of meditation and practicing daily gratitude, you’re going to be happier. A habit is something you do repeatedly which ultimately will decide the person you are and where you will end up in life.
So how do improve ourselves? How do we create these great habits? The easiest framework to establishing a new habit I’ve found is to take advantage of existing behaviors you already do unconsciously through habit stacking.
Habit stacking is something you’re most likely already doing without even realizing. For example, every morning when I wake up and take a shower and brush my teeth, I am habit stacking. These little habit stacks have been conditioned over time, so much so that you don’t even think about it.
Now, by attaching a new habit with something you already do habitually, you are more likely to stick to that thing.
Feature FREE Download: Habit Stacking Cheat Sheet
The 3 simple rules to Habit Stacking process is:
Decide on your new habits Plan a time to do each one Track that you’re doing it
The Formula to Habit Stacking looks like this:
After/Before [CURRENT ACTIVITY/HABIT], I will [NEW ACTIVITY/HABIT].
For example, from what we know Stephen Curry from his coach, he could have used these formulas:
“Before every team workout (current habit/routine), I will take 150 shots at the basket.”
“After every team workout (current habit/routine), I will shoot 5 free throws (new habit) in a row before I can go shower.”
For people like us, maybe it’s meditation, gratitude, or exercise that we want to add into our routine, so our formula would look like this:
Before brushing my teeth, I will meditate for 3 minutes Before eating breakfast, I will do 20 pushups and 30 squats After taking a shower, I will write down 3 things I am grateful for
It’s important to take it slow with this process, you shouldn’t try to build 5 new habits at once, for example. That’s too much, and it won’t stick. Rather, make a note of the current habit stacks in your day. Your morning or evening routine are usually the go-to’s. Add one new habit to each stack, and do it for 30 days before trying to add anything else.
“I know I’m putting the work in. I know I’m going to excel at this. I have goals in mind, and I’m going to make those goals happen.” — Stephen Curry
In the comments, let me know what activity or habit you want to include into your life.'Oh My Jesus!': Shots Fired During NPR Interview In Chicago
Enlarge this image toggle caption David Schaper /NPR David Schaper /NPR
An NPR interview in Chicago included an all-too-real example of the city's violence when a burst of gunfire erupted down the street from where NPR's David Schaper was conducting an interview Wednesday. He had been speaking to a neighborhood activist when a gunman opened fire nearby.
David was reporting a story on efforts to reclaim and repurpose community eyesores when the shots were fired. The radio story that aired on today's Morning Edition is jarring, as a talk about community engagement is suddenly overcome by shots that rang out shortly after kids had gotten out of school.
David had been talking with Asiaha Butler, a community booster and blogger, on her porch in the city's South Side neighborhood of Englewood when their conversation was derailed by a fusillade of gunfire. Parents immediately rushed to get their kids inside, and while no one on Butler's porch was hurt, the incident marred a conversation about progress in the neighborhood.
'Oh My Jesus!': Shots Fired During NPR Interview In Chicago Listen · 3:57 3:57
Here's how David describes it:
"About 30 or 40 yards away, a man is standing outside a car firing a large semi-automatic rifle at a target around the corner we cannot see. "Asiaha pushes the little girl indoors and some people duck down and scurry, while some of us just watch in bewilderment — while the shooter gets back into his car and drives down the street right in our direction."
The man had been firing at a van, David says:
"Police say it was found at a nearby hospital with bullet holes on all four sides, though some could have been from shots that went all the way through. "One passenger in the van, a 28-year-old male, was hit — the bullet lodged in his head just behind his ear. Police say it's a serious injury, possibly life threatening. The victim was initially conscious and talking but a detective tells me he refused to cooperate with investigators."
Like others who had been on the porch, David says he was shocked — and that the scene was "made all the more surreal" when an ice cream truck passed by minutes later, blaring its cheerful music down the block as police rushed to the scene.
"This is not typical," another neighborhood leader, Demond Drummer, tells David.
"It's far too common, but it's not normal," he said.Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET
Edward Snowden accused the National Security Agency and the US government today of "setting fire to the future of the Internet."
In a high-profile video appearance at the South by Southwest festival -- his video was beamed over Google Hangout from Russia to Austin, Texas, apparently jokingly through "seven proxies" -- Snowden touched on myriad topics, ranging from privacy to the ramifications of government spying, as he answered questions from the Internet at large via Twitter.
"The NSA...they're setting fire to the future of the Internet. And the people in this room, you guys are the firefighters. We need you to help us fix this," Snowden said.
Moderator Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said that Snowden's actions have led to a "reinvigorated" interest in government oversight.
"Sometimes it needs serious sweeping, and Ed Snowden's been the broom," Wizner said.
Related stories:
One of the first questions that Wizner asked Snowden was why he was addressing the technorati at South by Southwest instead of the policy wonks in Washington, D.C.
"The tech community are the ones who could help fix this situation, more than people in Washington," Snowden said. "There's a tech response needed. It's the makers, thinkers, and the dev community who can help make sure we're safe."
Christopher Soghoian, a privacy advocate and principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, was onstage with Wizner in Austin. He agreed with Snowden that the tech community and technology companies have improved their use of encryption, which often have been lackadaisical about implementing it.
"We need to lock things down and make things secure out of the box. Developers will have to think differently," he said.
Snowden said that the value of encryption can't be understated, and claimed that the US government remains unsure of which documents he leaked.
"They have no idea what documents were provided to journalists, because encryption works," he said. "We need to think about it not as an arcane dark art, but a protection against the dark arts."
The trio discussed the possibility of the NSA breaking encryption, but Snowden said he doesn't think that's likely. A bigger threat to encryption than government breaking encryption, Snowden said, is simply stealing the encryption keys.
"I think encryption will be sustained unless we make massive leaps in understanding math and physics," he said.
Soghoian said that the cryptographic community felt it had been lied to, in part because of a lack of motivation to toughen encryption.
Soghoian had harsh words for a broad swath of technology firms, including Google for data collection via Android and Chrome, Facebook for data collection and privacy violations, Apple for making its address book insecure, Yahoo for not implementing encryption sooner, and Mozilla for not making Firefox secure enough.
"The irony that we are using Google Hangouts to talk to Snowden is not being lost on me," he said, and he also noted the tech companies' response to the documents Snowden leaked.
"Unfortunately it took the largest whistle-blower in history to get these companies to prioritize their customer's privacy," Soghoian said.
A major difference between corporate data collection and government spying, Soghoian and Snowden agreed, is that you can't challenge government spying in court.
"If data is being clandestinely acquired and the public or courts have no way of reviewing it, that's a problem," Snowden said.
pompeo.house.gov
Another problem with the US government spying on its citizens was that it made it difficult to stop actual terrorist threats.
"Tamerlan Tsarnaev was known by the Russians. If we'd focused on traditional intelligence, not mass surveillance, we might've stopped him," Snowden said of the suspected mastermind behind last year's Boston Marathon bombings, who was later killed in a shootout with the Boston police.
"The goal here isn't to blind the NSA. The goal here is to make it so that they cannot spy on innocent people because they can," Soghoian added.
Wizner let Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web founder, ask Snowden the first audience question. He thanked Snowden and said that what Snowden has done is profoundly in the public interest. He also asked what should be done to improve the government surveillance practices.
Snowden replied that the problem was not with the system, but its implementation.
"We have an oversight model that could work. The problem is when the overseers in Congress, NSA, who don't want to do oversight."
The main issue, he said, is "accountability."
"We can't have people like [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper lying to Congress."
Snowden closed by reiterating his intention by going to Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras with the NSA documents.
"When I came public it wasn't to single-handedly change the government. I wanted to inform the public so they could make their own decision," he said.
"Regardless of what happens to me, this is something we had a right to. I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution and I saw that the Constitution was being violated on a massive scale," he said.As a 3-year-old boy’s parents frantically searched for him on the sand in Newport Beach, his small body was buried alive, trapped under the sand.
Had it not been for a bystander’s quick thinking, the boy may not be alive, authorities said.
Jesse Martin, a 35-year-old visiting from Arizona, overheard two frantic women asking lifeguards for help when they couldn’t find a lost 3-year-old boy near 40th Street around 2:30 p.m.
It’s not an uncommon occurrence, especially on a busy holiday weekend when the sand is |
.
The first test of the government's intentions would be the budget, which is likely to be announced in early July. "There are no visible near-term negatives. Investors are building portfolios ahead of the Union Budget, which would be the next big event. FIIs (foreign institutional investors) continue to support. The undercurrent is still positive," said Suresh Parmar, head of institutional equities at KJMC Capital Markets.
Indian stock markets have been supported by heavy overseas buying. According to Deutsche Bank, India has received an impressive $8 billion in equities and $7.7 billion in debt year-to-date.
Some market analysts remain cautiously optimistic after the sharp run-up in Indian markets. Market analyst Sanjeev Bhasin said there is a left-out feeling among some investors who missed the rally in stocks and are now chasing stocks. But investors should be cautious at current levels, he added.Independent market analyst G Chokkalingam says investors should be cautious of the sharp gains in some midcap and smallcap stocks that have gained multiple times.Upstream oil and gas companies led the gains today, with Oil and Natural Gas Corporation rising over 11 per cent and Reliance Industries advancing nearly 3 per cent. Reports citing sources said that the Narendra Modi government could hike gas prices by July 1. Among other oil & gas stocks, GAIL rose over 7 per cent.Banking stocks were also among big gainers today. Kotak Mahindra Bank, PNB, and Bank of Baroda rose between 2-3 per cent. Among losers, Infosys fell over 1 per cent, hurt another top executive exit on Thursday. Sesa Sterlite, which rose 6.5 per cent yesterday, fell 2.5 per cent to be the biggest Nifty loser today.CORDOVA -- Danny Banks lives in a gray and green tent on the spot where his single-wide trailer sat before it was destroyed in the April 27 tornado that pummeled this Walker County community.
Banks, 50, plans to continue living in the tent in his Disney Lake community because he says he has no alternatives.
A city ordinance bans single-wide trailers such as the ones supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Banks said he has no plans to purchase a double-wide mobile home, which is permitted in certain parts of the city.
"I don't do double-wides," Banks said. "I'm waiting on a trailer, and I'm not going to move."
Cordova Mayor Jack Scott said he knows tornado survivors need a place to live, but the city is enforcing the zoning ordinance that he said was passed in 1957. He acknowledged that the ordinance was not enforced in the past.
Scott said the ordinance's purpose is to help develop property in Cordova.
"We're trying to better Cordova," he said. "We're trying to clean up Cordova and keep it clean. We're trying to keep the property values up. We're trying to get it to where people will want to build homes on these vacant lots."
Scott said the ordinance permits double-wides in four locations of the city and allows modular homes to be placed anywhere.
The city has worked out other options for the survivors, he said, but he declined Monday to discuss them.
Scott said he expects several Cordova residents to show up at a council meeting tonight at 6 in protest of the ordinance.
"It's not Jack Scott doing this," he said. "It's the city ordinance."
Jim Foster, a FEMA spokesman, said the federal agency offers only single-wide trailers and abides by state and local laws.
"State and local law take precedence," he said.
Foster said Monday he was unaware of any other Alabama community blocking FEMA trailers.
The ordinance has saddened many residents who are working to help tornado survivors.
Kathy Watts, who is running a distribution site in Cordova, said she understands the ordinance, but believes the strict enforcement is wrong right now when people need shelter.
"This is not the time for that battle because we have homeless people in the city of Cordova who can't do better than a FEMA trailer or a single-wide," she said.
Geneva Stough's rental house was destroyed in the tornado. She is living with a neighbor whose full name she didn't know until after the storm.
Stough said she is grateful to be living with her neighbor, but a FEMA trailer would help her.
"I understand the rules," she said. "I just hate this right now. This is a hard time for us now."
Stough and Banks resent the notion that people living in trailers do not care about their properties.
"We don't want tacky, either," Stough said.
Call to Missouri
In other storm-related news, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley said he called Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon on Monday morning and offered his condolences on the destruction and deaths caused when a tornado hit Joplin, Mo., on Sunday. "I told him I understood exactly what he was going through," Bentley said.
FEMA representatives said disaster relief efforts under way in Missouri have not affected assistance being offered in Alabama.
Denise Everhart, a FEMA spokeswoman, said FEMA officials in the Missouri region will respond there.
"The people there are in our hearts and prayers, but it will not diminish operations here in Alabama at all."
In fact, FEMA announced it has opened two new disaster recovery centers in Jefferson and Walker counties. The new centers are at the Jefferson County satellite courthouse, 1485 Forestdale Road, Birmingham, and Bevill State Community College, 101 State Street in Sumiton in Walker County.
Join the conversation by clicking to comment or email Walton at vwalton@bhamnews.com.TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Striking down a challenge filed by industries and farmers, a federal appeals court in Atlanta has upheld a historic clean-water settlement between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Earthjustice.
The settlement, reached in 2009, requires the EPA to set limits on sewage, fertilizer and manure in Florida's waterways. Earthjustice director David Guest is celebrating the ruling by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
"Obviously, we're pretty happy. It means that the efforts by associations of polluting industries that keep the water dirty have been turned back again."
Florida's families should not have to endure the public-health threat posed by contaminated rivers, springs, lakes and beaches, Guest says, adding that the water flowing from kitchen taps needs to be clean.
The Caloosahatchee River in southwest Florida was covered with nauseating green slime and rotting fish for weeks. Guest claims polluters keep trying to use Florida's public waters as private sewers, adding that nobody wants to come to Florida to look a slime-infested dead fish in the eye.
Earthjustice intends to keep up the legal battle, Guest says.
"We've got another huge lawsuit - 11 coalitions of polluting associations and their government allies. That's going to hearing in December."
Florida's commercial and industrial community claims the environmental restrictions will cut financial growth and cost jobs.
The text of the ruling is online at fweauc.org.
Les Coleman, Public News Service - FLIn another piece I’ll be publishing later today, I take some time to discuss how the Israeli daily Ha’aretz has been marginalized in
Israel and no longer represents a “vibrant debate” as it once did. Now I must also take a moment to reflect on what is only the latest example of how their journalistic standards have fallen as well.
Ha’aretz today reports, uncritically, on the widespread story about leading Hamas activist Salach al-Aruri purportedly claiming that Hamas was, in fact, behind the kidnapping and murder of the three young Israelis earlier this year. That incident, you will recall, was the catalyst for a massive Israeli crackdown in the West Bank and eventually led to the horrors in Gaza these past weeks, which are ongoing. The problem is that this is a non-story, wherein al-Aruri said nothing we didn’t already know. Nothing he said should change anything about how we perceive this crime.
There has always been debate over whether the kidnappings were planned by Hamas or done by a rogue unit. The debate hasn’t really been a sensible one; speak to people with knowledge of the politics in Palestine and, in particular, the various armed factions as well as different familial groupings within the political system and resistance movements and you will realize quickly which side of the debate is correct. But such is the state of our media that such people are rarely spoken to, so we live in ignorance.
al-Aruri served sixteen years in an Israeli jail and moved to Turkey upon his release from jail and subsequent expulsion from Israeli-controlled areas. He is Hamas’ chief spokesperson there, and is considered a senior official in the organization. From that lofty perch, he is said to be coordinating Hamas activities in the West Bank, focusing on just the sort of kidnapping that was attempted back in June. These are accusations made by Israeli intelligence, but no one I’ve spoken to, both Israelis and Palestinians, has disputed them.
In any case, al-Aruri was front and center cheering the kidnappings/murders in June, and certainly could have been read as being a part of it. But Israeli officials trying, back in June, to link Hamas to the murders told the Israeli media that, while they couldn’t connect al-Aruri to the act “this is what he has been endless(ly) urging and directing the terror cells he funded to do, over the past few years.” So there was already a belief in Israel that al-Aruri was connected.
But, in fact, this big story that has broken today adds nothing to such suspicions. What did al-Aruri say? According to reports, he said: “It has been said that it is an Israeli conspiracy, and I say it isn’t…The al-Qassam’s mujahedeen were the ones to carry out [the abduction] in show of support for the prisoners’ hunger strike.”
Now, let’s examine this. Al-Aruri was addressing a very different point than the one being made by the media. He was talking about the belief, held by many, that Israel staged the kidnapping and murders in order to take the actions they subsequently set out upon. It’s an absurd theory, but I’ve seen it quite a bit in the past months. So, al-Aruri wanted to make it clear that this was a Palestinian act.
In fact, we know that the Qawasmeh clan in Hebron carried out the crime. The Qawasmehs are a powerful clan, and have often taken action not just without authorization from Hamas, with which they are strongly affiliated, but sometimes intentionally to foil or change Hamas’ plans and strategy. You can read more about this here. But the Qawasmehs are connected with Hamas’ military wing, the Izz ad-din al-Qassam Brigades. So, all al-Aruri said was what we already knew: the Qawasmehs carried out the act.
If their motivation was, as al-Aruri said, to support the struggle of the Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, their tactics failed miserably. That issue was becoming quite vexing for Israel through non-violent means such as hunger strikes and protests. Since the murders, the issue of the prisoners has fallen off the map completely. Even Hamas ignores it in their demands to Israel, speaking only of the prisoners Israel took during its massive sweep in the West Bank in June. Gaza has completely eclipsed the issue of the prisoners.
Al-Aruri, no doubt, is delighted with this media coverage. Based on his cheerleading when the incident first took place and his words now, he wants Hamas to be “credited” for that despicable act which has also sparked off so much destruction in Gaza. But that doesn’t mean anything has changed. His words do nothing to change the estimate of what happened in June. Unfortunately, the media is making sure it does, and the Israeli government and Hamas, each for their own reasons, are likely to go along with the lie.
I care very little about Hamas’ reputation. While I have long acknowledged that Israel’s refusal to recognize the simple reality that they are part of the Palestinian body politic is self-defeating, foolish and only empowers Hamas, I will not weep when Hamas disappears. They have committed many crimes that fall well outside the bounds of legitimate resistance, and more than that, they are an oppressive movement dominated by fundamentalism. That is something I stand against, no matter the religion and no matter the connection to a broader movement for liberation.
But the truth of this matter is important to how people think and it is a tragic day when Ha’aretz is no better than the rest of the media in portraying this in a false light. It only helps to bury the fact that, whoever committed this act, the Netanyahu government made a deliberate decision to run with it in order to smash Palestinian unity and wage war against the people of Gaza, on whom they have inflicted infinitely more damage than they have on Hamas.
I know my efforts may not be much on the face of so much media distorting the story. I hope you’ll help spread this around. With enough of us, the truth can remain out there.
AdvertisementsOAKLAND — Alameda County’s public hospital system revealed severe financial problems and asked the county government for help Monday, drawing a rebuke from county leaders who blamed irresponsible hospital administrators for jeopardizing the health care safety net.
“The Alameda Health System has proven to be inept at managing their finances,” said Alameda County Supervisor Richard Valle, demanding leadership change at the consortium that runs a network of hospitals, including its flagship Highland Hospital in Oakland.
“The public has been in the dark about the financial system until now,” Valle said at a Monday hearing. “The trust between AHS and Alameda County has been broken.”
The usually mild-mannered supervisor unleashed a torrent of criticism after the hospital system’s newly hired chief financial officer, David Cox, candidly made a case for why the hospitals need help.
The health system is now asking to restructure a $198.7 million debt owed to the county, delaying its end date by as many as 20 years so that the hospitals can pay their mounting bills.
The loan amount was supposed to be reduced to $110 million by June and to $30 million by June 2018.
Among the problems is a malfunctioning electronic records system the hospital bought last year from Siemens Healthcare. Technological problems in processing claims have caused a cash-flow problem that Cox said in an interview is “$55 million higher than it should be — (money) that could be in the bank account that could be used to pay down this debt to the county. It’s quite significant.”
Although Valle never referred by name to Alameda Health System CEO Wright Lassiter III, the supervisor called for a “major change at the executive level” and for hospital leaders and board members to be held accountable.
The hospital system “has shown irresponsibility at all levels of their financial system, putting the public in jeopardy,” Valle said.
Lassiter was scheduled to address the Monday morning meeting of the supervisors’ health committee but had to leave town for a family emergency and could not be reached to respond to the criticism. Described on the AHS website as a “successful turnaround executive,” Lassiter has built a national reputation for fixing the troubled hospital system since he took the job in 2005.
But Valle and other elected supervisors have raised concerns in recent years over how well the hospital system is overseen by its board of trustees.
The hospital consortium has grown since the county’s original line of credit was established, recently taking over San Leandro Hospital and Alameda Hospital, but its revenue has not grown. Lassiter’s attempt to compete with big corporate hospital chains such as Kaiser and Sutter has proved a challenge.
Kirk Miller, the president of the hospital board, was not present Monday and did not return a request for comment. Only one of the 13 board members, Tracy Jensen, appeared at Monday’s hearing. Jensen is one of the board’s newest five members appointed by supervisors this month.
Formerly known as the Alameda County Medical System, the hospital network split off from the county and created its own separate authority in 1998 but continues to rely on the county government for funding. The county also owns hospital real estate and is constructing the $700 million replacement and expansion of Highland Hospital.
Its financial problems began emerging soon after Alameda County residents voted in June to extend for another 15 years a half-cent sales tax that funds the health care safety net. Three-quarters of the money — about $75 million a year — goes directly to the Alameda Health System.
Supervisor Wilma Chan said Monday that she is also concerned with the hospital finances but was more measured than Valle in her criticism, pointing out it is a “challenging time for the public sector under the Affordable Care Act,” the Obama administration’s new health care law that took effect in January.
Chan said the reforms “favor large providers with a lot of capital (and) those providers who have a very rich patient mix,” not safety net hospitals such as those run by the Alameda Health System.Shutterstock
There are a few unwritten rules when it comes to dressing for certain occasions. It would be odd, for example, if you turned up to a christening in just leather underpants and a fishnet shirt. However, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, this behaviour is potentially jeopardising your career prospects. "We proposed that, under certain conditions, nonconforming behaviours can be more beneficial to someone than simply trying to fit in. In other words, when it looks deliberate, a person can appear to have a higher status and sense of competency," write authors Silvia Bellezza, Francesca Gino, and Anat Keinan of Harvard University.
The paper examined five separate lab and field studies on the role of nonconformity in different populations. The pooled results revealed that the majority of the test subjects perceived a greater sense of competence and status in people who were nonconformist than those who conformed. Even something as simple as, say, a lawyer wearing brightly coloured socks, would have been enough to heighten most of the test subjects' opinions of the individual.
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In one study, those who participated in the test were asked to rank the perceived professional status of a Professor from a top-tier university against that of a Professor from their local college. The Professor from the university wore a t-shirt and a large beard -- his college-based counterpart was sporting a suit and had no beard. More status and competency was -- in keeping with the expectations of the study -- attributed to the unshaven T-shirt-wearing Professor rather than the clean-shaven Professor from the local college.
The authors suggest this research could be used beyond the individual, aiding in both niche and mainstream brands looking to court the "nonconformist" buyer, capitalising on an ironically growing trend to appear nonconformist. What's more, if the nonconformist brand is in a premium price bracket, it allows the buyer to signal further that not only can they afford an alternative conformist product, but that they have purposely opted not to buy it, making it a matter of consumer choice and a statement of individuality rather than a forced necessity brought on by poverty. "A key question for companies is to understand how consumers can demonstrate that they are intentionally not conforming through brands and products." conclude the authors. You can see this reasoning manifested -- in part -- in the latest Guinness ad.
Those men with their trend-bucking colourful socks and bright trousers are the "masters of their own fate"... Now buy some Guinness and express your own nonconformity!Compression… your best friend and your worst enemy.
When used correctly, compression is a key ingredient for vocals that sound professional, modern and radio-ready.
When used incorrectly, compression can quickly ruin a good vocal recording and make your music sound amateur and over-processed.
By the end of this guide you will be able to apply vocal compression with confidence to craft vocals that sound modern and are easy to mix.
We’re going to cover tonal compression, dynamic compression, limiting, multiband compression, side chain compression, parallel compression and more.
And if you want to start improving your mixes right away…
Grab the free vocal compression cheat sheet below.
Inside you’ll learn the only two ways to approach vocal compression, as well as my go-to starting settings (that work with any compressor).
Get it here:
Chapters
Compression Strategy | Compression Settings | Best Compressor Plugins | Advanced Techniques
Before You Load Up a Vocal Compressor…
It’s important to have an understanding of what you are trying to achieve with compression. As with any mixing process, you should have a purpose behind every plugin and decision.
It’s also important to have an understanding of how a compressor works. If you aren’t comfortable with ratio, threshold, attack time and release time you can read this in-depth compression guide to get the basics.
One of your aims when mixing vocals is to make them as dynamically consistent as possible. They need to sit on top of the mix at all times. Every word should be clearly audible, and every word should be a similar volume.
Modern standards of professional production require crazy levels of perfection and consistency in the vocal. It might seem like this would sound unnatural, but it doesn’t.
You do this with automation, NOT compression.
You do this with automation, NOT compression.
That’s not a typo. I wanted you to read that twice so you really take it in.
It takes time, but it’s a requirement if you want your vocals to sound professional. There are two different types of volume automation, which you will learn about soon.
You may be wondering, then, “why is compression so important on a lead vocal?”
There are two main reasons:
To add EVEN MORE dynamic control To shape and enhance the tone of the vocal
In most cases, the genre will require you do both of these things. For some genres, though, you may only need to do one or the other.
It’s important that you consider the style and vibe of the track before you apply compression. Here are some basic vocal mixing guidelines to get you started:
Pop, R’n’B, Electronic: These styles share similar traits. In general, heavy processing is acceptable and often required. Lots of top-end shimmer, noticeable effects and highly consistent dynamics are the norm.
These styles share similar traits. In general, heavy processing is acceptable and often required. Lots of top-end shimmer, noticeable effects and highly consistent dynamics are the norm. Hip Hop: Similar to Pop, but with less effects and less top-end. More presence and aggression in the upper mids. (Though the most mainstream of Hip Hop often has top-end shimmer more akin to Pop).
Similar to Pop, but with less effects and less top-end. More presence and aggression in the upper mids. (Though the most mainstream of Hip Hop often has top-end shimmer more akin to Pop). Rock: Less top-end, more body and high mids. Vocals can sit a bit further back in the mix.
Less top-end, more body and high mids. Vocals can sit a bit further back in the mix. Jazz: Approach with subtlety and taste. Avoid obvious processing and leave the dynamics mostly intact.
Approach with subtlety and taste. Avoid obvious processing and leave the dynamics mostly intact. Hardcore/Metal: Heavy compression (several rounds of 6-10dB gain reduction can be warranted) to make the vocals sound aggressive. Check out Hardcore Music Studio for more advice on mixing hardcore music.
Front End Automation
Detailed automation can take some time, but it’s time well spent. Mutt Lange (AC/DC, Def Leppard, Lady Gaga, Muse, Shania Twain) has been known to spend a whole day just riding one vocal part.
Most people use basic volume automation to make the dynamics of the lead vocal consistent (the best way to do this is with a physical fader, using a control surface like the PreSonus Faderport)
But I propose an alternative – gain automation.
The key difference between ‘volume automation’ and ‘gain automation’ is that volume is at the end of the signal chain whereas gain is at the beginning of the signal chain.
This means that the vocal is dynamically consistent BEFORE it hits your vocal compressor – not after. Before the vocal touches ANYTHING else, it’s already consistent.
This takes a lot of stress off your compressors and limiters. It helps all of your plugins to perform better because the vocal will always be around that -18dBFS sweet spot.
By automating the vocal early on, we also make it a lot easier to mix. We can be more subtle with compression.
Big wins early on will increase your confidence, too, which means better mixes.
Then, later in the mix, you can use volume automation to make sure the levels are consistent with the feel of the track (for example, louder in the choruses).
Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of this great trick:
When To Use Your Vocal Compressor
To achieve subtle, natural sounding compression on your vocal it’s best to use multiple compressors throughout the mixing process (this is called ‘serial compression’).
Rather than using one heavy compressor with a 10:1 ratio that’s applying 10+ dB of gain reduction, it’s better to use multiple compressors that each chip away at the vocal applying 2-3dB of gain reduction.
That’s why it’s good to apply light compression with outboard gear when recording if you have the equipment (don’t worry if you don’t).
For some genres, only one compressor is needed (Jazz, some Rock, Acoustic etc). But when heavy processing is necessary (Pop, Hip Hop, R’n’B, Electronic etc) it’s better to apply compression in stages.
Here is an overview of my usual mixing system for mainstream, modern vocals:
(You can learn all about this system in my free ‘Vocal Mixing Formula’ class)
As you can see, I use compression before AND after EQ.
The first compressor uses ‘tonal compression’ to shape the tone, lightly tame the dynamics and add or remove aggression from the vocal.
The second compressor uses ‘dynamic compression’ to catch the loudest peaks and add more dynamic consistency. We can also shape the tone here too.
In a second we’ll take a look at those two different approaches in a bit more detail. But first, you need to decide on your purpose.
It’s Crucial to Have a Purpose
Think about the feel and vibe of the track before you apply compression.
What genre does it fall under? Does it require a modern, mainstream, in-your-face vocal sound like you would hear on the radio? Or does would it suit more subtle, musical compression?
How dynamic is the vocal? Does it need a lot of control, or does it already sound consistent? Do the dynamics of the song vary drastically?
How is the tone of the vocal? Does the vocal sound aggressive and full of energy, or does it sound boring a lifeless? Does it sound TOO aggressive for the vibe of the track?
Ask yourself these questions and come up with an idea of what you are trying to achieve with compression. Once you have a clear idea in your head, you can follow the procedures outlined in the rest of the guide to achieve your goals.
Tonal Compression
This lighter approach to compression is about shaping the tone of the vocal and adding a small amount of dynamic control just to smooth out the levels.
This approach should use quite a slow attack and release time. You don’t want to compress the transients too much, as this will push the vocals further back in the mix.
Adjust the threshold so that the compressor is engaging on almost every word, but then use a low ratio to make sure you are only applying 2-3dB of gain reduction.
This is how to compress vocals using a lighter, more musical approach:
First of all, load up a compressor. Any will do. Next, lower the threshold and raise the ratio to extreme settings. This allows you to clearly hear the compressor working. Start with a medium attack time around 15ms and adjust to taste. A fast attack (5ms) will make your vocals sound thick and heavy. A slow attack (30ms) will make your vocals sound punchy and aggressive. Dial in a medium release time of 40ms and adjust from there. Try to get the compressor pumping in time with the music. Once you’ve settled on an attack and release time, bring the ratio down to somewhere around 1.5:1 and the threshold back up to around -24dB. Finally, adjust the threshold and ratio until you are averaging 2-3dB of gain reduction (or higher for heavier music).
The main parameter that dictates the tone of the vocal is the attack time. Spend plenty of time tuning that in, and adjust it in the mix after you have set the compressor.
You could also try using a fast release time, or even setting it to as fast as it can go. This makes the vocals sound loud and aggressive. My good friend Jason Moss explains this well in this video.
Most of the time, though, it’s best to use a slower release time and adjust the timing until the compressor seems to breathe with the tempo of the track.
Remember, this approach to compression is about shaping the tone of the vocal, so try a few different compressors and compressor types if you have them.
Spend plenty of time adjusting the attack and release time until you are happy with the vocal. Use a fast attack time for thick, heavy vocals and a slow attack time for punchy, aggressive vocals.
I also recommend using a soft knee compressor for this approach if possible (just turn up the knee parameter if your compressor has one). This sounds more natural and musical. You don’t need a hard knee for dynamic control here.
Vocal Compression Settings For Light Tonal Compression
Here are my go-to vocal compression settings:
Ratio: 1.5:1
Attack Time: 15ms (but up to 30ms for more punch)
Release Time: 40ms
Threshold: -24dB
Gain Reduction: 2-3dB
Knee: Soft
Makeup Gain: 2dB
Remember that these settings are only a starting point. A lot of tweaking will be needed, and sometimes you may have to use completely different settings. But this is what I start with 80% of the time.
Dynamic Compression
This approach to compression is about catching the louder peaks and reducing their volume. For lighter genres, this type of compression might not be appropriate.
To do this, a faster attack time and higher ratio are needed.
As we are only trying to catch the louder peaks, a higher threshold is also needed. You don’t want to compress every word (like with tonal compression), you only want to compress the louder peaks.
You still need to be careful not to compress the transients too much, as this will put the vocals further back in the mix. Use a faster attack time, but try not to go below 1ms.
Adjust the release time so that the compressor breathes with the music, or use a fast release time for more loudness and aggression.
This time, the process is slightly different:
Load up a compressor (any will do). Set the ratio to 10:1 (and the knee to ‘hard’). Adjust the threshold until the compressor is only engaging on the louder peaks, not every word. Start with a medium-fast attack time of around 3-10ms. You can try using a slower attack time for more aggression, or a faster attack time for more weight (but don’t go too far below 2ms as you will put the vocal further back in the mix). Set the release time to 20ms and adjust until the compressor is breathing in time with the music. Try using a fast attack time for more aggression. Lower the ratio to somewhere around 2:1 until the compressor is applying 2-3dB of gain reduction (or 6-10dB for heavier genres).
Vocal Compression Settings For Dynamic Compression
Ratio: 2:1
Attack Time: 5ms (medium-fast)
Release Time: 20ms (medium)
Threshold: -24dB
Gain Reduction: 2-3dB
Knee: Hard
Makeup Gain: 1dB
Combining Tonal and Dynamic Compression
These two approaches work best when combined. As I mentioned earlier, compression sounds more musical and natural when applied in several stages (serial compression).
For lighter genres where little compression is needed, tonal compression is more appropriate. But for other genres where heavy processing is needed, apply both tonal compression and dynamic compression with two different plugins (or hardware units).
I rarely use dynamic compression on it’s own for vocals (as it’s normally used in combination with tonal compression), but I often use tonal compression on it’s own for lighter genres.
Here is my go-to plugin chain for mainstream vocal compression:
Light tonal compression when tracking Surgical EQ Tonal compression (slower attack, lower ratio, lower threshold) Tonal EQ Dynamic compression (faster attack, higher ratio, higher threshold)
You can also experiment with using the faster dynamic compressor BEFORE the slower tonal compressor. This means that your slower compressor isn’t thrown off by any loud peaks, as the fast compressor will catch them first.
My buddy Justin Coletti from SonicScoop explains this well in his video on serial compression.
NOTE: Always experiment with plugin order. Depending on what you are trying to achieve, applying plugins in a different order can make a big difference to the sound.
Best Compressors for Vocals
Let me make something clear…
The stock plugins that come with your DAW are INCREDIBLE.
Don’t buy plugins until you really see the need for better plugins.
If your mixes don’t sound as good as you would like, and you are blaming stock plugins – you aren’t ready to upgrade yet.
But when you are ready, I have a few favorite compressors for vocals.
FabFilter Pro-C 2 – An incredible compressor that is versatile and always sounds great.
– An incredible compressor that is versatile and always sounds great. Waves Renaissance Vocals – This plugin just has one control and it’s AWESOME.
– This plugin just has one control and it’s AWESOME. Waves CLA2A – Any LA2A emulation is perfect for lighter tonal compression.
– Any LA2A emulation is perfect for lighter tonal compression. Slate VMR – I like to use the 1176 emulation included in this plugin for faster dynamic control when needed.
Using a Limiter
After applying automation, tonal compression AND dynamic compression, the vocal should be pretty consistent in volume.
But for mainstream styles, you can go one step further and apply a limiter to catch any peaks that slip through your compressors.
Be subtle with limiting. As little as 1-2dB of gain reduction is sufficient in most cases, and you only want to affect the very loudest peaks.
For heavier styles or dense mixes you can experiment with more aggressive limiting to squeeze more volume out of the vocal.
Start with a fast attack time of 2ms and a medium release time of 80ms and go from there.
Sibilance Sucks… Seriously
Although you can remove some sibilance with EQ, it’s better to use a de-esser.
Most vocalists will require some degree of de-essing. Not all will, though, so this step is optional.
If you record with a dynamic microphone, sibilance probably won’t be an issue. If you reduced sibilance during the recording phase by placing the mic of axis, a de-esser might not be necessary.
De-essing is better than cutting sibilance with EQ as it will only have an effect when the vocalist says words that contain ‘S’ sounds.
Rather than cutting frequencies out the entire vocal, a de-esser uses multiband compression to limit the volume of those ‘s’ sounds. By compressing a targeted frequency range (usually a small range somewhere between 4-7kHz), those frequencies can never raise above a certain volume (as the de-esser will compress them when they start to take off).
Sometimes using a multiband compressor to create your own de-esser is more effective and gives you more control.
If you have a particularly sibilant vocalist, it’s worth going through the track and manually reducing the levels of sibilant words with clip gain.
Try inserting a de-esser early in the plugin chain. Later in the mix, experiment with moving it to the end of the plugin chain as this sometimes works better.
Powerful Parallel Compression
If you are struggling to make the vocal sit on top of the mix, or effects like reverb and delay are putting the vocal further away, you can use parallel compression to make sure the vocal sits at the very front of the mix at all times.
Here is the step-by-step process for applying parallel compression:
Create a new aux called ‘Vocal Compression’. Load up a compressor and send your lead vocal to this new aux. Change it’s output to the ‘Lead Vocals’ aux. Dial in some heavy compression (aim for 6 dB’s of gain reduction or more). Start with an attack time of 5ms and a release of 30ms and go from there. Bring up the new aux underneath the lead vocal until it starts to increase the volume of the vocal. As soon as you notice an increase in apparent volume, stop. That should be enough. You can push it even further than that if you want – it depends on the style of music.
This is a form of upward compression. With normal compression (downward compression), you make the peaks quieter and then increase the overall volume of the track. But with upward compression you’re making the quietest bits louder.
This means that your vocal will never drop below a certain volume.
It’s more time consuming, but it gives you a lot more control over the amount of compression.
Here are some general tips for using parallel compression:
It can sound more subtle than applying compression directly to the main vocal – great for lighter genres. Just keep the volume low.
It gives you a lot more control over the amount of compression. You can make extremely subtle changes by moving the channel fader up or down.
Some mixers don’t use any direct compression on the lead vocal at all and ONLY use parallel compression.
You could even add a limiter after the compressor to further control the dynamics.
Watch out for any resonant frequencies that become apparent due to the high amount compression. Apply EQ or multiband compression if needed.
Masterful Multiband Compression
Multiband compression isn’t the easiest thing to use. It’s easy to go from ‘adding energy and control’ to ‘completely over the top and ruined the mix’.
But by applying subtle multiband compression you can easily add energy to the vocal and effectively control specific frequency ranges.
There are two ways to use multiband compression on vocals:
Compress two or three wide frequency ranges individually Target specific frequency ranges to either enhance or reduce them
Let’s go over each technique in a bit more detail.
Wide Frequency Range
By simply adding a multiband compressor with the same compression settings over each frequency range you can add energy to the vocal.
Load up any multiband compressor and dial in 1-2dB of gain reduction on one of the bands. Copy the same settings to every other band. Experiment with moving the bands around. You might not want to compress the super high or low stuff, so try having one band compressing 100Hz-2kHz and another band compressing |
in the World Cup in 1986. It was also the case when Denmark became European champions in 1992 and when the team reached the quarter-finals in the World Cup in 1998 and the last 16 of the 2002 World Cup and Euro 2004. That said, nobody in Denmark really expects the team to qualify from the "group of death."
Who is the player who is going to surprise everyone at the Euros?
Christian Eriksen. The-20-year old attacking midfielder is one of the major architects behind Ajax's two championships in the last two years and is chased by some of Europe's biggest clubs. Eriksen has got pace, great dribbling abilities and vision.
Who is the player who is going to disappoint the most?
Michael Krohn-Dehli. The Brondby midfielder was a big part of the successful Danish qualification campaign but he has been in disappointing form for his club. He has not been near the same decisive force that he was in 2011 and has been hindered by a knee injury. Krohn-Dehli has got one year left on his contract and is looking to use the Euros as a way to play abroad again. He has had a spell at Ajax.
What is the realistic aim for your team at the Euros and why?
To avoid humiliation and get a couple of points. Not only are the opponents difficult but the order in which Denmark meet them is terrible. To meet first Holland, then Portugal and finally Germany was such a bad draw that the Danes did not know whether to laugh or cry when it was made. If Denmark need to beat Germany in the last group game to go through, it is not a good scenario. We would need another 1992 miracle for that to happen when a group of players went straight from their holidays to win the European Championship in Sweden.
Troels Henriksen is a football writer for Jyllands-Posten
Click here to read the profile of Nicklas Bendtner
Click here to read the secrets behind the Denmark players
This article has been updated to reflect Thomas Sorensen's withdrawal from Euro 2012Sen. John McCain John Sidney McCainGOP lobbyists worry Trump lags in K Street fundraising Mark Kelly kicks off Senate bid: ‘A mission to lift up hardworking Arizonans’ Gabbard hits back at Meghan McCain after fight over Assad MORE (R-Ariz.) said American leadership was stronger under President Trump's predecessor, according to a Guardian report published Sunday.
Asked if the country stood on sturdier ground under former President Obama's leadership, McCain said "yes," according to the report.
“As far as American leadership is concerned, yes," said McCain, though he vocally criticized many of the Obama administration's foreign policy decisions.
McCain also lost to Obama when he ran as the GOP nominee in the 2008 presidential election.
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The Arizona Republican was also asked what "message" the president delivered to the U.K. last week when he publicly criticized London's mayor, shortly after a terror-related attack that left eight people dead and many more wounded.
“What do you think the message is? The message is that America doesn’t want to lead,” said McCain, chairman on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“They are not sure of American leadership, whether it be in Siberia or whether it be in Antarctica,” he added.
Trump criticized London Mayor Sadiq Khan's comment that Londoners should not be alarmed by the increased police presence following the attack by taking the statement out of context.
Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his "no reason to be alarmed" statement. MSM is working hard to sell it! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2017
Trump also used the two recent attacks in the United Kingdom to renew his push to ban refugees and immigrants from several predominantly Muslim countries.FACT: Beginning a tweet with “FACT:” makes you look like an insufferable douchebag. That would be true even if what you are saying could actually be considered a fact and not just number fudged political spin.
But despite being exposed for “Grubering” this legislation on Americans under false pretenses, the Obama administration insists on bragging about the “success” of their wildly unpopular and incompetently implemented law.
FACT: 2014 has seen the largest health coverage gains in four decades → http://t.co/wWsFHTmpKf #ACAWorks #GetCovered pic.twitter.com/qW5JUzP0ix — The White House (@WhiteHouse) December 18, 2014
Padded stats include people who were kicked off EXISTING coverage, you fraud. @WhiteHouse — The Interview Dude (@TheDudeOfLa) December 18, 2014
@TheDudeOfLa @WhiteHouse kicked off? more like they replaced their plans with new ones that meet standards. — Deepen Gandhi (@deepen915) December 18, 2014
Even if that were genuinely true, it would still be padding the stats. Being forced to pay more for coverage you didn’t want is no “gain” at all though.
@WhiteHouse @SenatorDurbin how many lost it insurance and had to buy it after their old policies were cancelled? I call BS — Libertine (@uscoptic) December 18, 2014
There are over 7 million just like you. @fedup_patriot @WhiteHouse — The Interview Dude (@TheDudeOfLa) December 18, 2014
When they were kicked off of their old plans, involuntarily. There was no choice in the matter. @deepen915 @WhiteHouse — The Interview Dude (@TheDudeOfLa) December 18, 2014
@TheDudeOfLa @WhiteHouse yep, lost my coverage. Insurance company said it didn't meet new "standards" even though I was happy with it! — Susan (@Susan81) December 18, 2014
When "new standards" means having to pay for stuff you don't want/need, then they're STUPID standards. Right? @Susan81 @WhiteHouse — The Interview Dude (@TheDudeOfLa) December 18, 2014
@WhiteHouse and my premiums keep increasing to cover it! yay! Pft. — Carrie (@parider416) December 18, 2014
@WhiteHouse @USDOL Fact 1 in 3 Americans put off going to the Dr. because of high costs. Highest%in decades. $6k per person deductible?!! — fed-up not_takin_it (@fedup_patriot) December 18, 2014
@WhiteHouse What did you think would happen when you take away our freedom to choose for ourselves? — Chad Hagan (@Caedda10) December 18, 2014
@WhiteHouse When should we expect our $2500 per family health care cost savings? — Frank Burns (@LTCFBurns) December 18, 2014
@WhiteHouse FACT: Those "gains" have nothing to do w/healthcare. FACT: they were "made" under fraudulent circumstances. #Obamacare #Gruber — Ben Crystal (@Bennettruth) December 18, 2014
@WhiteHouse I know a lot of ppl here in California that can't afford ACA anymore. The premiums are too high, this is true all over USA — Laura Isaeff (@littlepeep09) December 18, 2014As humans cede more and more control to algorithms, whether in the courtroom or on social media, the way they are built becomes increasingly important. The foundation of machine learning is data gathered by humans, and without careful consideration, the machines learn the same biases of their creators.
Sometimes bias is difficult to track, but other times it’s clear as the nose on someone’s face—like when it’s a face the algorithm is trying to process and judge. An online beauty contest called Beauty.ai, run by Youth Laboratories (that lists big names in tech like Nvidia and Microsoft as “partners and supporters” on the contest website), solicited 600,000 entries by saying they would be graded by artificial intelligence. The algorithm would look at wrinkles, face symmetry, amount of pimples and blemishes, race, and perceived age. However, race seemed to play a larger role than intended; of the 44 winners, 36 were white.
Results of Beauty.ai’s contest.
The tools used to judge the competition were powered by deep neural networks, a flavor of artificial intelligence that learns patterns from massive amounts of data. In this case, the algorithms would have been shown, for example, thousands or millions of photos with people who have wrinkles and people who don’t. The algorithm slowly learns similarities between different instances of wrinkles on faces, and can identify them in new photos. But if the algorithm learns primarily from pictures of white people, its accuracy drops when confronted with a darker face. (The same goes for the other judged traits, which each used a separate algorithm.)
While 75% of applicants were white and of European descent, according to Motherboard, that theoretically shouldn’t matter. To the machine, these aren’t people, but similar assortments of pixels. When pixels don’t follow the expected pattern, they could be dropped as a bad input or accidentally punished by the algorithm’s misjudgment. In other words, the beauty in the photos was being judged by an objective standard—but that objective standard was built from an aggregate of white people.
“It happens to be that color does matter in machine vision,” Alex Zhavoronkov, chief science officer of Beauty.ai, told Motherboard. “And for some population groups the data sets are lacking an adequate number of samples to be able to train the deep neural networks.”
The answer to this problem is better data. If the algorithms are shown a more diverse set of people, they’ll be better-equipped to recognize them later.
This same problem has been illustrated in Google’s DeepDream experiments. Google researchers programmed algorithms to process images of architecture, landscapes, and famous art to amplify whatever patterns they found. The results were fractal hellscapes, punctuated by faces of dogs. It turned out the algorithm was trained on the open-source database ImageNet, which has thousands of dog photos, so the AI became easier really good at recognizing dog patterns in other instances.
It’s an issue that has plagued Google and HP, and still continues to be seen in large and small AI pursuits.
“If a system is trained on photos of people who are overwhelmingly white, it will have a harder time recognizing non-white faces,” writes Kate Crawford, principal researcher at Microsoft Research New York City, in a New York Times op-ed. “So inclusivity matters—from who designs it to who sits on the company boards and which ethical perspectives are included. Otherwise, we risk constructing machine intelligence that mirrors a narrow and privileged vision of society, with its old, familiar biases and stereotypes.”
Beauty.ai will hold another AI beauty contest in October, and though Zhavoronkov says that better data needs to be made available to the public, it’s unclear whether the next contest will use a different data set.I know it’s early, but my favorite article of the month comes courtesy of CNN. It’s called “math is racist,” and blames inequality in part on big data:
In a new book, “Weapons of Math Destruction,” Cathy O’Neil details all the ways that math is essentially being used for evil (my word, not hers). From targeted advertising and insurance to education and policing, O’Neil looks at how algorithms and big data are targeting the poor, reinforcing racism and amplifying inequality. These “WMDs,” as she calls them, have three key features: They are opaque, scalable and unfair. Denied a job because of a personality test? Too bad — the algorithm said you wouldn’t be a good fit. Charged a higher rate for a loan? Well, people in your zip code tend to be riskier borrowers. Received a harsher prison sentence? Here’s the thing: Your friends and family have criminal records too, so you’re likely to be a repeat offender. (Spoiler: The people on the receiving end of these messages don’t actually get an explanation.)
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To understand the critique, you have to understand the social justice warrior’s definition of “fair.” A fair result is one that either breaks down precisely along demographic lines (for example, if 40 percent of a city’s population is black, then 40 percent of its cops should be black) or favors preferred identity groups. In other words, if a university program admits more women than men, it’s a testament to the grit and courage of women to overcome historic discrimination. If it admits more men than women, then it’s evidence that the patriarchy is alive and well.
Corporations and other entities are constantly on the lookout for race and gender-blind methods of measuring risk, and the information era allows unprecedented access to hard numbers. To exactly no one’s surprise, these hard numbers show that risk and competence don’t break down neatly along demographic lines — that history, culture, and numerous other factors influence different people in different populations to make choices that impact their employability, insurability, or credit worthiness.
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That’s not to say that all data-based models are good. If credit worthiness, for example, turns out not to be an effective predictor of, say, insurability or reliability, then the model should be abandoned. And people can certainly make bad decisions even with good information. The author, however, seems less concerned with a model’s accuracy than with its demographic impact. If a model disproportionately impacts the poor, then it’s bad. But what if the poor disproportionately engage in the very behaviors that increase risk?
So what’s the answer? Well, one proposal is to restrict information flow:
And yet O’Neil is hopeful, because people are starting to pay attention. There’s a growing community of lawyers, sociologists and statisticians committed to finding places where data is used for harm and figuring out how to fix it. She’s optimistic that laws like HIPAA and the Americans with Disabilities Act will be modernized to cover and protect more of your personal data, that regulators like the CFPB and FTC will increase their monitoring, and that there will be standardized transparency requirements.
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In other words, if the data drives “bad” decisions, then take away the data. So much for the love of science. But people are not automatons. Remove all discrimination from the world and magically erase all the historic effects of discrimination, and people will still make different choices, including choices that inflict lasting harm on themselves and their families. Employers and others who are forced to rely on the integrity and reliability of their employees or customers are entitled to sufficient information to make reasonable decisions — even if the outcome is something other than “social justice.”It appears that Obama’s attempt at leading a shadow-like coup was just foiled and made nationally known. Unfortunately, that couldn’t be further from the truth. What actually happened is that this was merely the extension of the government’s executive-judicial overreach under the Obama administration. We can blame Obama all we want (and we definitely should), but we must also realize that he is a pawn. Currently, Obama is untouchable – he’s the Democrats’ token black president. Any backlash will be seen as racist, and undermine the very justice one seeks to achieve. But his methods were always legal. This is not intended to be a defense of the man, but should serve as a warning that what he did was enshrined in law. To successfully tackle the corruption in Washington we must systematically root out the source.
By now, it should be clear that in the aftermath of the financial collapse, Barack Obama opted for an elaborate financial regulatory scheme for the bank bailouts and subsequent TARP settlements instead of jailing the CEOs responsible. However, his actions in utilizing Obamacare weren’t necessarily to conduct a “net worth sweep” in claiming Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae solely as a means of funding his failing healthcare initiative and it wasn’t using a healthcare plan as a vehicle to contribute to his slush fund, as his critics charge.
Obamacare was the slush fund, designed to coerce America’s poorest population into indentured servitude, again.
The narrative thus far is that Obama was creating an illegal slush fund to financially promote liberal activist organizations like The National Council of La Raza ($1.5 million), The National Urban League ($1.1 million), The National Community Reinvestment Coalition ($750,000), Planned Parenthood (Iowa, Montana, and New Hampshire collectively receiving $655.000), and the Catholic Church ($90 million).
“This scandal comes courtesy of the Justice Department, engaged in a scheme to undermine Congress’ spending authority by independently transferring dollars to President Obama’s political allies. It works like this: The Justice Department prosecutes cases against supposed corporate bad actors. Those companies agree to settlements that include financial penalties. The Justice Department mandates that at least some of that penalty money be paid in the form of donations to nonprofits that supposedly aid consumers and bolster neighborhoods.”
That’s not the ground-breaking connection here nor is it true – it’s too partisan and convenient in wrapping up everything nicely to blame the DOJ. It’s that this is the iteration that snagged a pawn. Obamacare was too public to ignore.
If You Like Your Obamacare, Then You Can Keep Your Obamacare
Obamacare was always more than a healthcare plan. It was a means of ensuring yet another implosion of the middle class and a means of destroying private insurance industry by delaying premium increases to price out the competitors. This time, instead of people losing their homes, they would be granted two options – vote Democrat and have Medicare healthcare coverage, or vote Republican and survive uninsured. It is a round-a-bout Death Panel of sorts. Unlike the Conservative conspiracy meme that doctors would be overseeing such matters, it would be completely regulated by Obama’s administration and overseen by the states.
For example, the 1993 Medicaid “claw provisions” allowed for asset forfeiture on behalf of the states to recover costs from the deceased if they’d relied on “long term care”. This could result in tax liens on estates, which ensured that the inheritors would be faced with a “government shakedown” of sorts. While Medicaid was created in the 1980s, and the “claw provision” under Bill Clinton, Obamacare’s amendment in 2014 did not repeal such state asset forfeiture. The Obamacare amendment of 2014, in fact, extended the Medicaid eligibility program even further with an expansion of eligibility and federal funding for the former.
Had the widespread eligibility increase gone through, it would have extended coverage to all non-elderly individual with family incomes below 133% of the federal poverty level. Thankfully, due to NFIB v Sebelius, this expansion provision was deemed “coercive,” and many Republican-backed states refused to approve the amendment. Had Hillary Clinton won, she would have ensured that the expansion became mandatory.
Even further, Obamacare was rolled out to hide his administration’s complicit behavior in the Wall Street bank bailouts and subsequent TARP fund settlements, as well as serve as the second iteration of such complicity. This is why his announcement website was shoddy – it was released ahead of schedule, thanks to Congress requesting it in order track the transfer of funds available through the Prevention and Public Health Fund (PPHF). There was much confusion surrounding its deployment because the orders weren’t supposed to be given yet.
An overlooked fact is that it all began when Obama tried to float Obamacare legally, creating the navigators program (of which he planned $54 million). He then upped the funding of the navigators program to $67 million, with the extra $13 million coming from the PPHF – a Fund established under Section 4002 of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 that initially had #12.5 billion donated to it.
“Since ObamaCare was first debated in the House in 2009, Republicans have tried to block federal funds from flowing to Planned Parenthood, which is one of the nation’s primary abortion providers. With these grants, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius seemed to be saying to Republicans, “in your face,” as one GOP leadership aide put it.”
What is a “navigator”? According to healthcare.gov, it’s “an individual or organization that’s trained and able to help consumers, small businesses, and their employees as they look for health coverage options through the marketplace. This includes completing eligibility and enrollment forms. These individuals and organizations are required to be unbiased. Their services are free to consumers.
A second Wall Street collapse was all but inevitable; stymied in Healthcare budget roll outs. The insurance underwriters and the banks would continue to see profits in their detached, yet still related, industries with no one but a previous administration to blame. The goal was, with the two policies intertwined, that there’d be no separation at the state or federal level in terms of fund disbursement. Citizens too poor to choose their own healthcare would sign up in what was essentially a Ponzi scheme.
Indeed, states handle the rollout logistics of Medicaid and Medicare. The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (handled by the states) drafted a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) on the availability of up to $54 million in cooperative agreements to fund navigators in federally-facilitated or state partnership marketplaces. The money instead funded left-wing activist groups by diverting funds from those who actually could have used the funds for healthcare plan options.
These were essentially executive orders on whom to fund, with the protection of plausible deniability against the federal government since the states would be determining the logistics.
Thus, the U.S. government decided to grant the illusion of healthcare choices while only budgeting for the assurance of their healthcare plan (a huge conflict of interest, even by their own rules, 45 C.F.R. § 155.210(b) – not to mention a violation of RICO laws). And this went all the way through the individual state departments, which comprised (legally) with the enforcement of Obamacare, RMBS settlements with the banks, TARP rollouts, and the Wall Street financial collapse. Keep in mind this was before the landmark Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. FEC. Could it be that Citizens United was the legislative attempt to legitimize what had already been occurring behind closed doors between the U.S. government and the Wall Street banks?
If You Like Your TARP Funds, Then You Can Keep Your TARP Funds
By donating to liberal causes (their greatest consumer revenue base), the banks were essentially funding activist groups comprised of the very people with heavy non-dischargable student loans that would rely on the bank to provide a lenient interest rate while simultaneously ensuring conscription into Selective Service. Ideological money laundering in and of itself, the money was always going to be coming right back into the pockets of the corporations, full circle. It was the cost of doing business for the financial institutions and ensured another means of making money without being as public pre-2008, while maintaining a population of military-eligible warm bodies. Instead of homeowners being pressured to buy mortgages they couldn’t afford, students were being pressured to enroll in liberal subjects in schools that they couldn’t (normally) pay tuition for due to activist group representation, and conversely, being drafted into Selective Service should another war (with Russia?) break out. We’ve seen this all before.
Obama gutted Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (by reforming the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, by placing them in conservatorship), stealing infinite profits from their shareholders because they were quasi-government sponsored enterprises, and arguably the only two governmental oversight committees left for Wall Street). The ratings agencies (S&P, Fitch, Moodys) had already been vilified and broken up, and the tactic of quasi-oversight had already been applied in that avenue, meaning that the last remaining obstacle were the GSEs. This is why he didn’t also takeover Ginnie Mae, as the Government National Mortgage Association is already owned wholly by the U.S. government, and had definitely partaken in the wholesale mortgage fraud leading up to the overall collapse.
In sacking Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, Obama also gained the benefit of having nothing backing mortgage-backed securities (MSBs), which happen to underwrite a majority of home mortgages in the U.S., and the de-classification of future funds as government receipts. Mixing this with taxpayer revenue means there’s no way to track the money other than by what is reported in the mainstream news. Additionally, since MSBs are being propped up to be reinvested (now called a “mortgage bond whale”) which recirculates money back into the economy, leaving GSEs with no liquid recapitalization. This means that they’ll simply come to a standstill if the slightest downturn occurs. Especially since the Federal Reserve is sitting on a $4.3 Trillion “ticking time bomb”, and the Obama administration has been flooding the GSEs with funds they already own as a means of propping up a “healthy” conservatorship (also known as indirect monetization of debt). This fiduciary deception will lead to another bailout, as nothing will be propping up the housing bubble and mortgages. The end goal was to set a precedent in placing more publicly-traded companies in a conservatorship. The national debt exploded under Obama because the economy ran wild when he removed the checks and balances designed to curb it. This is also why Rand Paul complained about the replacement bill being “Obamacare lite.” It’s hard to fully divest from something embedded within a majority of federal and state institutions; from the court house to the senate, to the American people and the state-level subsidiaries that were designed to help them.
Before Obamacare, the bundling of mortgage-backed securities were the primary means of channeling funds from the pockets of Americans (a hold-over from before the financial collapse) to the very corporations that were demonized in the media. Before Obamacare and his slush fund, the funneling mechanism for these funds was the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group (RMBS), which is a collaborative effort by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice (including many United States Attorneys’ Offices), and numerous state Attorney General’s offices. The aim of the RMBS was to procure “evidence of false or misleading statements, deception, or other misconduct by market participants (such as loan originators, sponsors, underwriters, trustees, and others) in the creation, packaging, and sale of mortgage-backed securities.”
For this specific reason, there was Democratic obstructionism against Dr. Ben Carson at the helm of the Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD). In the years following the bailout, HUD was instrumental in rooting out the corruption of the banks because predatory lending policies would target African-Americans and Hispanics living in poverty by charging huge fees, high interest rates, and ultimately forcing them into a cycle of never-ending debt payments. Regarding the RMBS Task Force, HUD was primarily invested in determining the complicities of the Federal Housing Administration regarding underwriting policies. The banks were ensuring that the FHA would approve loans for otherwise ineligible home buyers, so HUD lost millions in revenue.
The massive default that arose from homeowners not being able to pay their annual dues resulted in a widespread divestment of funds, which triggered the explosion of the housing bubble and the onset of the financial collapse. Many lost their homes to foreclosure thanks to the collusion between the U.S. government, the Federal Housing Administration, the banking system, the Federal Reserve, the ratings agencies, and the oversight regulators. Even HUD was complicit by essentially investigating itself as federal funds flowed through their coffers as well. Indeed, in setting aside money for consumer relief, money was funneled into Community Development Financial Institutions, which circumvented Congress’ 2015 decision to cut $43 million in federal funds routed to these groups through the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Obamacare was not kept afloat by settlement slush funds. The settlement slush funds were decided upon by the corporations, the government, and the judiciary system, in order to fund Obamacare, which acted as a fund in its own right. It purposefully flaunted the funding of any group that the U.S. Congress decided needed to be curbed. This wasn’t just an attack on the U.S. Congress, but a complete attack on Constitutional laws.
Even more clandestine, the funding of liberal activist groups enabled the Obama Administration to have the support they needed in funding their environmental crusades.
Such sue and settle rulemaking is responsible for many of EPA’s most controversial and economically significant regulations that have plagued the business community for the past few years. Included are regulations on power plants, refineries, mining operations, cement plants, chemical manufacturers, and a host of other industries. One of the most successful sue and settle strategies they cited “… has been on an issue few in Washington or around the nation are paying attention to: regional haze requirements under the Clean Air Act.”
Wielding a malleable army of shills, the U.S. Government (and its subsidiaries, like the EPA) was able to use that rhetoric to affect the change they wanted by completely bypassing US Congress (or the right to representation of roughly half the American population). It was a perpetual propaganda machine.
If You Like Your Senators, Then You Can Keep Your Senators
Attorney General Lisa Madigan, of Chicago, (and the first Attorney General with the help of the DOJ to sue a national bank for fair-lending violations) settled with Morgan Stanley in a $22.5 million dollar settlement. This was supposedly for the RMBS deployment that led to the 2008 financial collapse that was meant for her state’s pension funds, which are currently in debt. Her track record (which includes a stint in working for the RMBS Working Group under Eric Holder) has been one of “standing up for the little guy.” Her father also took on numerous financial institutions for the behavior that led to the collapse. She’s been involved in soliciting settlements with JP Morgan, Chase & Co., for $100 million (earmarked for the pension systems), with Citigroup for $44 million (earmarked for pension plans and $40 million earmarked “consumer relief” plans), and Bank of America-Merrill Lynch for $300 million, with $200 million additionally being earmarked for the pension plans and $100 million in consumer relief. Partnering with the DOJ, she also reached a $175 million settlement with Wells Fargo over discriminatory and predatory lending practices against African-American and Hispanic homeowners. She also won a $8.7 billion dollar settlement against Countrywide over fair-lending violations.
In fact, she was a lead negotiator in the overall $2.5 billion mortgage settlement (Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank and Ally Bank, formerly GMAC), which apparently generated $2.4 billion in direct relief for Illinois home buyers. Indeed, the Morgan Stanley $22.5 million dollars was to be earmarked for the Teachers Retirement System of the State of Illinois, the State Universities Retirement System of Illinois, and the Illinois State Board of Investment, which oversees the State Employees’ Retirement System, General Assembly Retirement System and Judges’ Retirement System.
She even sued the ratings agencies S&P for $52.5 million over their abusive ratings on risky financial investments in their quest for profits and partook in an initial $275 million settlement with Volkswagen, but is planning to sue them again. Her latest outing is (as the first state Attorney) to sue Sallie Mae, which handles the $1 trillion dollar predatory student loan industry.
“Just as the housing crisis has trapped millions of borrowers in mortgages that are underwater, student debt could very well prevent millions of Americans from fully participating in the economy or ever achieving financial security,” Madigan testified to Congress in 2014. “The warning signs are there, just like they were there before the housing crisis and Congress needs to act before it is too late.”
Madigan seems to be a shoe-in for a female presidency and has been touted as “Hillary’s replacement”.
With hundreds of millions of settlement dollars, why did she freeze payment to state workers, without a budget in place? And why has she been obstructing state progress for 18 months?
A prolonged budget impass means there is no budget. There was none and there still hasn’t been one for 18 months. She has also eased out of her career of rooting out corruption by initially accusing her predecessor of being soft of corruption while she targeted Rod Blagojevich, who was eventually sent to prison for attempting to sell Obama’s Senate seat.
Her opposition, Illinois GOP Chairman Tim Schneider, is maintaining Madigan not only violated her oath of office, but also conspired with her father to block a budget compromise. She hasn’t offered much of a reply in her op-ed, but appears to be hoping to delay it as much as possible.
“It’s clear that Mike and Lisa Madigan are working together to protect the status quo and prevent reform by creating a crisis,” Schneider charged. “She’s working for the speaker, not the people.”
According to Bruce Rauner, Illinois Governor and Schneider ally, Madigan was intervening in a simmering dispute in determining whether state workers should be paid if a budget isn’t in place. In delaying the budget compromises, Madigan is ensuring that state workers (on her end) will not get paid, which is seemingly an act of retaliation against a proposed grand budget deal that is pending in the Senate.
How were those hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for the Illinois pension plans and overall state budget spent so recklessly? How did the funds dry up so quickly, given her status in office since 2003?
If You Like Your Wall Street, Then You Can Keep Your Wall Street
None of this would have been possible if it weren’t for the grand collusion between the multinational corporations in enticing the U.S. government into ensuring that their America, not the citizens’, came to fruition.
That’s the real story here; the entrenched judicial executive overreach in settlement cases pertaining to multinational corporations, with settlements orchestrated and agreed upon by all sides.
Eric Holder, who established the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force under former President Obama and remained in his position until 2015, mentioned “When we find evidence of criminal wrongdoing, we bring criminal prosecutions. When we don’t, we endeavor to use other tools available to us – such as civil sanctions – to seek justice.” Hilarious.
Few prolific businessmen were jailed. Instead, tons of civil sanctions were rolled out, which means, in hindsight, the committee itself was nothing more than a means of activating and manipulating the slush fund in its entirety. This task force was nothing more than the means of a funneling system enabling former President Obama to operate his slush fund. In conjunction with the Justice Department, the RMBS Working Group reached multibillion-dollar settlements with essentially every major bank in America. The true motivation as a task force was proven in the words of Eric Holder, when he mentioned, “This working group brings together a variety of federal, state, and local partners – including HUD, the FBI, IRS, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and Federal Housing Finance Agency Office of Inspector General.” The corruption was multi-level and widespread throughout the entire government.
The victims in this widespread judicial abuse consisted of Goldman Sachs ($5.1 Billion), Morgan Stanley ($3.2 Billion), Citigroup ($7 Billion), J.P Morgan Chase ($13 Billion), and Bank of America ($16.65 Billion). The funds were supposed to be placed into a consumer relief package, to help the homeowners who’d lost everything in the collapse. Obviously, that didn’t occur. They ended up financing liberal activist groups. Why? Because, according to the Washington Examiner, “direct consumer relief, such as forgiving delinquent loans, earns the banks at best only $1 of credit for each dollar it spends.”
While the Justice Department maintains that this maneuver isn’t a loophole, it’s perfectly legal because it’s steeped in the terms and conditions for their settlement in the first place. This means the financial institutions weren’t forced to choose options via verdict incentives. They were creating the options and acting like victims. It was reported as if the companies themselves were stuck in a bind and chose the lesser of two evils, but from the top down the companies themselves were secretly relieved to have an ally within the opposition.
Other forms of consumer relief packages (in other industry lawsuits) could be in dealership relief, environmental relief, etc. The idea was that, no matter what the instrument is called, money is officially earmarked to help the populace, whereas in reality, the fund would be channeled through various government entities (money laundering) until it made its way into the purse of the Obama Administration (Ponzi schemes). It is a massive circumvention of federal law (RICO) by declaring that all revenue obtained by the government must go to the Treasury and cannot be redirected to third parties.
The Banks themselves were pleased with the outcomes due to the means in which they could lessen their settlement costs. For example, Bank of America was able to eliminate a multi-billion dollar fine for mortgage fraud simply by donating to approved activist groups. Their donation cleaned $194 million dollars from the $16.6 Billion fine, so the bank only had to spend $84 million to make it happen.
This means that the establishment was playing both sides of the situation the entire time. The grand idea was to allow the mainstream media to stay silent on the notion of an Obama slush fund that cemented the fact that it was always an Obama Administration scandal, which was tied to no one conspirator. Indeed, Lankford (R-OK), has introduced the Stop Settlement Slush Fund Act of 2017 while House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), submitted similar legislation in the House. “Congress must permanently end the abuses Obama’s Justice Department exploited to use settlements to funnel money to their liberal friends,” Goodlatte said in a statement.
It’ll be interesting to see whether ongoing settlement amounts are appealed on the basis of this slush fund discovery, or if payments will be delayed and mistrials incurred. Multinational corporations might express mock outrage at the idea of an Obama slush fund, but they have all made hefty contributions.
If You Like Your Judiciary-Executive Overreach, Then You Can Keep Your Judiciary-Executive Overreach
These actions might even be seen as a kickback scheme by the State Department in retaliation for the financial collapse, which cost America its reputation in the white-collar world (and bankrupted Greece). But not only banks were affected.
Make no mistake, these lawsuits were filed to address violations stemming from the 2008 financial crisis and most of the violations involved Countrywide (which former Attorney General Eric Holder stated was the largest fair lending settlement in history), and Merrill Lynch, which Bank of America bought during the crisis with the government’s encouragement.
However, the DOJ also used these slush fund tactics against virtually every big-name company that could afford to lose billions in settlements. This isn’t to imply that those companies were innocent in their affairs because they weren’t. The approach taken to exude justice was even more ham-fisted and sleazy than their stereotypes make them out to be.
This is literal pay-to-play. Other settlements with non-banking companies include GlaxoSmithKline ($3 Billion), BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill (which the Obama Administration intervened in – $18.7 Billion), the ExxonValdez disaster ($509 million), Rx Fen-Phen ($21.1 Billion – ongoing), GM’s ignition-switch defect ($900 million), Toyota’s sudden-acceleration litigation ($1.2 Billion), |
An affable Hoosier, nicknamed “Smiler” for his sunny disposition, Colfax was leaving town the next day on an overland trip to California. Later he remembered Lincoln telling him he’d love to see California himself, but could only dream about it since “public duties chain me down here.” Lincoln’s comments to the Speaker about the “pleasures” of the West were among his last spoken words.
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Lincoln tried to entice Colfax to join the party headed to Ford’s, but the Speaker begged off, saying he had to pack his bags. He walked beside Lincoln as the president “took his last steps” from the White House Red Room to the North Portico. Colfax received “the last grasp of that generous and loving hand, and his last goodbye.” With that, Lincoln clambered into his carriage for the two-block ride to Fifteenth and H Streets, where he and Mary picked up their two guests, Clara Harris, the daughter of a New York senator, and her fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone. Then they rode on another eight blocks to Tenth Street, between E and F, where a small crowd, pelted by occasional cloudbursts, was waiting to greet them.
Jiggling along on the unpaved streets, the presidential party got a glimpse of the decorations put up to celebrate Lee’s April 9 surrender. The public euphoria had peaked on Thursday night, April 13, with a festive “grand illumination” running into the wee hours. The city’s homes, shops, and buildings were now even more lavishly appointed, as the April 14 Washington Star catalogued in a five-column survey of the most striking embellishments.
Jaunty or solemn words had been put up all over town. “How are you Lee?” taunted a motto spelled out in gas jets at E. L. Seldner’s clothing store at Pennsylvania Avenue and Seventh Street. At the Swiss consulate on A Street South, a sign read, “The old Republic of the Old World greets the new Republic of the New World on the occasion of its new birth.” If Lincoln’s carriage was traveling east on E Street between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets on its way to Ford’s, he could have read the large illuminated transparency mounted in front of Grover’s Theatre, summing up the trajectory of the rebellion: “April 1861 the cradle, April 1865 the grave.”
At Wolfsheimer & Brothers clothiers on Seventh Street, a poem- prayer placed in a large display window petitioned the Lord to protect Lincoln, whose health was widely thought to be failing:
Long live our chief, the President,
In glory, peace and health;
Nobly he brought the war to end,
Crushed treason in its wealth.
O God! Preserve his worthy life,
Let never war or civil strife
Again disturb our land.
The fifty-six-year-old president did look bedraggled during this week of northern jubilation. His face had withered over the previous year: deep creases beside his nose, sunken eyes, hollowed cheeks, graying temples and beard. The outer man appeared old and frail, but on the inside, as Colfax and other friends testified, Lincoln felt revitalized by Appomattox and by his recent two-week stay at General Grant’s headquarters on the James River. The epic April 4 march through Richmond had capped the visit, with thousands of slaves striding through town in the wake of the man they hailed as liberator. Colfax told Lincoln on his return from Virginia that he’d worried about the president’s safety in the rebels’ fallen capital. Lincoln replied that he would have fretted too if it had been anyone else; for himself, he’d felt no qualms at all.
AROUND 8:30 P.M., the Lincoln party of four made its way up the staircase from the foyer of Ford’s Theatre to the dress circle. The audience was already engrossed in the evening’s performance of the comedy Our American Cousin, but with the gaslights in all likelihood burning bright (dimming the house became customary in American theaters only a generation later) most people in the orchestra seats would have had no trouble catching the Lincolns’ entrance. Once they appeared, spectators rose to their feet in applause, actors on stage joined in the welcome, and the orchestra launched into “Hail to the Chief.” Seated in his wicker chair in the dress circle, Charles Leale, a twenty-three-year-old army surgeon, noted the presidential couple smiling and bowing as they proceeded to their stage-left box.
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When the play resumed, Lincoln’s good spirits persisted, for the actors were freely adding humorous lines, for his benefit, to an already funny play. To one character’s expressed desire to “escape the draft” of cool air, another answered that she needn’t worry: the “draft has just been abolished,” as the morning papers on April 14 had announced (referring to the military draft). Treasury Department employee John Deering got a straight-on view of the presidential party from his stage-right seat in the dress circle, and he noticed the “broad smile on Uncle Abraham’s face.” Actors and audience members were all keeping up the weeklong spirit of levity, and Lincoln was enjoying the party.
Shortly after 10:15 p.m., during the second scene of the third act of Our American Cousin, Deering heard what sounded like a gunshot. Later he claimed that upon hearing the report of the weapon, he sensed a gunman might have attacked the president. If so, he outclassed the rest of the audience in quick mental work. Hardly anyone realized initially that Lincoln might have been assaulted, and many did not register the sharp sound as gunfire. Virtually everyone in 1865 thought about assassination in the abstract, but few were prepared for it as a real prospect. Lincoln had attended Ford’s and Grover’s Theatres on many occasions with no apparent risk, and no security detail.
Grudgingly, after several moments of confusion, the audience began accepting the idea of an assassination unfolding in their midst. Yet, after Booth had launched the lead ball from his derringer muzzle-loader into the back of Abraham Lincoln’s head, rendering him instantly and per- manently unconscious; and after Booth had slashed the Lincolns’ guest Major Rathbone in the upper arm with a long blade, causing blood to spurt all over the box as Rathbone kept trying to subdue the assailant; and after Mary had let out an anguished scream; and after Booth had vaulted over the balustrade of the box, falling ten or twelve feet to the stage below and shouting “sic semper tyrannis”—many in the audience still could not take in what had happened. Witnessing Booth’s awkward landing on the boards, Edwin Bates, a New England businessman sit- ting in the front row of the orchestra underneath the presidential box, assumed at first that Booth had crashed onto the stage because someone had shot at him.
The audience at Ford’s on that evening inhabited an America fundamentally different from the one that came abruptly into being the very next day—a new dispensation in which freely elected presidents might succumb to violent attack, not just to illness (like William Henry Harrison in 1841 and Zachary Taylor in 1850). “It seemed,” wrote the Cincinnati Daily Commercial in a pained, page-one pronouncement four days later, “as if we had turned over a new page in history, and become suddenly possessed of new natures and new destinies—the one baleful and ungovernable, and the other leading to shipwreck.”
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Newspapers soon scoured the annals of history for the most recent example of an assassinated republican leader, and they settled on Dutch Protestant nobleman William of Orange, shot and killed without warning in 1584 by a French Catholic assassin because he objected to Spanish rule. Almost three hundred years had passed since that murder. Assassination made no sense in a republic, and three centuries of European and American history confirmed it.
The Sunday and Monday papers on April 16 and 17 engraved the entire sequence of events into millions of northern minds: Booth’s stealthy approach, the distinct crack of his weapon, the bloody scuffle with Rathbone, Mary’s cry, Booth’s leap and declaration and escape, the impotent stupor of the audience. The killing lodged in people’s memories as a succession of images, as a quickly developing action narrative that couldn’t have happened, but did. The implausibility of the event made the theatergoers’ anguished confusion vital to the story: their experience could stand for the gaping incomprehension of the entire Union population of twenty-five million. At the center of the sequence sat Lincoln’s hulking frame, mute and motionless in his red damask rocking chair.
For villainous flair, John Wilkes Booth has never been surpassed: incensed at the public elation in the North over Lee’s surrender to Grant, he waited for the Ford’s theatergoers to roar with delight before pulling the trigger. Has any other martyr in history been dispatched while a thousand of his admirers were bent over in stitches? A master of dramatic irony, Booth had also made a careful calculation. The people’s glee would slow down their perceptions. They wouldn’t know how to react. They’d think the odd noise piercing their laughter had been intentionally added to the play—one more comic bit. Their disorientation would ease his escape. Some in the theater were ashamed of their slow response that night.
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What the Ford’s audience went through on April 14—a wrenching reversal from mirth to misery—was repeated in northern hamlets and cities in the days to come. It made Lincoln’s death all the more inconceivable and all the more searing. For so incomprehensible a killing it was impossible to limit the blame to Booth (immediately named as the assassin in the weekend press), or to the Confederate government that must surely have controlled him, or to a negligent bodyguard from the Washington Metropolitan Police.
Many northerners blamed themselves for letting their guard down after Lincoln’s return from Richmond. They had lost focus in celebrating Appomattox day after day since Monday, April 10. They had lulled themselves into believing that if Lincoln had walked unscathed through the former Confederate capital on April 4, he was surely safe in Washington, DC. “Of all the occurrences within the range of possibility,” said the shaken and disbelieving St. Louis Democrat, “the assassination of our President in Washington, at this triumphant stage of the war, and while he was devoting himself in the most liberal spirit to an adjustment with the rebels, was perhaps the one event never thought of, still less looked for.” For those who lived through the assassination, the brutal emotional turnabout from April 14 to 15 forever colored their sense of loss. “Noon and midnight,” noted Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher, “without a space between.”
IN LINCOLN’S DAY, Americans were infatuated with the dying sentiments of public officials. Mass-produced lithographs depicted great men’s deathbed scenes and printed their parting phrases as captions. The two previous presidents to expire in office—Harrison and Taylor— had declined little by little, giving them the chance to offer solemn last reflections. “Sir,” the sixty-eight-year-old Harrison had said to his doctor, “I wish you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more.” The sixty-five-year-old Taylor, famous for his exploits in the war with Mexico, spotted his doctor and spoke soldier to soldier: “You have fought a good fight, but you cannot make a stand.” To those gathered around his bed, including his wife, Margaret, and his son-in-law Jefferson Davis, he added, “I die. I am ready for the summons. I have endeavored to do my duty. I am sorry to leave my old friends.”
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During the Civil War, the nation’s readers consumed a steady diet of dying phrases spoken by common soldiers and by great leaders, past and present. In its column “Last Words,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, one of the most popular weeklies of the day, reminded everyone that George Washington’s parting declaration was as “firm, cool, and reliant as himself: ‘I am about to die, and I am not afraid to die.’” When Lincoln’s old nemesis, Stephen Douglas, lay on his deathbed in 1861, his wife put her arms around him and said, “Your boys, Robby and Stevie, and your mother and sister Sarah—have you any message for them?” Douglas replied, “Tell them to obey the laws and support the Constitution of the United States.”
In the days ahead, northerners speculated freely about the words Lincoln would have chosen if he’d been given the time. Perhaps he’d have offered a message of reconciliation for North and South, or a Christian word of forgiveness for his attacker. Perhaps he’d have repeated words he’d already spoken elsewhere, like “with malice toward none, with charity for all” from his second inaugural address, delivered only six weeks before the assassination. Newspapers by the hundreds reminded readers of the martyr’s favorite poem: the Scottish poet William Knox’s fourteen-stanza “Oh, Why Should the Spirit of Mortal Be Proud?” written in the early 1820s. In doing so, they gave it the status of a self-eulogy, Lincoln’s virtual last words.
In 1850, at the end of the eulogy he delivered for Zachary Taylor at a public gathering in Chicago, Lincoln had recited six of Knox’s last seven stanzas from memory. His oration was soon published, and from that point on Lincoln was frequently taken as the poem’s author. With good reason: he recited it to all comers and told them he couldn’t remember who had written it. He melted at its fatalistic insistence on the universality and unanswerable power of death.
So the multitude goes, like the flowers or the weed That withers away to let others succeed;
So the multitude comes, even those we behold,
To repeat every tale that has often been told.
’Tis the wink of an eye—’tis the draught of a breath
From the blossom of health to the paleness of death
From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud
Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
“I would give all I am worth, and go in debt,” Lincoln wrote in 1846, “to write so fine a piece as I think that is.”
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THE NEW YORK HERALD reported that as Booth approached him from behind, Lincoln was bending forward in his rocking chair, eyes fixed on the stage, head resting on his hand in his carefree way, sharing “a hearty laugh” with the audience. Sitting below Lincoln in the orchestra, Julia Adelaide Shepard noticed “how sociable” the event seemed, “like one family sitting around their parlor fire.” Lincoln had tried to mingle as best he could from his elevated position. She described him as “a father watching what interests his children, for their pleasure rather than his own... How different this from the pomp and show of monarchial Europe.”
Many of those who loved Lincoln in 1865 regretted that he had spent his last conscious hours in a theater, in their eyes a morally dubious destination at best. But they took comfort in knowing that to the very end, he had sought out the company of ordinary citizens. He had been sitting among them, relishing their merriment, when he was struck down. Most northerners believed he’d given up his life for them. They took the assassination not as a retroactive martyrdom made possible by Booth’s bullet, but as a voluntary self-sacrifice, akin to the death of a soldier in battle. “President Lincoln fell a sacrifice to his country’s salvation as absolutely, palpably,” said a New York Tribune editorial on April 17, “as though he had been struck down while leading an assault on the ramparts of Petersburg.”
Lincoln didn’t know he had a date with death that night, but he did know that his republican duty entailed an attitude of disinterestedness as to life or death. A confirmed reader of the Bible, if not a professed Christian, he understood the relevance to his republicanism of Matthew 10:28 (“fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul”) and Paul’s comment to the Philippians (1:20) that “Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death.”
He might have said the same about the American Republic being magnified by his dying as much as by his living. Perhaps once in a while President Lincoln came close to imagining the appropriateness, in the midst of all the war losses, of his own death. Schuyler Colfax remembered the president telling him, after spending a sleepless night agonizing over Union fatalities in 1863, “how willingly” he would “exchange places today with the soldier who sleeps on the ground in the Army of the Potomac.” On that occasion, Lincoln was plainly aching for a good night’s sleep, but he also sensed that solid rest now depended on imagining his body exposed to the risks run by his soldiers.
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SITTING in the dress circle forty feet from the president’s box, army surgeon Charles Leale was startled like everyone else, not long after 10:15 p.m., by what sounded like a pistol going off. He rushed in the direction of the shot and reached the box before anyone else did. Lincoln sat slumped in his rocking chair, propped up by his wife, unconscious but still breathing. Leale couldn’t tell where Lincoln had been wounded, and he quickly laid him out on the floor to examine him. He glanced at Major Rathbone’s bleeding arm and inferred that Lincoln, too, might have been stabbed. A bystander with a penknife cut away Lincoln’s coat and shirt, revealing no wound.
Running his hands through the victim’s thick black hair (Lincoln had likened it to a horse’s mane), Leale found the entry point of the derringer ball behind the left ear. Ignorant of microbial transmission, he used his pinky to probe the entry point of the.41-caliber projectile (four-tenths of an inch in diameter). Feeling the cavity convinced Leale that Lincoln had suffered a fatal injury. The surgeon conveyed this news to the people pressing into the box, and it spread quickly through the theater and into the crowd already forming in anger and gloom on Tenth Street.
By this time, a second young army surgeon, Charles Taft (uncle of future president William Howard Taft, then seven years old) had been boosted into the balcony box from the stage below. He concurred with Leale’s dire prognosis, as did a third doctor, Albert F. A. King, who soon joined the others. Immediately they turned their attention from saving the president to keeping him alive as long as they could. As the doctors deliberated about what to do next, actress Laura Keene, the star of the show, arrived in the box and got Leale’s permission to cradle Lincoln’s head in her lap, absorbing drops of Lincoln’s blood into the folds of her dress.
Laura Keene was, in effect, sitting in for Mary Lincoln, who was too distraught to stroke her husband’s forehead. In the weeks to come, many lithographs were produced to capture the scene in the president’s box, but apparently none showed Laura Keene performing the holy service of succoring the dying martyr. Perhaps too many citizens would have taken umbrage at the idea of a “public woman,” an actress, playing this poignant familial role. Such judgment did nothing to lessen interest in the bloodstained patches of her dress that she eventually distributed, along with affidavits attesting to their authenticity.
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Major Rathbone’s blood is dripping from Booth’s knife as he leaps to the stage, and the top of Lincoln’s rocking chair has been squared off to look like a coffin.
Dr. Leale recollected decades later that his only thought at this point was to “remove [the president] to safety.” He and the other doctors ruled out a bumpy carriage ride back to the White House, a trip they felt would surely kill him, and chose instead to carry him out into the street in search of shelter. Had protecting his body alone controlled their decision, they might have asked the many soldiers present to clear the theater and make Lincoln as comfortable as they could. Something besides the victim’s physical security drove their decision to take him on a jostling journey down the staircase and into a volatile crowd on Tenth Street, where, for all they knew, more danger lurked in the form of another assassin.
Merely moving the president outdoors posed medical risks too: “retaining [Lincoln’s] life” as they crossed the street, Dr. Leale recalled, was accomplished only with “great difficulty.” They had to keep stopping so that he could remove the clot of blood on the wound, reducing cranial pressure to aid the president’s breathing. Dr. Taft was supporting Lincoln’s head as the group shuffled along, led by a soldier who parted the crowd with his drawn sword. As Taft later remembered, “the motion of the body in being carried” caused additional oozing, “and my hands, which supported the head, were covered with blood and brain tissue.”
Meanwhile, Lincoln’s body was barely covered above the waist. William DeMotte, an Illinois state official who’d attended the play and was now watching the Tenth Street spectacle, said the president was “denuded of the upper clothing, not only his face and neck exposed but his breast and arms. His coat or cloak was thrown loosely over his chest.” On the evening of April 14, dozens if not hundreds of citizens got a glimpse of Lincoln’s head and bare chest as he was carried past them in the open air.
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The idea of putting Lincoln in a lodging house on the other side of Tenth Street may have seemed so enticing to Leale, Taft, and King because it offered them a domestic setting where they could temporarily have the dying man to themselves. In a real bedroom they could close the door, keeping family, politicians, and soldiers out of the way as they prepared the president for a proper deathbed vigil. The pull of this enclosable space, where the physicians could perform their medical duties unimpeded, was matched by an equally compelling push factor: relocating Lincoln to a boardinghouse would ensure he didn’t die on Good Friday in a setting many Americans considered suspect at best, disgraceful at worst. Realizing that the wound was mortal, the doctors may have sensed that the threat to the “safety” of the president included his moral legacy just as much as his bodily survival for, at best, a few more hours.
For years, Lincoln had been roundly chastised for his regular trips to the theater; one historian counts forty-three such trips during his four years in the White House. He had attended Grover’s (later National) Theatre more frequently than Ford’s, taking in performances of Shakespeare and of ordinary playwrights like Tom Taylor, author of Our American Cousin. For many American Protestants, theaters ranked with gambling dens and dance halls as cesspools of vice, and the president’s spending the anniversary of Christ’s crucifixion chuckling at an English comedy struck many of them as a lamentable lapse of judgment.
“Multitudes of his best friends,” said the Lincolns’ own minister, Phineas Gurley, in a public address six weeks later, “would have preferred that he should have fallen in almost any other place. Had he been murdered in his bed, or in his office, or on the street, or on the steps of the Capitol,” said Gurley, “the tidings of his death would not have struck the Christian heart of the country quite so painfully.” If the public roadway ranked higher than the theater as a respectable place for a president to die, then Drs. Leale, Taft, and King had done Christians a vital service simply by getting the still breathing Lincoln out onto Tenth Street.
IMMIGRANT TAILOR William Petersen owned a three-story, eleven-room house across the street from Ford’s Theatre, and he rented out rooms to several young government employees and to Hulda Francis and her husband, George, a dealer in “house furnishing goods” (“cutlery, guns, baskets, brushes, and notions”). About 10:30 p.m., George and Hulda were undressing for bed in their big first-floor room at the rear of the house. Suddenly they heard what George called “a terrible scream” outside, and they ran to the front parlor window looking out on Tenth Street.
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At the doorway of Ford’s Theatre they saw “some running in, others hurrying out,” and they heard “hundreds of voices mingled in the greatest confusion.” Buttoning up his clothes and hurrying out the door, George reached the street just as Lincoln was being carried from the theater. Like William DeMotte, Francis registered the unexpected sight of the president’s chest only barely covered with a coat. “I could see as the gas light [from the sidewalk streetlamp] fell upon his face,” George recalled. The president looked “deathly pale,” and “his eyes were closed.”
Holding a candle as he stood on the raised front stoop of the Petersen house, fellow boarder Henry Safford called out to Dr. Leale’s party, inviting them to bring Lincoln inside. The obvious place to lay him down was the large Francis bedroom, but Leale’s group passed it up in favor of a much smaller (10×17-foot) room rented by William Clark, a former soldier in Company D of the Thirteenth Massachusetts Infantry and now a clerk at the Treasury Department. Out for the evening, Clark had left his room neatly made up, and the door unlocked. The gigantic Lincoln was placed diagonally on the black walnut bed, his feet left dangling off the edge of the mattress by the wall, and his head angled toward the door.
This room’s spare simplicity would permit an easy transition to the deathbed vigil. Aside from the bed, it contained only a bureau (topped with a crochet) and a small table. The old standards affixed to the wall— prints of J. H. Herring Sr.’s Barnyard, Stable, and Village Blacksmith, and a photo reproduction of Rosa Bonheur’s Horse Fair—gave grieving visitors some familiar images of prewar rural tranquillity to contemplate as the night wore on.
Almost immediately, the Francis bedroom was pressed into national service too, as soldiers, officials, family, friends, and ordinary citizens converged on the Petersen house. In chaotic fulfillment of republican doctrine, a random detachment of “the people” had swarmed up the steps and followed the president’s body onto the premises. Taking for granted the propriety of continued free access to their chief magistrate, they hung about the soon impassable hallway until a soldier was finally delegated to throw them out. Then they blended into the large mass of people squeezed into Tenth Street, where reeling theatergoers had been joined by the same roving bands of young men who’d been publicly celebrating every evening since Lee’s surrender to Grant five days earlier.
After the hotheads in their midst had expended themselves with calls to burn down Ford’s Theatre and to hang an allegedly anti-Lincoln passerby from a sycamore tree, the informal assembly settled into patient waiting for hard facts to emerge. Whenever a general or politician appeared on the Petersen house steps, the crowd plied him for information. William DeMotte remembered the people on Tenth Street keeping their collective ear literally to the ground. “At intervals during the night the clatter of horses’ hoofs was heard as squads of cavalry galloped about the city. Each time there would be quiet and listening of the vast crowd till the direction was determined and as the sound always died away from us we knew the assassin was not found.”
Another man standing in the street, Union army officer Roeliff Brinkerhoff, had followed Lincoln’s body down the stairway from Ford’s dress circle, noticing “a plash of blood on every step.” (The blood likely belonged to Major Rathbone, severely gashed by Booth’s knife, not to Lincoln, whose head wound bled far less copiously.) Once outdoors, Brinkerhoff found alarm spreading as rumors pulsed through the crowd. Vice President Johnson, Secretary of State Seward, and Secretary of War Stanton had all supposedly been killed. “It looked as if there might be a second Saint Bartholomew [massacre of 1572 in France] in progress,” Brinkerhoff wrote later. He ran up Tenth Street to get a look at the signal station atop the five-story Winder Building at Seventeenth and F Streets. When he saw the corpsmen sending a message to “the fortifications,” he relaxed, knowing that “any uprising would be quickly suppressed.”
The rumors Brinkerhoff had picked up contained some truth. Booth had planned a coordinated assault against Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward. His accomplice Lewis Powell had in fact “assassinated” Seward, since the word then connoted any violent assault, lethal or not, on the life of a public official. Seward and his son Frederick, also wounded by Powell, survived the knife attack. Johnson’s designated attacker, George Atzerodt, had gotten cold feet and failed to act.
As a deliberating minipublic, sifting out the truth or falsity of its own rumors, the crowd acted the part of a first-alert apparatus, sending off emissaries armed with the latest intelligence to other parts of the city. Until official word of the assassination was cabled from the War Department to the national press soon after midnight, the Tenth Street citizens operated as an informal broadcasting system.
Lounging with a newspaper in the lobby of the Willard Hotel, several blocks west of Ford’s Theatre, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Maun- sell B. Field first learned what had happened when several men ran into the lobby yelling that the president had been shot. He hustled up Tenth Street and began buttonholing members of the crowd, who told him— perhaps grasping at straws of hope based on having seen the president’s upper torso—that Lincoln had been shot in the chest and might survive. Field had little trouble pursuing the truth of the matter on his own by talking his way into the still lightly guarded boardinghouse.
Meanwhile, Dr. Leale had cleared William Clark’s bedroom of everyone but medical personnel—an order that meant ejecting an inconsolable Mary Lincoln. As Secretary Field stepped inside the house, he found her standing alone in the center of the front parlor, still in her bonnet and gloves, keeping solitary company with a marble-topped table. Three times she repeated the question: “Why didn’t he [Booth] shoot me?” Soon she was joined and comforted by her friend Elizabeth Dixon, wife of Connecticut senator James Dixon, who remained with her all night long, and by her pastor, Phineas Gurley. Until the following morning, the front parlor of the Petersen house remained a sanctuary for familial, prayerful mourning.
Having found the president unscathed below the head, yet growing frigid in his extremities, Dr. Leale ordered blankets, hot-water bottles, and “mustard plaster” to increase body temperature (by irritating the skin, the mustard application improved blood circulation). At Dr. Taft’s suggestion, Leale forced a sip of diluted brandy between Lincoln’s lips, which he swallowed with a struggle. Another teaspoonful of brandy did not go down at all. With that, the doctors settled in for a deathbed vigil of indeterminate length, readmitting mourners while continuing to monitor the victim’s breathing and heartbeat.
Excerpted from "Lincoln’s Body: A Cultural History" by Richard Wightman Fox. Copyright © 2015 by Richard Wightman Fox. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.First up: I know I missed the Untried Polish Challenge yesterday. I joined a boxing/kickboxing class last night, and by the time I got home, I couldn't lift my arms high enough to apply polish. I hope to make it up tomorrow, before my next challenge date. Don't hate me!
Today I have a fun little geometric manicure to show you all. I started off with a base of Maybelline Color Show's Canary Cool. This is from the new Summer 2013 Limited Edition Collection.
People, this is the soft yellow polish I've been dreaming off. It's amazing. Not streaky, opaque in two coats, and the perfect color. If you can find this polish, I highly recommend taking it home with you.
To add a little spice to this manicure, I've done some fun little striping tape accent triangles. I'm really feeling geometric shapes lately, so this was a fun manicure to wear.
West End Wonderland is a wonderful gold glitter polish with a smattering of copper glitters thrown in. It is gorgeous, absolutely what you would expect from a Butter London polish.
What do you think of my triangles?
Enjoy & until next time, Amy Lee
*all products featured in this post were purchased by meGet the latest from TODAY Sign up for our newsletter
July 4, 2013, 1:58 PM GMT By Scott Stump
Nearly five months after he was charged with making a terroristic threat on Facebook, a Texas teen remains in jail while his father worries constantly about his son’s safety.
“He’s scared for his life, and I’m scared for his life," Jack Carter told TODAY. "And every minute he’s in there is just another moment of torture for me and for him."
Justin Carter, 19, is being held in the Comal County Jail in New Braunfels near San Antonio on a $500,000 bond after being charged with making a terroristic threat on Facebook in February. The charge is a third-degree felony and could lead to a prison term of two to 10 years if Carter is convicted.
Two months after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Carter wrote on Facebook, “I think I’ma shoot up a kindergarten. And watch the blood of the innocent rain down. And eat the beating heart of one of them.”
“Unfortunately, any time that we have those type of comments made about a school system, with the history of school violence, we have shown we have to take those very seriously,’’ Lt. John Wells of the New Braunfels Police Department told TODAY.
“He never contemplated anybody would take that to mean that he’s serious,’’ attorney Don Flanary told TODAY. “It’s clearly sarcasm.”
Flanary and Carter’s father understand why authorities were concerned but argue there is no evidence Carter ever intended or had the means to carry out the threat. Flanary says he will meet with the judge on Tuesday to ask for a reduced bond so that Carter can be released from jail and come home to his family to fight the charges. Under the current $500,000 bond, his family would have to put up 10 percent, or $50,000, to have him released, and does not have the money to do so.
“He’s a good kid, and he never did anything, and there was not any weapons,’’ Jack Carter said. “I think it’s very obvious.”
“Justin Carter’s case will proceed through the criminal justice system like all the other felony cases,’’ the Comal County district attorney’s office said in a statement to TODAY.
A change.org petition started by Jack Carter called “Release My Son Justin Carter – In Jail for a Facebook Comment” had received more than 63,000 signatures as of Thursday morning.And i’ll totally be that….
Mayhaps I should back this whole story up a little bit in order to provide context to the ran which is about to take place.
The other day a buddy of mine shot an email over to me asking if I had heard of about a new game called: ‘Remember Me’ which is scheduled to come out this summer. Now my friends and I send one another lots of new information about upcoming video games because well.. we are some gaming azz gamers and it’s always good to keep the homies up on awesome new nerdy ish that is coming down the pipeline. Well, the homey:’Mike’ sent me a heads up about this new game and it went something like this:
Mike: Slaus have you heard about that new game coming out called: Remember Me? It kind of looks like Deus Ex cept it features a Black chick as the lead character. SlausCaldwell: Waaaaaitammint. There is a damn game coming out with a Black woman as the lead? Seriously? Ohhhhh shit. It’s an action Role Playing game? Yeah I’m getting that. Not passing up the opportunity to NOT buy an RPG with a black woman as the main character. I pretty much HAVE to buy it. Mike: Why do you HAVE to. You don’t know if It’s good or bad and you always talk about how you never buy games without knowing if they are good or not. SlausCaldwell: Man it’s not only a genre I like to play but it has a Black protagonist? Far as i’m concerned I HAVE no real choice. I HAVE to support a game like this to let developers know how much I appreciate the fact that not only is there a woman as the main character but a BLACK woman? Bytch it’s non-negotiable. Mike: Sounds kind of racist to me. SlausCaldwell: :: cue the reverse racism whiteboy whining session :: Spare me. Mike: Just saying. It sounds racist. If I said I was only buying games because they had white males as the lead character, that would be wrong, but you wanting to buy game just because the lead character is Black is ok? SlausCaldwell: Ohhhh Goddddd. What the fuck is it with people and False Equivalence these days. Fuckoutta here with that dumb shyt. Fuck outta here with that I’m racist shyt also. YOU don’t have to try very hard to find any games featuring a white male lead because that’s 99% of the games on the market. You could go into Gamestop blindfolded, trip and spin around thrice, grab any random game on the shelf and chances are it’s gonna be a white dude saving the world. ME on the other hand, I have to look high and low to try and find a game that has a Black lead in it THAT ISN”T A DAMN SPORTS GAME. So Tell me this.. How many video games have come out in the last 20 years that featured a Black female lead? Mike: I don’t know but I’m sure there are more than a few.SlausCaldwell: name ’em. Name me 5. Mike: Damn Dude. Dramatic much? SlausCaldwell: Dramadeeznutz. Name me every video game that has been released in the last 20 years. Mike: That’s ridiculous, |
the files. For example, if you want to diff the contents of two archives without having to uncompress them first, use the following command:
$ zrun diff archive1.gz archive2.gz
This command will uncompress automatically the two.gz files and pass the contents to the diff command. Very cool.
The following compression types are supported: gz bz2 Z xz lzma lzo. If zrun is linked to some name beginning with z, like zprog, and the link is executed, this is equivalent to executing zrun prog.
That’s it! Please don’t forget to read the manpages for greater detail on the above commands. I hope you liked to learn about this fantastic tool package and that it motivated you to use it on your daily UNIX programming tasks! Until next time, have an awesome coding fun!ROME — Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, a hero to the progressive liberation theology movement in Catholicism who was assassinated in 1980 while saying Mass, will be beatified on May 23.
The act brings Romero to the final step before sainthood, and comes after a decades-long debate in the Vatican as to whether the populist archbishop’s death had more to do with politics or faith.
The date for the beatification ceremony was announced by Italian Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, a Vatican official who has championed Romero’s sainthood cause and who is currently in El Salvador working on details for the ceremony. The event will take place in San Salvador, at the city’s Divine Savior monument.
Typically the head of the Vatican’s office for sainthood causes, Italian Cardinal Angelo Amato, would lead the beatification Mass. Since Amato is already scheduled to lead another beatification event in Kenya that day, however, someone else may be tapped to preside.
Pope Francis cleared the way for the announcement earlier this year by decreeing that Romero was a martyr, meaning someone who died as a witness to the faith.
Romero is the most prominent victim of the 75,000 people believed to have been killed in El Salvador’s bloody civil war, which went on from 1980 to 1992. No one was ever prosecuted for his assassination, but right-wing death squads have long been suspected.
Romero’s priest secretary, Rev. Jesus Delgado, has said that Romero’s love for those in need was rooted in the Second Vatican Council, a summit of Catholic bishops from around the world in the mid-1960s that called for a personal encounter with Christ implying a preferential option for the poor: “Jesus opted for the poor to save us all.”
In an interview with Crux Feb. 4 while in Rome for a press conference, Delgado said that if anything, Romero was very faithful to the conservative Catholic movement Opus Dei, and to the Jesuits.
Delgado said that at the moment of his death, Romero had two priests that he spoke to with regularity, one an Opus Dei member and one a Jesuit.
“He had a very traditional formation, faithful to the Vatican and to the pope,” Delgado said. “But as archbishop in El Salvador, his spirituality wasn’t with the Jesuits or the Opus Dei, it was with the people of his country. Romero went from a very traditional Catholicism to a very committed one.”
The beatification cause for Romero has been a complicated one, with many denouncing it was being blocked by Vatican officials who received negative reports on Romero. Those reports claimed that the bishop was aligned with the Marxist arm of liberation theology, and that his murder was political, not religious.
Born in the 1970s in Latin America, this theological movement sought to place the Catholic Church on the side of the poor in struggles for social justice. Some of its proponents, such as Peruvian Gustavo Gutierrez and Brazilian Leonardo Boff, urged the masses to take an armed stance against oligarchic governments and defied the idea of a hierarchical Church.
During the February press conference, Paglia addressed the rumors of popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI blocking the cause.
Paglia said that in the beginning, Pope St. John Paul II had been ambivalent about whether Romero’s death was truly a cause of martyrdom, but he eventually embraced the full picture. In 1983, while visiting El Salvador, John Paul II praised Romero as a “a zealous and venerated pastor who tried to stop violence.”
“I ask that his memory be always respected,” John Paul said, “and let no ideological interest try to distort his sacrifice as a pastor given over to his flock.”
Benedict XVI was an extraordinary interlocutor for the cause, even as a cardinal, Paglia said, insisting on the fact that “robust objections require a robust response.”
“Papa Ratzinger,” Paglia said, “personally told me many times that Romero is a man of the Church.”
It’s of great symbolism that the date for the beatification was announced during the vigil of the death of another Salvadorian priest murdered and who is currently in the process of beatification: the Rev. Rutilio Grande, killed March 12, 1977.
Grande, a Jesuit, is said to have inspired Romero in his solidarity with the poor.Think about what we would expect to find if there really were a skills shortage. Above all, we should see workers with the right skills doing well, while only those without those skills are doing badly. We don’t.
Yes, workers with a lot of formal education have lower unemployment than those with less, but that’s always true, in good times and bad. The crucial point is that unemployment remains much higher among workers at all education levels than it was before the financial crisis. The same is true across occupations: workers in every major category are doing worse than they were in 2007.
Some employers do complain that they’re finding it hard to find workers with the skills they need. But show us the money: If employers are really crying out for certain skills, they should be willing to offer higher wages to attract workers with those skills. In reality, however, it’s very hard to find groups of workers getting big wage increases, and the cases you can find don’t fit the conventional wisdom at all. It’s good, for example, that workers who know how to operate a sewing machine are seeing significant raises in wages, but I very much doubt that these are the skills people who make a lot of noise about the alleged gap have in mind.
And it’s not just the evidence on unemployment and wages that refutes the skills-gap story. Careful surveys of employers — like those recently conducted by researchers at both M.I.T. and the Boston Consulting Group — similarly find, as the consulting group declared, that “worries of a skills gap crisis are overblown.”
The one piece of evidence you might cite in favor of the skills-gap story is the sharp rise in long-term unemployment, which could be evidence that many workers don’t have what employers want. But it isn’t. At this point, we know a lot about the long-term unemployed, and they’re pretty much indistinguishable in skills from laid-off workers who quickly find new jobs. So what’s their problem? It’s the very fact of being out of work, which makes employers unwilling even to look at their qualifications.-- by Connor Gibson, Greenpeace
You're probably familiar with the old "fox in the hen house" story, but what about when a hen joins the fox den?
This is the case with the recent American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) meeting in Washington, DC. Leaked documents obtained by Greenpeace reveal that ALEC's anti-environmental jamboree was inundated with coal money and featured an Indiana regulator advising coal utilities on delaying US Environmental Protection Agency rules to control greenhouse gas emissions and hazardous air pollution.
At ALEC's coal-sponsored meeting, where state legislators and corporate representatives meet to create template state laws ranging from attacks on clean energy to privatization of public schools, Indiana's Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Management Tom Easterly laid out a plan to stall the US EPA global warming action in a power point clearly addressed to coal industry representatives at ALEC's meeting.
In a USB drive branded with the logo of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a folder labeled "Easterly" contains a presentation titled "Easterly ALEC presentation 11 28 12" explaining current EPA air pollution rules and how Tom Easterly has worked to obstruct them. The power points is branded with the Indiana Department of Environmental Protection seal. In the latter presentation, Easterly ended his briefing to ALEC's dirty energy members with suggestions for delaying EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions at coal plants.
Easterly's presentation, which is posted on his Indiana Dept. of Environmental Mgmt commissioner webpage, even offered a template state resolution that would burden EPA with conducting a number of unnecessary cost benefit analyses (which the federal government has done through the Social Cost of Carbon analysis) in the process of controlling GHG emissions.
The template resolution Easterly presented to ALEC was created by the Environmental Council of States (ECOS), a group of state regulators that create template state resolutions similar to ALEC, often with overlapping agendas that benefit coal companies. ECOS has some questionable template state resolutions for an "Environmental" organization, including a resolution urging EPA not to classify coal ash as "hazardous." Although its less regulated than household trash, coal ash contains neurotoxins, carcinogens and radioactive elements and is stored in dangerous slurry "ponds" that can leak these dangerous toxins into our waterways.
Almost too predictably, ECOS' work is sponsored by the coal fronts like ACCCE and the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), both sponsors of the ALEC meeting where Easterly presented the ECOS model resolution. See clean air watchdog Frank O'Donnell's blog on ECOS for more.
Easterly's work, including his presentation to ALEC, is also promoted by the Midwest Ozone Group, a group whose members include ACCCE, American Electric Power and Duke Energy.
Commissioner Tom Easterly's suggestion of burdening EPA with tasks beyond its responsibility is concerning, as is his ongoing campaign to discredit the science of global warming--something he doesn't have the scientific qualifications to do. To this end, the Indiana regulator fits nicely into the coal industry's long history of denying problems they don't want to be held accountable for and delaying solutions to those problems. The same processes applied to acid rain, a problem the coal industry also denied for years--check out Greenpeace's collection of Coal Ads: Decades of Deception.
Climate Science Denial at Indiana's Department of Environmental Management
Even before Indiana's top enforcer of federal and state environmental regulations was advising coal companies on how to continuing polluting our air and water, it appears that denial of basic climate science was the state's official position on global warming--Indiana's 2011 "State of the Environment" report rehashes tired climate denier arguments such as global temperature records having "no appreciable change since about 1998." (see why this is a lie) and referencing the "medieval warm period" as false proof that current temperature anomalies are normal (they aren't, see Skeptical Science for a proper debunking). Similar arguments have apparently been presented by the Indiana government to ALEC since 2008--the ACCCE USB drive contains another Indiana power point created in 2008 full of junk climate "science." This level of scientific illiteracy is concerning, especially for the regulatory body responsible for overseeing pollution controls for the coal industry.
Remember, this isn't the Heartland Institute. It's the State of Indiana....working with the Heartland Institute, a member of ALEC's anti-environmental task force that has been central in coordinating campaigns to deny global warming. See Commissioner Easterly's full presentation to ALEC on climate "science."
ALEC States & Nation Policy Summit 2012: brought to you by King Coal
ALEC's brochure for last week's meeting shows a disproportionately large presence of coal sponsors. The brochure lists 14 sponsors, five of which are coal interests:
American Electric Power (AEP): the second largest coal utility in the U.S. now that Duke Energy and Progress Energy have merged. Political spending since 2007: AEP has spent over $46.2 million on federal lobbying and $3.9 million on federal politicians and political committees.
(AEP): the second largest coal utility in the U.S. now that Duke Energy and Progress Energy have merged.
Peabody Energy : the world's largest private-sector coal mining company, known for its legacy of pollution and aggressive finance of climate change denial. Political spending since 2007: Peabody has spent over $37.9 million on federal lobbying and $690,769 on federal politicians and political committees.
: the world's largest private-sector coal mining company, known for its legacy of pollution and aggressive finance of climate change denial.
Edison Electric Institute (EEI): the primary trade association for electric utility companies, whose members include AEP, Duke Energy and numerous other members of ALEC's energy/environment task force. Political spending since 2007: EEI has spent over $63.7 million on federal lobbying and over $2.1 million on federal politicians and political committees.
(EEI): the primary trade association for electric utility companies, whose members include AEP, Duke Energy and numerous other members of ALEC's energy/environment task force.
National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA): NRECA is the top dirty energy money contributor to federal politicians, above heavyweights like Koch Industries and ExxonMobil. Composed of over 900 rural coal interests, NRECA is known for its staunch opposition to climate change policy. Political spending since 2007: NRECA has spent over $23.9 million on federal lobbying and over $8.6 million on federal politicians and political committees.
(NRECA): NRECA is the top dirty energy money contributor to federal politicians, above heavyweights like Koch Industries and ExxonMobil. Composed of over 900 rural coal interests, NRECA is known for its staunch opposition to climate change policy.
$15.3 million: total federal politicians and committees spending from these groups since 2007
$194 million: total federal lobbying expenditures from these groups since 2007
The collective millions spent on federal lobbying and politicians went a long way for these five coal interest groups. Their lobbying goals included weakening 2009 climate legislation and working to interfere with US EPA rules to reduce coal pollution or greenhouse gases. All five of these groups have recently lobbied to prevent US EPA from controlling greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.
These five interests only represent a slice of the coal interests spending money in politics, and just a few players among many in the coal, oil, gas and chemical industries that dump millions of dollars into public relations campaigns telling us that climate change is not a problem.
This article was originally published by Connor Gibson of Greenpeace at PolluterWatch.com.This week a diplomatic crisis hit the Middle East as several countries (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen and Maldives) cut ties with Qatar, accusing it of supporting terrorist groups. Now Qatar's foreign ministry has issued a statement putting some of the blame on a fake news story. In a statement, the ministry said hackers installed a fake file on the Qatar News Agency last April, before activating it Monday morning.
Reuters reports that file claimed Qatar's Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani made statements warning against confrontation with Iran, and gave support to groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Qatari officials did not identify who it believes pulled off the hack, but thanked the FBI and the British National Commission for Combating Crime for their assistance in the investigation. Previously, CNN claimed that US government investigators believed hackers based in Russia were behind the breach -- a claim that Russia's government has denied.× Joint federal-local effort to combat violence in St. Louis
ST. LOUIS (AP) – Federal and local law enforcement organizations are teaming up on an effort to reduce the skyrocketing violent crime rate in St. Louis.
Details of “Mission SAVE” were announced Monday, though the collaboration actually began in December.
The effort involves officers from St. Louis city, St. Louis County, the FBI and DEA working together on investigations, with the U.S. Attorney’s office helping local prosecutors to get cases to the courts.
It targets the most violent offenders. In addition to the law enforcement aspect, a community engagement effort will reach out to those most likely to commit violent gun crimes, seeking to persuade them to change their ways.
Six more homicides occurred in the city over the weekend, bringing to 103 the number of killings in St. Louis so far this year.With all the headlines swirling over the state of U.S. readiness to adopt EMV by the October deadline, it may seem like there’s plenty of time – or no time at all – to make the leap to the new technology. Depends on where you stand in the transition. For too many merchants, the time to adopt EMV is now.
Oct. 1, of course, is the “liability shift” date wherein merchants and acquirers must shoulder the blame and financial costs of card fraud that could otherwise have been prevented with EMV. And though the act of installing a terminal that can read EMV cards may seem a simple one, the sheer fact that many businesses in the U.S. have dragged their feet speaks volumes about the “market driven” approach, according to one payments industry insider.
As Philip Andreae, vice president of North America field marketing efforts and payments at Oberthur Technologies notes, this late stage adoption of EMV comes at a time when the rest of the world – or at least almost the rest of the world – has been solidly at home with EMV and has in fact been using it for years. Cards with magnetic stripes may seem positively quaint next to cards that have chips to store and protect cardholder data.
To illustrate just how far back the European institutional memory with chip cards goes, Andreae says that his own work with the technology stretches back to 1991, with Europay International, now a MasterCard division. Studies conducted by Europay showed the impact chip cards could have on fraud – one high enough so that scarcely a year later, France was done with a transition that had roots stretching back to 1984. That Europay team then began drafting standards in the United States beginning in 1993 that led to the first workable version of EMV (an acronym of the participating companies’ first letters of their first names) three years later.
Reflecting on the movement beyond U.S. shores to embrace EMV, the Oberthur executive says that “some countries took up the banner” and pushed through principles, tech standards and timelines to adoption that were in part tied to technology already in place, especially as depended upon telecom systems (sophisticated or otherwise). “All [of these countries],” according to Andreae, “were motivated by the goal set by the founders of EMV to address – some would say eliminate – the threat of counterfeit and lost/stolen card fraud.”
But in technology directives, as in clothing, one size almost never fits all. As Andreae observes, approaches to the EMV adoption “tended to mirror countries’ politics, economics and sociology” so much so that some directives were “tyrannical” in nature, while other nations urged a “sense of public spirited cooperation” or even incentives for adoption. Key to all nations’ efforts was, as termed by Andreae, a carrot and stick approach. Regardless of PIN or signature structures, someone got, and gets, a carrot or a stick. “A liability shift, for example, is a stick for merchants and a carrot for issuers,” says Andreae. One case in point of a public campaign: The liability shift in the United Kingdom a decade ago that was accompanied by a “Love your PIN campaign,” aimed at the consumers. In another example, the central bank of Malaysia pushed the shift quickly to EMV (also a decade ago) to root out and defeat what the Oberthur executive says was rampant fraud. Now, he notes, as much as 95 percent of all criminal activity tied to transactions has fled to neighboring countries.
For the U.S., where of 1.2 billion cards only 30 percent today – growing to ~50 percent by year end (with only ~25 percent of terminals in the country EMV compatible now or by years’ end), the shift is a greenfield and the time is now, according to Andreae.Origins Edit
The Surfers Paradise meter maids were first instituted by entrepreneur Bernie Elsey in 1965, through the Surfers Paradise Progress Association, which was opposed to the introduction of parking meters by the Gold Coast City Council. The meter maids carried a gold bag of sixpences to top-up expired meters, thereby saving motorists from a £1 fine.[3] The women left a card stating: "You have just been saved from a parking fine by the Surfers Paradise Meter Maids".[2] The activities of the meter maids were supposed to promote goodwill, but they were controversial because feeding parking meters was illegal.[citation needed] The council, however, decided to ignore the offence because the maids were providing such good publicity for the area. The first maid, Annette Welch, was disinherited by her grandmother for working in that way,[4] but went on to marry the manager of a real estate firm in Surfers Paradise.[1] Many women who worked as meter maids went on to have careers as models after the initial exposure.
Later developments Edit
At the outset, the maids' uniform was a gold lamé bikini and a tiara.[5] That has now evolved into a gold lycra bikini and an Akubra hat — a traditional Australian bush hat.[5] Maids usually have a sash emblazoned with "Surfers Paradise Meter Maids" or the like, and white knee-length boots are sometimes worn.[4] Advertising is carried on the uniform to provide income.[6] The maids, however, have had ongoing financial problems since the council forbade them from selling merchandise on its land, such as keyrings, calendars and "stubby holders" for beer bottles.[2] When a cyclone which devastated the area in 1967 caused a decline in tourism, the then mayor of the Gold Coast, Bruce Small, toured Australia with a group of maids to promote the area.[7] For a while the maids were sponsored by the local chamber of commerce, but that stopped in 1990 when maids Roberta Aitchison and Melinda Stewart appeared in Penthouse. Aitchison and Stewart then set up a business to continue the service, but a rival organisation was established by Lisa Hassan. A legal battle erupted a few years later when Aitchison was sued by Hassan for distributing a video of her performing a striptease. In 2009, Aitchison bought Hassan out.[2] A museum now exists to record the history of Gold Coast's meter maids.[8]
Criticism Edit
There has been persistent criticism that the scantily-clad meter maids are an anachronism and an embarrassment. In the early 2000s, some local business owners recruited 10 women as "tourism ambassadors" — dressed in khaki shirts and shorts, and sensible shoes — to patrol the beach-front, distributing surf safety advice and free sunscreen.[6] In 2010, Gold Coast Tourism revealed plans to have the maids travel around Australia to promote the Gold Coast, but in much less revealing outfits. Roberta Aitchison was quoted as querying the idea, saying that the maids' distinctive swimsuits were integral to their image.[2] There has been efforts to introduce male equivalent meter boys.
See also EditConservative Republicans were mighty upset when their party nominated Richard Nixon in 1960. Nixon was supposed to be a conservative, but his nomination had begun to look like a sellout to the party’s liberal wing. That’s when Barry Goldwater strode to the podium and administered a slap. “Grow up, conservatives,” he told them.
That’s what some conservatives need to hear today. They’re not happy Steve Bannon has left the White House. And they hate the planned troop increase in Afghanistan. They need to grow up.
They need to chill.
First, let’s remember that Bannon fired himself. He didn’t just quit, he slammed the door on his way out. Second, those of us who voted for President Trump did so because we had liked what he was saying long before Bannon came on the scene.
That includes Trump’s foreign-policy speech in April 2016. I really, really liked that one. It was well-reasoned, astute and sensible. Heck, it was brilliant. And I’d think so even if I hadn’t had a hand in drafting it.
Here’s what Trump said about ISIS: “I have a simple message for them. Their days are numbered. I won’t tell them where and I won’t tell them how.” He said exactly the same thing Monday night. “I will not say when we are going to attack, but attack we will.”
Right now, the principal breeding ground of Islamic jihadism is Afghanistan, not Syria, and Trump correctly concluded that the best way to prevent another 9/11 is to continue the fight in that country. It’s just what he promised on the campaign trail.
Now, let’s be clear about what Trump didn’t do or say on Monday. He didn’t say we should cut and run, as President Barack Obama did with a drastic withdrawal of US forces in Iraq that gave us the Islamic insurgency in that country and killed many thousands of people. The Bannonites seem to think that somewhere along the line, Trump promised he’d withdraw all US forces around the globe. He didn’t.
Trump also didn’t say that he wanted to continue our failed strategy of nation-building. Back in 2016, he said, “We’re getting out of the nation-building business and instead focusing on creating stability in the world.”
And as he told us Monday night, the litmus test is going to be our national interest. We’re not going to try to make a democracy out of Afghanistan. Trump even extended a cautious hand to the Taliban: “We are a partner and a friend, but we will not dictate to the Afghan people how to live or how to govern their own complex society. We are not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists.”
Trump said that we need to be flexible, so as not to give the game away to our enemies — just as he said during the campaign: “We must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable. We tell everything. We’re sending troops. We tell them.”
And he said the same thing Monday: “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. America’s enemies must never know our plans or believe they can wait us out.”
It’s reported that we’re going to increase our troop levels in Afghanistan from the present 10,500 to about 15,000. True to his word, Trump didn’t mention numbers in the speech. A senior White House spokesman, however, told me that the number in question will be in the low five-figure range.
It won’t be the major surge of 30,000 or 40,000 troops that some had imagined. Instead, we’re going to rely on the Afghan army to do the combat fighting while supporting them largely with air power. As Trump said last night, “Ultimately, it is up to the people of Afghanistan to take ownership of their future.”
Finally, Trump announced that he expects our NATO allies to step up to the plate in the fight. They had no reason to do so when Obama was president, when there was no strategy for victory and when we let them free ride on us. But there’s a new sheriff in town.
Bannon’s dismissal, then, is irrelevant here. President Trump is doing just what candidate Trump promised a year ago.
F.H. Buckley is a professor at Scalia Law School at George Mason University and author of “The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America.”As a young Libertarian attending Auburn University in the late 80’s and early 90’s, I came up with a new theory which I called The Kindergarten Theory of Government. Memories from my kindergarten class at Forestdale Baptist Church led to the name of this theory.
When in kindergarten, my friend Michael B. and I were pretty good architects. Using the building blocks in our kindergarten classroom we routinely built buildings much taller than we were.
From time to time when we built a very tall building, there was another kid, an idiot, who would pick up a large block, run towards our building, and hit our building with the large block, causing our building to crash down.
Being young and gullible, we would look to the teacher expecting her to right the wrong, to punish the idiot kid who knocked down our building. Guess what the teacher did on more occasions than not? She made everyone in the entire classroom stop all their play activities because of the actions of one bad kid.
The Kindergarten Theory of Government is one of the main operating theories that the United States government uses as a principle for day-to-day operation.
It's fundamental characteristic is this: It punishes the responsible citizens, the majority, for the actions of the irresponsible citizens, the minority.
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Let's look at some concrete examples.
A small minority of criminals use guns to commit crimes. It follows that these individuals should be punished. Yet every time we have shooting, you have legions of politicians calling for bans on all private firearms. Why? This makes no sense. There are millions, possibly billions of firearms in the hands of private U.S. citizens. If this posed such a great danger, the United States would look like Europe during World War 2. I trust my fellow citizens with guns far more than I will ever trust my government with guns.
Let's look at another example of this theory in practice: Social Security.
Unless a person has a mental defect, they have to realize that if they do not die, they will reach a point in which the deterioration of their body will not allow them to do productive work. As such, it is prudent to start saving money for when the period of productive work is over. However, one day a few politicians come along and say something like this: "We believe you are all ignorant sheep who will not save for your future. As such we are going to use the coercive power of the government to force you to save as you are too dumb to do it for your self."
So the majority of the responsible citizens who would save money for old age are forced into a savings plan that is a loser financially simply because the minority of the irresponsible citizens will not save. COMMENT: Even if the social security money were really there, the poor return makes it a BIG LOSER in pure financial terms. One could get a better return by putting their money in a low-risk mutual fund.
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(I want to say for clarity that I do think social security money is O.K. to give to people with severe mental or physical handicaps, severe mental or physical defects, people with advanced senile dementia, orphans, etc. I don't think these people are entitled to this money by "right," I just think it is just the decent, humane, and practical thing to do.)
Drug-taking behavior is another area where the majority of good people are punished for the actions of the bad. Let me explain. I conservatively estimate that for every one whacked-out drug abuser/mis-user you see on the t.v. shows such as Cops, there are 5 individuals working in cubicles in office buildings who take drugs like amphetamines, narcotic analgesics, and benzodiazepine tranquilizers, purchased on the street, on a daily or near daily basis, to help them get through life and meet their responsibilities. If these type users work jobs and take care of their families, why should they be arrested and treated in the same way as whacked-out drug users you see on Cops? Again, the responsible majority is punished for the acts of the irresponsible minority.
How about the most egregious example of all: NOT DEFINING WHEN ADULTHOOD BEGINS! This is the absolute worst punishment that can be put on a young person, and it's done to the good youths (the majority) for the actions of the bad youths (the minority).
In the United States, at age 18, you can be convicted of murder and executed. However at age 18, you cannot walk into a bar and buy a beer (But you can vote for president! Ha! Ha! How much did you know at 18?) You have to be 21 for beer but only 18 for executing! Unless, you’re in the military, in which you can drink or buy alcohol if you’re under age 21, but only while on base Think of that. A young man or woman has volunteered to serve their country, to die if necessary, but they cannot walk into a bar in Las Vegas and drink alcohol Then there is tobacco: you have to be 19 to buy that.
I think the legal definition of adulthood should be age 19. Why 19? Because by the time most people get to age 19 they have graduated high school and at least had a very small taste of the real world.
SO WHY DOES THE KINDERGARTEN THEORY OF GOVERNMENT CONTINUE TO BE IMPLEMENTED OVER TIME? MORE TO THE POINT, WHY DON'T THE PEOPLE JUST BUCK THIS SYSTEM OF KINDERGARTEN TECHNIQUES OF GOVERNMENT?
Four words: Government-Mandated Public Education.
Translation: A lot, a lot of people in our United States don't know how to think due to the "education" they receive in public schools. They cannot see that their "government" is really a kindergarten class.
You will NEVER, EVER, have a society of independent, self-reliant people as long as government-mandated public education exists. Government-run public schools do not teach students how to think. They teach students how to conform and fit in with the group. Thanks to John Dewey and his ilk, the public schools were hijacked from institutions of education and made into institutions of socialization.
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In order to end the kindergarten technique of government, schools, home and private for now, and with a strong push for change, public schools in the future, should do the following:
Teach mathematical and logical reasoning. Teach the children how to think. It's very difficult to pull the wool over the eyes of a society of people trained in mathematics and logic. Teach real economics, such as the Austrian School of Economics. Explain the dangers of fiat money and private central banks like the Federal Reserve. Teach history, including the ancient western classics of history and have the students learn the fundamental principles that the history teaches instead of having them regurgitate names and dates. Encourage technical creativity in the pure and applied sciences, engineering, and technical vocations. Teach about the United States form of government, a constitutional republic, not a democracy. Focus on the Bill of Rights, especially the first, second, ninth, and tenth amendments. Focus on the fact that the federal government serves the states, and that the states DO NOT serve the federal government. Teach entrepreneurship. Teach self-reliance and set it as the highest virtue.
September 26, 2009
The Best of Kevin SwindleCrude-oil futures ended Friday trade on a decidedly upbeat note, settling above $60 for the first time in more than two years to wrap up 2017.
West Texas Intermediate crude on the New York Mercantile Exchange US:CLG8 finished up 1%, or 58 cents, to $60.42 a barrel. That represents its first close above $60 since June 23, 2015, according WSJ Market Data Group. U.S. benchmark oil is up 12.5% in 2017, nearly 17% this quarter, 5.3% for the month, and 3.3% this week.
March Brent UK:LCOH8 rose 71 cents, or 1.1%, to $66.87 a barrel. The international benchmark for crude has gained 18% this year, more than 16% over the last three months of the year, 5.2% for the month, and 0.6% for the week.
The market has improved amid optimism about years of oversupply finally ebbing, capped by rising demand and the production-limit deal, led by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, being extended through 2018. Both oil contracts rallied to end at 2½-year highs.
Moves for crude prices came as Baker Hughes on Friday reported a small drop in rig counts for the week, with rigs drilling for gas down by two to 182, while those drilling for oil remained unchanged at 747. Over the year, however, total rigs have climbed by 271 to a total rig count at 929.
On Thursday, the market took cues from inventory reports that showed a steady decline in U.S. crude stocks. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that domestic-crude supplies fell by 4.6 million barrels for the week ended Dec. 22, compared with a 6-million-barrel drawdown reported by the American Petroleum Institute late Wednesday.
Meanwhile, natural gas US:NGG18 for February jumped 3.9 cents, or 1.3%, to settle at $2.9530 per million British thermal units, after surging 6.4% on Thursday, posting the biggest daily rise since Dec. 21, 2016, according to FactSet. Natural-gas futures, however, have declined 21% in 2017, retreated 1.8% on the quarter, fell 2.4% on the month, but an 11% surge this week, amid freezing weather, helped mitigate more brutal losses.
January heating oil US:HOF8 rose by about 2.34 cents, or 1.1%, to $2.0755 a gallon, marking a fresh 52-week high and the highest settlement since Feb. 27, 2015. Futures have gained 22% this year, about 15% this quarter, 10% in December, and 5.4% gain on the week.
Arctic cold air has been chilling portions of the U.S., with forecasts calling for a continuation of that weather into the first week of January. Record-cold levels were set in Minnesota and Michigan on Thursday, according to The Weather Channel. Cold weather could support further buying of natural gas and heating oil.
January gasoline US:RBF8 rose 0.62 cent, or 0.4%, to $1.7992 a gallon. Gasoline futures are up 8 |
in general, they wisely decided to ask the opinion of the world-famous Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Ashkenazi (c.1660-1718), also called the Chacham Tzvi, the former chief rabbi of the Ashkhenazic community in Amsterdam who was then living in Altona, Germany. The rabbi convened his beit din, studied all the relevant material from both sides, and vindicated Chacham Nieto completely, telling the leaders of the S&P that they had misunderstood their rabbi and that he must continue as their religious leader (1). This ended a most unfortunate controversy and dangerous development within Judaism.
Now, more than 300 years later, a new scandal with major ramifications is again erupting around the S&P — this time, regarding a lecture on homosexuality given by its venerable Senior Rabbi Joseph Dweck. In this case, however, it is not the lay leaders of the S&P who accuse their rabbi of heresy (in fact, they are standing with him) but some influential rabbis in England and abroad who felt the need to accuse Rabbi Dweck of heresy. In a tirade of mostly meaningless words, they attacked his integrity, faith and scholarship, calling him a wicked person and using even worse descriptions. By doing so, they showed ignorance, bias and self-interest and, above all, as in the case of Chacham Nieto, they completely and probably deliberately misinterpreted what the rabbi said.
In this remarkable lecture at the Ner Yisrael Synagogue, where the congregation is led by my dear friend Rabbi Dr. Avraham (Alan) Kimche, Rabbi Dweck presented an entirely new way of understanding homosexuality. Drawing on non-Jewish historical sources, he explained that homosexuality was an accepted lifestyle in the ancient non-Jewish world and, quoting many Jewish classical sources, he then specified what the prohibition of homosexuality in Halacha is all about and what is not prohibited in a same-sex, male loving relationship. He presented the different points of view and their nuances, and expressed the idea that current Western attitudes toward sexuality force traditional Judaism to rethink some of its core values, as it has always done when challenged. While it is true that Rabbi Dweck used some unfortunate phrases in the heat of his argument (What speaker doesn’t, from time to time?), nothing that he said was outside the boundaries of established Halacha.
In fact, much of what he argued had already been said by Rabbi Chaim Rapoport, a great halachic scholar in London, in his well-known book, Judaism and Homosexuality: An Authentic Orthodox View, for which I wrote an approbation and which carries a foreword by Emeritus Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and a preface by the late Dayan Berel Berkovits of the Beth Din of the (Orthodox) Federation of Synagogues in London.
However, that didn’t stop Rabbi Dweck’s rabbinical opponents from deliberately misrepresenting him. Nothing but fear, lack of knowledge about homosexuality, and personal (not so kosher) reasons seem to have motivated them.
One rabbi felt the need to scrutinize all of Rabbi Dweck’s lectures from the time he came to live in London — a witch hunt of sorts — looking for possible mistakes the rabbi may have made in earlier lectures so as to undermine his reputation, as if no Orthodox rabbis ever make mistakes in some of their rulings. He completely ignored the fact that Rabbi Dweck comes from a different Sefardic-Syrian tradition with its own (halachic) practices and religious outlook on life.
Rabbi Dweck is married to the granddaughter of Chacham Ovadia Yosef, z”l, former chief rabbi of Israel. But that didn’t prevent the current Chief Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef and his brother Rabbi David Yosef — both sons of Rav Ovadia — from refusing to see him (their own nephew) when he asked for a meeting. In fact, both wrote a letter to the Sefardic communities of New York and New Jersey condemning Rabbi Dweck (while never mentioning his name!) and asking for his dismissal, thereby showing lamentable small-mindedness, a lack of general knowledge, and ignorance of the Jewish religious philosophical tradition.
I have been told by reliable sources that by now Rabbi Dweck’s weekly lectures have been cancelled and his former lectures removed from the Internet. Not only is this a grave injustice but it greatly harms his remarkable and most successful influence in London and beyond, in bringing people closer to our holy Torah.
The great danger of this unfortunate affair is not just the controversy surrounding Rabbi Dweck. More than anything else, it is an indication of where British or perhaps all European Orthodoxy is heading. When Orthodox rabbis are told that they are no longer able to speak their minds, offer new insights into Orthodox Judaism, or try to find solutions to serious problems by using innovative ideas, we are faced with a rabbinical world that is wearing blinders, is comprised of yes-people looking over their shoulders, and is generating a hazardous small-mindedness that has far-reaching effects.
Sure, there have always been differences of opinion within Rabbinic Judaism. This is healthy, and Judaism has only benefited from it. But this was always done in a framework of well-informed argument and discussion, not in tirades of meaningless and hateful statements.
One of the biggest problems of current mainstream Orthodoxy is that it believes it is always right, knows all the sources, and doesn’t need to be apprised of new information coming from our traditional sources. The consequences are that it is rewriting Orthodoxy in ways that sometimes make authentic Judaism unrecognizable.
What rabbis like those attacking Rabbi Dweck do not realize is that they are slowly but surely becoming irrelevant. They may be great Talmudic scholars, but instead of using their exceptional knowledge to make Orthodox Judaism more and more vibrant, they drown in it and become stuck in the quicksand of intransigence, which they themselves have created.
The danger is that in their stubbornness they take down all of British Orthodoxy, which seems to be unaware or too immature to understand what is happening.
The task of great rabbis is to jump aboard the sinking ship of Orthodoxy, with knives between their teeth, ensuring that a fearless Judaism, in full sail and in full force, will sail the ship of Torah into the midst of the sea of our lives.
I call on:
The venerable British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and his beit din to unequivocally condemn the attacks on Rabbi Dweck and stand staunchly behind him;
Emeritus Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks to join Rabbi Mirvis in this endeavor;
My dear friend Rabbi Dr. Alan Kimche to resume Rabbi Dweck’s lectures in his community without further delay;
The relevant parties to restore Rabbi Dweck’s lectures on the Internet;
The S&P to continue to show courage and to oppose with full force any attempt to fire Rabbi Dweck and/or discredit him;
The New York and New Jersey communities to immediately invite Rabbi Dweck to be their scholar in residence again;
Chief Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef, Rabbi David Yosef, and other rabbis to cease harassing Rabbi Dweck and subjecting him to a meaningless inquisition; to begin listening to what he has actually been saying; and to stop the witch hunt, which has no place in authentic Orthodox Judaism.
And I call on Rabbi Dweck himself to continue leading and inspiring the S&P with pride and self-confidence and spreading Torah wherever possible. Let him not forget the wise words of Jonathan Swift: “Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent” (2).
Let us hope that this story will end in the same way as did the attack on Chacham Nieto, once again proving the power of Judaism when confronted with the lamentable closing of current rabbinic minds.
*****
(1) See Responsa Chacham Tzvi, responsum # 18 (Amsterdam, 1712). See also: Jakob J. Petuchowsky, The Theology of Haham David Nieto: An Eighteenth Century Defence of the Jewish Tradition (NY: KTAV Publishing House, 1970).
(2) From Swift’s satirical essay, “Various Thoughts, Moral and Diverting,” first appeared in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (Leicester, UK: Scolar Press, 1711).Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers has attempted to reassure fans that the club are “in control” of the developing story of Luis Suarez’s future on Merseyside.
Suarez has been linked with big money move to Real Madrid this summer, and quotes from the Uruguayan international himself have suggested his time in England is up.
Just last week it was reported that Liverpool will make Suarez hand in a transfer request to force him into forfeiting a £1million loyalty bonus, should he want to leave.
But Rodgers says that he has been in contact with Suarez and sees the 26-year-old as an integral part of his squad’s immediate future.
Speaking to radio station talkSPORT on Saturday, Rodgers said, “I haven’t spoke to him, We’ve exchanged messages. For me it’s quite simple. The club is in control of the situation.
“We’re in a situation that we’ve got a player that we don’t want to lose and Suarez is important to the team we’re building.”
“The problem is with Luis, he says he loves Liverpool, the people and the city, but that doesn’t get reported much.”
The Sunday Mirror report that Liverpool are fearing Real Madrid will leave it late to launch their bid for Suarez, in order to get his price down. The saga could run for another two months yet.
Rodgers also took the interview opportunity to discuss the recent acquisitions of Luis Alberto, Kolo Toure and Iago Aspas.
He also spoke about the imminent signing of Sunderland goalkeeper Simon Mignolet as competition for first choice goalkeeper Pepe Reina.BALTIMORE — An Arkansas megachurch pastor was elected Tuesday to lead the country’s Southern Baptists as the conservative denomination tries to turn around declining membership, church attendance and baptisms and faces increasing conflict with mainstream culture, especially over its conviction that gay sex is immoral.
Also on Tuesday, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination approved a resolution opposing the idea that gender identity can be different from biological sex.
The group declined to consider a motion made from the floor by one delegate asking that a Southern California church be disciplined for perceived support of homosexuality. Denomination officials ruled the motion out of order.
Article continues below
In nominating the Rev. Ronnie Floyd for president, the powerful head of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the Rev. Albert Mohler, told the crowd of 5,000 meeting in Baltimore, “The nation is embracing a horrifying moral rebellion that is transforming our culture before our very eyes.”
He warned of “direct challenges to our religious freedoms and churches” and said Floyd is the person who can “convey our message in the midst of the most trying times.”
Floyd received 52 percent of votes from delegates to the SBC annual meeting, beating out the Rev. Dennis Kim, the Korean-American pastor of a bilingual Maryland church, who received 41 percent of votes.
For 27 years Floyd has been the pastor at Cross Church in northwest Arkansas, where about 8,500 people worship each week at its several locations. He succeeds the Rev. Fred Luter Jr., who became the 15.7-million-member denomination’s first African-American president in 2012.
Floyd is the author of the book “The Gay Agenda,” who in a 2003 sermon called homosexuality Satan’s “con job.”
“It appears now that everywhere you look, everything you read and everything you hear is about the gay lifestyle. Satan has taken his tool of homosexuality, a gross and evil sin, and done a con job on the American culture, making it seem like all is okay when you are gay. “I hope you are aware that what was once subtle has now turned into the rage of a lion as brazen and threatening as anything in our culture. “I must sound the trumpet loud and clear, praying that we do not run in retreat, but march in the truth of God valiantly. This is not a skirmish or a conflict or a disagreement, but it is a war. The war they have declared against our culture has an agenda and we need to be aware of it.”
Later Tuesday, delegates passed, without discussion, a resolution on transgender identity that opposes hormone therapy, gender reassignment surgery and other efforts to “alter one’s bodily identity.”
According to the resolution, “God’s design was the creation of two distinct and complementary sexes, male and female.”
The resolution expresses opposition to government efforts to “validate transgender identity as morally praiseworthy.”
Associated Press contributed to this report.
This Story Filed UnderImage copyright Getty Images Image caption Jeremy Corbyn targeted younger voters
Why did Theresa May lose her overall majority in the general election earlier this year?
There were lots of contributory factors, of course, but here is one that so far has been comparatively ignored - the rush of hundreds of thousands of young voters who used the government's online system to join the electoral register after the election was called.
They were probably enough to tilt the balance and deny Mrs May an effective Commons majority.
According to a new BBC analysis and data obtained under freedom of information, it is highly likely that without these additional voters the Conservatives would have won six seats which they lost narrowly, by under 200 votes - Kensington, Perth & North Perthshire, Dudley North, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Crewe & Nantwich, and Canterbury. The SNP took Perth & North Perthshire, while Labour squeezed home in the other five.
In two further seats held by Labour, Barrow & Furness and Keighley, it's reasonably likely the Tories would have won too. And depending on some assumptions used in the calculation, it's plausible they could have won another four or five seats - Lanark and Hamilton East (which the SNP held), Ashfield, Bishop Auckland, and possibly Peterborough and Stroud (which were Labour victories).
In the election the Conservatives won 317 seats, nine short of the target for a guaranteed overall majority. However given the seven Sinn Fein MPs who were elected do not take up their seats in the Commons, the Tories would have an effective majority if they had won just another five seats.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Theresa May saw her majority wiped out
After Theresa May announced on 18 April that there would be a snap general election, there were 2,834,000 online applications to join the electoral register made via the central "Register to vote" website.
Government data shows that 71% of these were made by voters under 35, with 1,051,000 aged 18 to 24 and 973,000 aged 25 to 34. Given that younger voters were much more likely to vote Labour or (in Scotland) SNP rather than back the Conservatives, this influx of young voters could well have swung the overall result.
Of course we can't be sure how (or indeed if) they actually voted. But we do know they were preponderantly young, and all the polling data shows that age was a major factor affecting voting patterns, with Conservative support mainly concentrated in the older age brackets.
The Cabinet Office has recently released data on the number of online applications for each council area during the election period, in response to a BBC freedom of information request. This enables us to check on the impact in individual constituencies.
The BBC analysis uses polling research from the British Election Study and Ipsos MORI on how different age groups voted, in order to estimate how these extra voters would have cast their ballot in each seat.
Image copyright Gov.uk Image caption The register to vote site has been live since 2014
However, assessing the full impact is uncertain because a substantial proportion of the online applications were actually duplicates. Some people who weren't sure they were on the electoral roll tried to register again to be on the safe side. The number will also include individuals who in fact were just changing address or asking for a postal vote, rather than adding themselves to the register.
According to an Electoral Commission report, council returning officers have put the number of duplicates at between 30% and 70%. The Commission told that me that its staff think around 40% is a reasonable approximation for the national level.
Taking a cautious approach, we would use the highest estimate for duplicates of around 70%. Then the analysis suggests that without the extra voters the Conservatives would have additionally won the six to eight most marginal seats. Being less cautious and using the Electoral Commission's suggested national approximation indicates an even higher figure, of 11 to 13 extra seats for the Tories.
The central online system for individuals to register was set up in 2014. Applications made via the website are passed on to local councils for checking and adding to the electoral roll. This has made it much easier for people missing from the register to add themselves later.
During the election Labour and some campaign organisations ran major drives to boost voter registration, particularly aimed at students and other young voters.The Class of 2016 -- i.e., the recruiting class each school just enrolled -- wasn't great for the American Athletic Conference, the proof being that only one school secured a class that ranked in the top 50 nationally.
That one school was Connecticut.
And it's difficult to say whether things will get considerably better because the league did lose two accomplished recruiters this offseason -- first when Josh Pastner left Memphis for Georgia Tech, then when Larry Brown abruptly resigned from SMU. Sure, it's possible their replacements -- Tubby Smith and Tim Jankovich -- will recruit similarly or even at a higher level. But nobody can say for sure. And, either way, it's worth noting the AAC isn't off to a hot start with the Class of 2017 considering only one consensus top-100 prospect is currently committed to an AAC school.
All that said, some of the programs that are now in this still relatively new league that's basically a mashup of old Big East and C-USA schools have recruited well in the past. In the first installment of our Top Recruits Series, the following is a look at the 10 best prospects each AAC school has signed since the year 2000, according to 247Sports' database.
PLAYER YEAR STARS RATING NATIONAL RANK 1. Lance Stephenson 2009.9963 9 2. Jermaine Lawrence 2013.9900 24 3. Yancy Gates 2008.9886 22 4. Devan Downey 2005.9851 34 5. Jason Henry 2007.9775 52 6. Jarron Cumberland 2016.9774 55 7. Anthony McClain 2007.9730 60 8. Tyree Evans 2005.9691 62 9. Shaquille Thomas 2011.9664 81 10. Vincent Banks 2004.9618 56
Source: 247Sports --
Lance Stephenson spent only one year in college and averaged 12.3 points for a team that finished 19-16. He then went on to the NBA, where he most famously blew air in LeBron James' ear during the Eastern Conference Playoffs.
Jermaine Lawrence played one season at Cincinnati and then transferred to Manhattan. He averaged 4.8 points for the Jaspers in the 2014-15 season but didn't appear in any of the final six games because of a "violation of team rules." The 6-10 forward was suspended for half of the following season because of a failed drug test. He then withdrew from school.
Devan Downey spent only one year at Cincinnati before transferring to South Carolina. The point guard finished with 2,304 career points and 567 career assists. He was largely responsible for handing John Calipari his first loss at Kentucky.
PLAYER YEAR STARS RATING NATIONAL RANK 1. Jabari Craig 2016.8800 12 2. Lance Tejada 2014.8763 177 3. Chris Turner 2008.8734 179 4. Paris Roberts-Campbell 2011.8633 221 5. Raquan Wilkins 2016.8590 244 T6. Marshall Guilmette 2012.8556 233 T6. Christian Kabongo 2010.8556 263 8. Brock Young 2007.8546 261 9. Darius Morrow 2008.8512 242 10. Deng Riak 2015.8510 253
Source: 247Sports --
Lance Tejada averaged 4.1 points as a freshman, 4.4 points as a sophomore and then transferred out of the ECU program. He's now at Lehigh, where he'll sit this season per normal transfer rules and be eligible for the 2017-18 season.
Christian Kabongo never actually played at East Carolina. But he did spend parts of two seasons at New Mexico State, where he averaged 14.6 points and 3.5 assists as a sophomore before being suspended indefinitely for making a lewd gesture at a UTEP fan. The Canadian point guard then transferred to Morgan State -- though he never actually played a game for Todd Bozeman's Bears.
Darrius Morrow played 123 games for the Pirates and scored 1,506 career points. But ECU only finished with a winning record in one of his four years on campus.
PLAYER YEAR STARS RATING NATIONAL RANK 1. Danuel House 2012.9909 26 2. Danrad Knowles 2012.9747 70 3. Lanny Smith 2003.9641 75 4. Joseph Young 2010.9620 89 5. TaShawn Thomas 2011.9274 107 6. Torian Graham 2014.9200 3 7. Rob Gray 2015.8900 27 8. Fabian White 2017.8746 230 9. Xavier Dupree 2015.8700 38 10. Brockeith Pane 2007.8616 192
Source: 247Sports --
Danuel House spent two years at Houston but then transferred to Texas A&M. He averaged at least 12.4 points in all four years of college and led the Aggies to a first-place tie with Kentucky in the SEC last season, then to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament.
Joseph Young spent two seasons at Houston but then transferred to Oregon. The 2015 Pac-12 Player of the Year scored 2,304 points in his four-year college career. He appeared in 41 games for the Indiana Pacers last season.
Tashawn Thomas spent his first three years of college at Houston but closed his career at Oklahoma, where he averaged 11.6 points and 6.5 rebounds for a team that made the Sweet 16 of the 2015 NCAA Tournament. His best season, statistically speaking, was when he averaged 16.9 points and 9.8 rebounds as a sophomore at Houston.
PLAYER YEAR STARS RATING NATIONAL RANK 1. Derrick Rose 2007.9987 5 2. Tyreke Evans 2008.9985 5 3. Kendrick Perkins 2003.9980 6 4. Adonis Thomas 2011.9961 9 5. Will Barton 2010.9949 13 6. Shawne Williams 2005.9924 16 7. Joe Jackson 2010.9921 20 8. Darius Washington Jr. 2004.9912 18 9. Austin Nichols 2013.9907 22 10. Jelan Kendrick 2010.9898 24
Derrick Rose spent one year at Memphis and led the Tigers to the title game of the 2008 NCAA Tournament. But that season was later vacated because of Rose's fraudulent standardized test score. He was the No. 1 overall pick of the 2008 NBA Draft and the NBA's Most Valuable Player in 2011.
Joe Jackson spent four seasons at Memphis and led the Tigers to four straight NCAA Tournament appearances. The Memphis native was twice named MVP of the Conference USA Tournament and was voted C-USA's Player of the Year in 2013. He's now playing professionally in Israel.
Darius Washington had two solid years at Memphis but is best remembered for missing two free throws with no time on the clock in the title game of the 2005 C-USA Tournament. The misses occurred on national television and cost Memphis a trip to the NCAA Tournament. Phish wrote a song about it.
PLAYER YEAR STARS RATING NATIONAL RANK 1. Keith Frazier 2013.9878 27 2. Shake Milton 2015.9670 79 3. Sterling Brown 2013.9306 110 4. Harry Froling 2016.9174 130 5. Tom Wilson 2016.9100 136 6. Everett Ray 2017.9080 157 7. Dez Willingham 2005.9018 100 8. Sedrick Barefield 2015.9005 153 9. Yanick Moreira 2013.9000 5 10. Cannen Cunningham 2011.8972 144
Source: 247Sports --
Keith Frazier spent parts of three seasons at SMU but will ultimately be remembered as the player whose academic issues got the school banned from the 2016 NCAA Tournament. He averaged 11.9 points in 10 games last season before leaving the program for good.
Shake Milton averaged 10.5 points, 3.0 rebounds and 2.7 assists for the Mustangs last season. The sophomore is expected to have a bigger role this season now that Nic Moore has exhausted his eligibility.
Yanick Moreira averaged 11.1 points and 6.4 rebounds in his final year of college while helping the Mustangs advance to the 2015 NCAA Tournament. He was famously called for goaltending in the final seconds of SMU's Round of 64 game with UCLA when he touched a 3-point shot launched by Bryce Alford. The Mustangs lost the game 60-59, after which Moreira said, "It's all my fault."
PLAYER YEAR STARS RATING NATIONAL RANK 1. Wayne Marshall 2003.9259 96 2. Obi Enechionyia 2014.9233 120 3. Levan Alston 2015.9212 127 4. Daniel Dingle 2012.9205 146 5. Lavoy Allen 2007.9131 117 6. Trey Lowe 2015.9029 147 7. Nate Pierre-Louis 2017.8998 175 8. Josh Brown 2013.8935 160 9. Alani Moore 2016.8915 164 10. Dion Dacons 2003.8876 126
Source: 247Sports --
Wayne Marshall only played two seasons at Temple and averaged 6.9 points and 4.6 rebounds for Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame coach John Chaney. He spent much of the subsequent decade playing professionally in Japan.
Obi Enechionyia is now a junior at Temple and the team's leading returning scorer. He averaged 11.0 points and 3.8 rebounds last season.
Lavoy Allen helped Temple make four straight NCAA Tournament appearances from 2008 through 2011. He scored 1,421 career points and has spent the past five seasons in the NBA playing for the Sixers and Pacers.
PLAYER YEAR STARS RATING NATIONAL RANK 1. Keith Pinckney 2014.9008 146 2. Kain Harris 2015.8813 180 3. Melvin Frazier 2015.8772 184 4. Colin Slater 2016.8648 233 5. Charvon Julien 2015.8538 245 6. Kris Richard 2007.8484 273 T7. Vincent Camper 2003.8444 215 T7. Aaron Holmes 2009.8444 19* T7. Johnny Mayhanne 2006.8444 275 10. Jon Andersen 2007.8262 344
Source: 247Sports --
Keith Pinckney spent one season at Tulane and averaged just 2.4 points in 9.4 minutes per game. He then transferred to Old Dominion and sat out last season per normal NCAA transfer rules. He'll play for the Monarchs this season.
Melvin Frazier averaged 5.2 points in 19.5 minutes per game last season as a freshman. He had a career-high 15 points in a win over USF last January.
Vincent Camper played three years at Tulane. He averaged 6.8 points and 3.0 assists in his final season with the Green Wave.
PLAYER YEAR STARS RATING NATIONAL RANK 1. Yusuf Baker 2004.8778 147 2. Jordan Clarkson 2010.8755 211 3. Tim Peete 2010.8692 230 4. Travis Atson 2016.8661 223 5. Keondre Dew 2014.8564 225 T6. Oswaldo Gonzalez 2003.8556 143 T6. Bassel Bawji 2008.8556 201 T6. Guilherme Teichmann 2003.8556 29* 9. Blondy Baruti 2010.8552 273 T10. Roderick Earls 2005.8444 177 T10. Jamel McLean 2006.8444 200 T10. Calvin Walls 2006.8444 7* T10. Antonio Hanson 2005.8444 211 T10. Ben Uzoh 2006.8444 252
Source: 247Sports --
Jordan Clarkson averaged 11.5 points as a freshman at Tulsa and 16.5 as a sophomore. He then transferred to Missouri, where he averaged 17.5 points before entering the 2014 NBA Draft. The 6-5 guard was a second-round pick. But he's spent the past two seasons with the Lakers. He signed a $50 million contract with the franchise this past July.
Tim Peete played four years at Tulsa and never averaged more than 5.3 points in any season. But he did play 22.3 minutes per game for the Tulsa team that made the 2014 NCAA Tournament under Danny Manning.
Keondre Dew lasted only one season at Tulsa and played just 5.5 minutes per game. He spent last season in junior college. He's now at Oregon State.
PLAYER YEAR STARS RATING NATIONAL RANK 1. Michael Chandler 2011.9787 50 2. Tacko Fall 2015.9070 142 3. Adonys Henriquez 2014.9013 144 4. Keith Clanton 2009.8998 132 5. Chad Brown 2015.8870 171 6. Myles Douglas 2017.8776 219 T7. Nik Garcia 2009.8775 164 T7. Isaiah Sykes 2010.8775 202 9. Steven Haney 2013.8760 173 10. Danny Lewis 2017.8742 231
Source: 247Sports --
Michael Chandler failed to meet minimum standards for freshman eligibility coming out of high school and thus never enrolled at UCF. He subsequently played in junior college and appeared in 19 games for Oregon during the 2014-15 season.
Keith Clanton scored 1,718 points in four seasons at UCF. The 6-9 forward was First Team All Conference USA in 2012. He's now playing professionally in Greece.
Isaiah Sykes scored 1,545 points in four seasons with the Knights. He averaged 17.2 points, 7.2 rebounds, 3.5 assists and 1.7 steals as a senior.
PLAYER YEAR STARS RATING NATIONAL RANK 1. John Egbunu 2013.9740 60 2. Konimba Diarra 2003.9612 80 3. Luis Montero 2015.9300 4* 4. Javontae Hawkins 2012.8934 180 5. Eladio Espinosa 2008.8903 139 6. Dante Curry 2006.8902 130 7. Shawn Smith 2015.8900 20* 8. Troy Holston 2014.8869 159 9. Chris Perry 2013.8814 169 10. Lavonte Dority 2010.8796 181
Source: 247Sports --
John Egbuno averaged 7.4 points and 6.2 rebounds as a freshman at USF, then transferred to Florida. The 6-11 forward averaged 11.5 points and 6.5 rebounds for the Gators last season and will be a redshirt junior this season.
Konimba Diarra never became a relevant college player. The 6-10 center spent two years at USF and two at Charleston. He averaged 1.3 points in 94 career games.
Luis Montero decided to enter the 2015 NBA Draft out of junior college rather than enroll at USF. He was not selected. But he ultimately signed with Portland and appeared in 12 games for the Blazers last season.
PLAYER YEAR STARS RATING NATIONAL RANK 1. Rudy Gay 2004.9986 5 2. Charlie Villanueva 2003.9980 7 3. Andrew Bynum 2005.9974 6 4. Kemba Walker 2008.9950 12 5. Stanley Robinson 2006.9930 17 6. DeAndre Daniels 2011.9928 16 T7. Alex Oriakhi 2009.9922 19 T7. Ater Majok 2008.9922 17 9. Daniel Hamilton 2014.9921 17 10. Jalen Adams 2015.9907 23
Source: 247Sports --
Rudy Gay averaged 15.2 points and 6.4 rebounds in his second and final season at UConn. He's spent the past 10 seasons in the NBA and has averaged 18.4 points and 5.9 rebounds for his career.
Kemba Walker spent three years at UConn and averaged 23.5 points, 5.4 rebounds and 4.5 assists as a junior while leading the Huskies to a national championship. The point guard from New York has spent the past five seasons playing for the Charlotte Hornets. He averaged 20.9 points and 5.2 assists last season.
Jalen Adams is now a sophomore at UConn. He averaged 7.3 points, 2.6 rebounds and 2.4 assists last season while helping the Huskies win 25 games and advance to the Round of 32 of the NCAA Tournament.FROG FAMILIES EPISODE SINK a guest Jul 23rd, 2016 116 Never a guest116Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 1.90 KB BIENVNUE A LE NOUVEAUX EPISODE DE LA HIT TELEVISION SERIE: 🐸 🐸 🐸 🐸 🐸 FROG FAMILIES 🐸 🐸 🐸 🐸 🐸 🐸 🐸 🐸 "YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY" - Arrem, 2016 "No subtitles in German, please" - Meshugganah The scene opens on a cold december evening in Quebec, where two French soldiers, VIN ROUGE and VIN BLANC, are discussing their troubles next to a wheel of cheese VIN ROUGE: hon hon hon hon, j'aime etre dodgy et French VIN BLANC: mes oui, mes oui, je suis tres dodgy et French! VIN ROUGE: il est une tres shame zat we are le losing le seven years war VIN BLANC: mais on have plenty de le wine et le cheese so il est le fine VIN BLANC and VIN ROUGE slug wine from a botle VIN BLANC: Anyway, il est time for les dejuner! VIN ROUGE: of le course! Let us headez-to le Barrel des Frogs! VIN BLANC and VIN ROUGE head to the frog barrel to pick their frog, where they meet the chef, BIER BIER: freshez froges! freshez frogs! Vendre-tu les freshez frogs! VIN BLANC: (pointing at a brown frog) je would like zis frog over 'ere mes monsiour BIER: zat will be trois francs, s'il vous plait VIN ROUGE: Je suis tres deprress recentement, so je pense que une Frog Hallucinogenique, s'il vous plait BIER hands VIN ROUGE a red frog VIN ROUGE: eating his fried frog ah, je suis hereux already! VIN BLANC: 'ang on! I 'ear une noise a la horizon! VIN ROUGE: Ah, non! Les Anglais! VIN ROUGE: Ah, on! Our engineering is le tres shit! Le car won't start! A platoon of British Grenadiers in superior Jaguar Mk IIIs crest the local hill, firing weaponised crumpets from their guns. VIN ROUGE and VIN BLANC both take a direct hit VIN ROUGE: servez-us right pour non etre handsome et sophistique like les Rosbifs VIN BLANC: I supposez zat Quebec was always les rightful Rosbif land VIN ROUGE and VIN BLANC slowly die as a Union Flag and a Canadian Flag rises above their corpses 🇬🇧 LES FIN 🇨🇦
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BIENVNUE A LE NOUVEAUX EPISODE DE LA HIT TELEVISION SERIE: 🐸 🐸 🐸 🐸 🐸 FROG FAMILIES 🐸 🐸 🐸 🐸 🐸 🐸 🐸 🐸 "YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY" - Arrem, 2016 "No subtitles in German, please" - Meshugganah The scene opens on a cold december evening in Quebec, where two French soldiers, VIN ROUGE and VIN BLANC, are discussing their troubles next to a wheel of cheese VIN |
of Somerset Maugham Golf clubs and balls
.08-Aug-66. Michael Craig The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame Musical instrument
.08-Aug-99. Patricia Routledge The collected works of John Donne Tea service with tea
.08-Dec-02. Linton Kwesi Johnson One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez a bass guitar
.08-Dec-45. Stewart Granger No book No item
.08-Dec-58. Stanley Black No book Piano
.08-Dec-84. Sir John Burgh Encyclopædia Britannica Transistor radio
.08-Dec-91. Sue Townsend Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis Swimming pool of champagne
.08-Dec-96. Robert Winston The Koran (in Arabic and English) Glass and tools to make a telescope
.08-Feb-04. Sister Frances Dominica The Earth from the Air by Yann Arthus-Bertrand a chaise longue with a mosquito net attached
.08-Feb-09. David Suchet Magnum Magnum edited by Brigitte Lardinois His clarinet and an unlimited supply of reeds
.08-Feb-60. Herbert Lom Nonsense rhymes by Edward Lear Modelling clay
.08-Feb-65. Owen Brannigan The collected works of G.K. Chesterton Trombone
.08-Feb-87. Victoria Wood The collected works of Arthur Marshall Cinema organ
.08-Jan-06. Richard Griffiths Vanity Fair by William Thackeray Velázquez's Las Meninas
.08-Jan-12. Dame Monica Mason A special compilation of all of David Attenborough's books A torch
.08-Jan-44. Alan Dent No book No item
.08-Jan-52. Carroll Gibbons No book Music manuscript paper
.08-Jan-62. Hughie Green An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser Looking glass
.08-Jan-83. Steve Davis The Throwback and Wilt by Tom Sharpe Snooker table
.08-Jan-89. Twiggy Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy Cold cream
.08-Jan-95. Patricia Hodge A compendium of the plays of Harold Pinter Supply of embroidery
.08-Jul-01. Peggy Seeger A Scots Quair by Frank Grassic Gibbon Banjo with plastic head and an inexhaustible supply of strings and pegs
.08-Jul-07. Simon Russell Beale Book on medieval history (Cambridge Press) Daily Araucaria crossword
.08-Jul-52. Fred Perry No book Radio transmitter
.08-Jul-57. Tamara Karsavina No book Wooden statue of St Florian
.08-Jul-63. Juliette Greco Atlas Writing materials
.08-Jul-90. Peter Jonas City of God by Saint Augustine Cyanide, in a joint, in champagne truffle in a fridge
.08-Jun-03. Vittorio Radice La première gorgée de Bière et autres plaisirs minuscules by Philippe Delerm sunglasses
.08-Jun-08. Bill Bailey Collected works of Somerset Maugham Pack of cards
.08-Jun-43. Tom Driberg No book No item
.08-Jun-64. Harry Wheatcroft Lives by Plutarch Rose trees
.08-Jun-86. Ismail Merchant The works of E. M. Forster, P. D. James and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Cooking range
.08-Jun-97. Benjamin Zephaniah Poetical Works of Shelley Law of the island (so he could break it)
.08-Mar-09. Richard Madeley Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke Guitar
.08-Mar-65. Dick Richards Encyclopaedia Travel itinerary
.08-Mar-87. Johnny Mathis Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell Golf bag
.08-Mar-92. Jocelyn Stevens Other Men's Flowers by Lord Wavell One mile stretch of the River Test in Hampshire
.08-Mar-98. Sir Anthony Dowell The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame Sketch pad and paints
.08-May-05. Josephine Cox a book which is in my head about my brother a photo album of her family
.08-May-11. Molly Parkin The History of the Colony by Sophie Parkin Her entire outfit including her Andrew Logan brooch
.08-May-53. Jack Hawkins No book No item
.08-May-61. Ralph Reader Goodbye Mr Chips by James Hilton Typewriter and paper
.08-May-71. Reginald Foort Back number's of the Reader's Digest An organ
.08-May-82. Lucia Popp The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann Teddy bear
.08-May-88. Peggy Makins The biggest atlas in the world Little rosebush
.08-May-94. Sir John Wilson A chess strategy book (in Braille) A sonic probe
.08-Nov-65. Constance Shacklock Letters of the Scattered Brotherhood by Mary Strong Bed
.08-Nov-87. Sue Lawley French Provinical Cooking by Elizabeth David Iron and ironing board
.08-Nov-92. Christabel Bielenberg War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy A comfortable chair
.08-Nov-98. Joseph Rotblat Encyclopædia Britannica on CD-Rom Solar-powered laptop
.08-Oct-06. Jane Horrocks Jamie's Dinners: The Essential Family Cookbook by Jamie Oliver an endless supply of tissues
.08-Oct-54. John Betjeman No book The lower half of the west window of Fairford Church, Gloucestershire
.08-Oct-56. Ada Cherry Kearton No book Cards
.08-Oct-62. Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss Skin food
.08-Oct-83. Mollie Harris The five-volume works by Anthony Wood Union Jack
.08-Oct-89. Jack Lemmon A Play in the Fields of Our Lord by Peter Matheson Piano
.08-Oct-95. Alan Yentob Essays by Michel de Montaigne Video recorder
.08-Sep-45. Roy Williams No book No item
.08-Sep-58. Percy Kahn No book Tape recorder
.08-Sep-84. Catherine Cookson Her own autobiography Piano
.08-Sep-91. Bernice Rubens Poems For Joy and Sermons For Solace by John Donne A painting by her daughter
.08-Sep-96. Professor Colin Blakemore The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin Solar-powered Internet (to receive, not send)
.09-Apr-00. Claire Tomalin The Diary of Samuel Pepys Garden
.09-Apr-42. Eva Turner No book No item
.09-Apr-62. Leslie Phillips The rudiments of several useful languages Chess board with jade pieces
.09-Apr-83. Ruggiero Ricci The letters of Beethoven The Plowden Guarneri violin
.09-Apr-89. Leslie Grantham Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe Metal detector
.09-Apr-95. James Bowman Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier Fabergé egg
.09-Aug-09. Dame Joan Bakewell War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy An abundance of paper and pencils
.09-Aug-55. Michael Ayrton No book An ancient Greek sculpture
.09-Aug-65. Harry Corbett The Best of Beachcomber Trumpet
.09-Aug-87. Frances Edmonds The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams Bollinger '69
.09-Aug-98. David Hempleman Adams Jonathan Livingstone Seagull by Richard Bach Saxophone
.09-Dec-01. Sir Cameron Mackintosh Complete Cookery Course by Delia Smith Solar-powered Magimix
.09-Dec-07. Alec Jeffreys Complete books of Flashman by George McDonald Fraser World's biggest Church organ
.09-Dec-54. Fred Hoyle No book A large photo of a lot of people at a race meeting
.09-Dec-57. Eric Sykes No book Typewriter and paper
.09-Dec-63. Millicent Martin A Way of Life by Laozi Four poster bed
.09-Feb-03. Sir Ian McKellen a dictionary of flora and fauna a grand piano
.09-Feb-59. Chris Barber No book Sports car and petrol
.09-Feb-85. Elly Ameling The poetry of Paul Verlaine Buddha statue
.09-Feb-86. Bruce Oldfield The Destiny of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman by J. P. Donleavy Cigarettes
.09-Feb-92. Robbie Coltrane The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler Pencils and paper
.09-Feb-97. Terry Pratchett Edible Plants of the South Seas by Emile Massal The Chrysler Building
.09-Jan-00. Dr. Jane Goodall The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien Pencil and paper
.09-Jan-05. Andy McNab any Dickens book a gollock
.09-Jan-11. Gyles Brandreth The complete plays of Anton Chekhov Michelangelo's Pietà
.09-Jan-53. Margaret Rutherford No book A bejewelled golden comb
.09-Jan-61. Kenneth Horne Anthology of English verse Piece of crystal
.09-Jan-71. James Fitton An encyclopedia Painting equipment
.09-Jan-82. Martin Gilbert The document volumes of the Churchill biography by Martin Gilbert Drawings of his two children
.09-Jan-94. Ian Hislop Civilisation by Kenneth Clarke Frosties
.09-Jul-00. Alan Parker A giant photo album of his children and grandchildren which goes back over 20 years Watercolour paint box plus brush and pads
.09-Jul-06. Monty Don collected poems of Henry Vaughan Rembrandt's Hendrickje Bathing
.09-Jul-42. Beatrice Lillie No book No item
.09-Jul-56. Jim Laker No book Cricket ball and a piano
.09-Jul-62. Stephen Spender History of the Renaissance by Jacob Burckhardt Painting materials
.09-Jul-83. Julian Bream
.09-Jul-89. Ned Sherrin No Bed for Bacon by Caryl Brahms Seed potatoes
.09-Jul-95. Wendy Richard Wilt by Tom Sharpe Tapestry to make
.09-Jun-02. Leonard Rosoman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce a sloping lawn
.09-Jun-58. Naomi Jacob No book Soap
.09-Jun-91. Derek Walcott Ulysses by James Joyce Carton of cigarettes
.09-Jun-96. Peggy Mount The Diary of Noel Coward Tea in abundance
.09-Mar-03. Vic Reeves Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome potato seeds
.09-Mar-08. Liz Smith A very large catalogue A complete artist's set
.09-Mar-59. Judy Grinham War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Typewriter and paper
.09-Mar-85. Alison Lurie Oxford Book of English Verse Telephone
.09-Mar-86. Beryl Bainbridge The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard Old-fashioned diary with pens
.09-Mar-97. Redmond O'Hanlon War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Pair of green, insulated Leica binoculars 8 X 20
.09-May-04. U. A. Fanthorpe a book to identify birdlife on the island a bath with soap and towels
.09-May-10. Fay Weldon Kennedy's Latin Primer A shotgun
.09-May-60. Shirley Bassey Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe Lipsticks
.09-May-66. Inia Te Wiata Arts and Crafts of the Maori People by Hamilton Painting by Michelangelo
.09-May-93. John Cole À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust Typewriter
.09-May-99. Richard Dreyfuss A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens Books delivered to the island on a regular basis
.09-Nov-59. Sir Arthur Bliss Works on astronomy Telescope
.09-Nov-64. Hardie Ratcliffe Russian grammar Guitar
.09-Nov-86. Kingsley Amis Oxford English Dictionary Scotch whiskey
.09-Nov-97. Anthony Minghella Collected piano works by Bach Piano
.09-Oct-05. Michael Winner The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger a big supply of caviar
.09-Oct-11. Vidal Sassoon The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky A dozen bottles of Vidal Sassoon hair shampoo
.09-Oct-42. Jonah Barrington No book No item
.09-Oct-61. Canon Noel Duckworth Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis Radio receiver
.09-Oct-88. Terry Wogan The collected works of P. G. Wodehouse Radio-cassette player and language tapes
.09-Oct-94. Jeanette Winterson Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot A case of Krug champagne
.09-Sep-52. Vivien Leigh No book A piano
.09-Sep-57. Eric Barker No book Cricket bowling machine
.09-Sep-63. Raymond Baxter Encyclopædia Britannica Rodin's Danae
.09-Sep-90. Lord Charteris War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Set of wood-carving tools
.10-Apr-05. Philippe Petit The Ashley Book of Knots by Clifford Ashley his mysterious object (an object found by his father that as yet no one can identify)
.10-Apr-11. Terry Gilliam Dictionary A mirror
.10-Apr-53. Yolande Donlan[2] A Mediterranean cookbook No item
.10-Apr-61. Barbara Jefford History of the English Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill Piano
.10-Apr-71. Geoff Boycott A set of Wisdens A telephone line to a sports newspaper
.10-Apr-82. Julia McKenzie Act One by Moss Hart Painting materials
.10-Apr-88. Arthur Scargill Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain The Mona Lisa
.10-Apr-94. Roger McGough The Times atlas of the night sky Black cab
.10-Aug-08. A. C. Grayling The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil A good piano
.10-Aug-59. Norman Fisher The dialogues of Plato Writing materials
.10-Aug-64. Stephen Grenfell The Golden Treasury by Francis Palgrave Writing materials
.10-Aug-86. Virginia Holgate A do-it-yourself manual Never-ending supply of smoked salmon
.10-Dec-00. Tim Smit Book with plain pages Piano
.10-Dec-06. Karl Jenkins Michelin Guide to France a piano
.10-Dec-56. Spike Milligan No book Barometer
.10-Dec-62. Acker Bilk The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame Apple seeds
.10-Dec-83. John Piper The Complete Works of William Blake Pianola
.10-Feb-02. Sir Paul Nurse The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski telescope
.10-Feb-08. Oleg Gordievsky Encyclopædia Britannica Good toiletries for my bath
.10-Feb-55. Robert Harris No book Tuning fork
.10-Feb-58. Rex Palmer No book Alcohol
.10-Feb-91. Paddy Ashdown The collected works of John Donne Laptop computer
.10-Jan-10. Mary Portas The works of Rumi, Persian poet and philosopher A set of different fragrances from the people she loves
.10-Jan-66. Patience Strong Complete Works by William Wordsworth Indian painting showing the crucifiction
.10-Jan-88. Adele Leigh Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Loofah
.10-Jan-93. Barbara Mills History of the Crusades by Stephen Runciman Tennis court, balls, racket and wall
.10-Jan-99. Claire Hollingworth History of England by G. M. Trevelyan Paper and pens (with thick nibs)
.10-Jul-05. Ronald Searle The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography the best Champagne possible
.10-Jul-11. Reverend John Graham The complete works of Saki A telescope
.10-Jul-53. Geraldine McEwan No book A box of watercolours
.10-Jul-61. Anna Massey Book on mathematics Family photographs and tape recorder
.10-Jul-82. Captain Jacques Cousteau Essays by Michel de Montaigne Stone from the stomach of a fossilised dinosaur
.10-Jul-88. David Essex The Guinness Book of Records Set of cricket equipment
.10-Jul-94. Rabbi Hugo Gryn Biography of Churchill by Martin Gilbert A parking space
.10-Jun-01. Sir Kyffin Williams Germinal by Emile Zola A small painting called "The Head of a Girl" by Michael Schwertz
.10-Jun-07. Yoko Ono Sai-Yu-Ki Her life for the next thirty years
.10-Jun-52. Googie Withers No book A jade amulet
.10-Jun-57. Count Basie No book Picture of his family with a New York background
.10-Jun-63. Eva Bartok The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery Painting materials
.10-Jun-90. Maeve Binchy Teach yourself bridge Photograph album
.10-Mar-02. Dame Beryl Grey This Sceptred Isle by Christopher Lee box of watercolour paints
.10-Mar-55. Pat Kirkwood No book Gardenia bush
.10-Mar-58. Beryl Grey No book Swedish wooden horse
.10-Mar-84. Don McCullin One year of issues of The Times Mirror
.10-Mar-91. Jeffrey Bernard The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle High powered hunting rifle and ammunition
.10-May-03. Nigella Lawson The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri liquid Temazepam "to give me the possibility of a very pleasant exit"
.10-May-09. Whoopi Goldberg Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke Wise Potato Chips
.10-May-65. Hayley Mills Roget's Thesaurus Writing materials
.10-May-92. Will Carling The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien Flotation tank
.10-May-98. Antony Gormley Principle of Hope by Ernst Bloch Snorkel and mask
.10-Nov-45. Bobby Howes No book No item
.10-Nov-58. Elena Gerhardt A philosophical work by Johann Wolfgang Goethe Tapestry-making kit
.10-Nov-84. Vernon Hadley The Principles of Art by R G Collingwood Sodastream and gas cylinders
.10-Nov-91. Lord Delfont 1515–1985 British Music Theatre Book Cigars and matches
.10-Nov-96. Sir Laurens Van Der Post The Golden Bough by James Frazer Piano
.10-Oct-04. Anne Scott-James The Semi-attached Couple by Emily Eden a nightdress made of pure white cotton
.10-Oct-10. Sarah Doukas The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin A photo album of all her family
.10-Oct-52. Binnie Hale No book A piano
.10-Oct-55. Max Bygraves No book Golf clubs
.10-Oct-60. Alec Bedser Set of Wisden Razor
.10-Oct-66. Katherine Whitehorn Her favourite books by William Faulkner Negligee
.10-Oct-93. Lesley Garrett Photograph album Tightrope
.10-Sep-42. Emlyn Williams No book No item
.10-Sep-56. Harry Secombe No book Collapsible concrete model of Broadcasting House with plastic announcers etc.
.10-Sep-62. Stanley Unwin Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians Painting materials
.10-Sep-83. Charlotte Lamb Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Typewriter and paper
.10-Sep-89. Eric Clapton Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens Guitar
.10-Sep-95. John Updike The collected works of Marcel Proust Silken tent (for luxury, not survival)
.11-Apr-60. John Freeman Oxford English Dictionary Typewriter
.11-Apr-66. Terry Scott French language course Eau de Cologne
.11-Apr-93. Lord Oaksey Mr Mulliner's Memoirs by P. G. Wodehouse Cargo of champagne
.11-Apr-99. Paco Peña Anthology of poetry by Jose Bergua Virtual reality module
.11-Aug-45. Peter Fettes No book No item
.11-Aug-58. Elsie and Doris Waters The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame and Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith Sunshade and garbage disposal unit
.11-Aug-84. Ron Goodwin The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran Tuba
.11-Dec-05. David Hope The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens a case of selected malt whiskies
.11-Dec-11. Eve Pollard Maritime Intelligence and Publications Tweezers
.11-Dec-61. Sir Michael Balcon Oxford English Dictionary Wine
.11-Dec-88. Charles Dance A Dream in the Luxembourg by Richard Aldington Guitar
.11-Feb-01. Griff Rhys Jones The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens Newspaper
.11-Feb-07. Paul Abbott the complete works of Arthur Miller a writing pad and pencils
.11-Feb-57. Peggy Ashcroft No book Frogwoman's outfit
.11-Feb-63. Michael Bentine Encyclopædia Britannica Painting materials
.11-Feb-84. Lord Elwyn-Jones English Social History by G M Trevelyan Comic collage by Pearl Binder
.11-Feb-90. Michael Tilson Thomas Collected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke Yahama computerised concert grand piano
.11-Feb-96. Susan Hill The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford The Barnes Collection (paintings)
.11-Jan-04. Jimmy Tarbuck The Essential Henry Longhurst his own set of golf clubs and balls
.11-Jan-09. Ruth Padel The Iliad by Homer A lot of paper and pencils
.11-Jan-60. Semprini The Nature of the Physical World by Sir Arthur Eddington Telescope
.11-Jan-65. Dawn Addams Anthology of world poetry Writing materials
.11-Jan-87. James Prior Unknown Unknown
.11-Jan-98. Paul Hogarth The Times Atlas of World History Solar-powered Apple Mac
.11-Jul-04. Hugh Masekela Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens a keyboard
.11-Jul-10. Dr Gwen Adshead Biggest book of poetry available Pen and paper
.11-Jul-60. Eddie Calvert Piano tutor Piano
.11-Jul-66. Sir Stanley Rous Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson Field glasses
.11-Jul-93. Nicholas Hytner The collected works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Large supply of total block suncream
.11-Jul-99. Paddy Moloney The Book of Lempster (old Irish textbook currently in The Hague) Tin whistle
.11-Jun-00. Clive James My Method of Singing by Enrico Caruso Karaoke piano
.11-Jun-06. George Davies a book about learning to paint a Cannondale bike
.11-Jun-56. Ted Heath No book Racing form books
.11-Jun-62. Alistair Cooke Chrestomathy by H L Mencken Tape recorder
.11-Jun-83. Sir Peter Pears A book by E M Forster Painting from his collection
.11-Jun-89. Jonathon Porritt Bleak House by Charles Dickens Fountain pen
.11-Jun-95. John Lee Hooker A book with pictures of pretty women His guitar
.11-Mar-01. Henry Sandon A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman Huge supply of Indian tea with Worcester tea pot
.11-Mar-07. Andy Kershaw collected works of Ryszard Kapuściński lots of toilet roll
.11-Mar-52. Hermione Gingold No book A barrel of lipstick
.11-Mar-57. Elizabeth Bowen Emma by Jane Austen Kaledioscope
.11-Mar-63. Arthur Haynes French language course Ukelele
.11-Mar-90. George Porter Non-Equilibrium Thermo Dynamics by Prigogine Computer, pen and paper
.11-May-03. George Fenton short stories by Chekhov a piano or failing that for comfort a tin of condensed milk and an opener
.11-May-08. Annie Lennox The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle Suncream
.11-May-59. Ray Ellington David Copperfield by Charles Dickens Bed with mosquito net
.11-May-64. David Kossoff Story of the Marx Brothers Michelangelo's David
.11-May-85. Sheila Steafel Dictionary Artist's equipment
.11-May-97. David Wynne The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer Harmonica
.11-Nov-57. Jack Teagarden No book Trombone and materials for making a crystal radio
.11-Nov-63. Stephen Potter Book about sea birds and waders Field glasses
.11-Nov-90. Baroness Castle of Blackburn The collected works of William Morris Typewriter
.11-Oct-09. Steve Coogan The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne Fully restored Morris Minor Traveller with wooden detail
.11-Oct-43. Stephen Tallents No book No item
.11-Oct-65. Adele Leigh The Second World War by Sir Winston Churchill Make-up table
.11-Oct-87. Lord Killanin A Vanished Arcadia by Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham Olympic gold medal and award
.11-Oct-92. Lord Sainsbury The New Oxford Book of English Verse Bed
.11-Sep-53. Peggy Cummins No book A painting of circus horses by Toulouse-Lautrec
.11-Sep-61. Coral Browne The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde Sable coat
.11-Sep-82. James Loughran Comprehensive world airways timetable Drawing and painting equipment
.11-Sep-88. Peter Donohoe The Complete Scripts of Billy Connolly Waterbed
.11-Sep-94. Joanna Trollope Oxford Book of English Verse Bed and white Egyptian sheets
.12-Apr-43. Ian Hay No book No item
.12-Apr-65. Dame Margot Fonteyn Hadrian's Memoirs by Marguerite Yourcenar Skin diver's mask
.12-Apr-87. Julian Critchley An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David Case of wine
.12-Apr-98. Dame Judi Dench Ordnance Survey map of the world The Man with a Glove, painting by Titian
.12-Aug-01. Joss Ackland The Diary of Samuel Pepys Huge jar of liquorice
.12-Aug-07. Felix Dennis Dictionary of National Biography A very long stainless steel shaft to encourage pole dancing mermaids
.12-Aug-52. Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray No book Denison - a raft (to fish) Gray - a large supply of insecticide
.12-Aug-57. Owen Berry No book Photograph of Granny Grove
.12-Aug-63. Sir Charles Maclean Volumes of the Illustrated London News Piano
.12-Dec-04. John Fortune The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (in Italian and English) a rug made by the Baluch people from Afghanistan
.12-Dec-10. Sir Torquil Norman A book of his father's poems and verses A small still with an ice maker attached to it
.12-Dec-52. Bill Greenslade No book No item
.12-Dec-55. Bob Monkhouse and Denis Goodwin Encyclopædia Britannica Large coloured picture of Marilyn Monroe
.12-Dec-60. Don Thompson English Social History by G M Trevelyan Clarinet
.12-Dec-66. Leonard Cotrell Collected works by Homer Bronze statue of Poseidon
.12-Dec-99. Oz Clarke French Provincial Cookery by Elizabeth David His memory
.12-Feb-06. Karen Armstrong The complete works of Milton Continuous supply of very cold & dry white wine
.12-Feb-42. A. B. Campbell No book No item
.12-Feb-44. Ralph Reader No book No item
.12-Feb-62. Stanley Holloway Mrs Beeton's Household Management Parking meter and plenty of change
.12-Feb-83. Zandra Rhodes Mrs Beeton's Household Management Sketchbook, pens and pencils
.12-Feb-89. Jeffrey Tate The collected works of Jane Austen Nativity painting from the National Gallery
.12-Jan-03. Gillian Anderson The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle recordings of her daughter and love reading their poems
.12-Jan-59. Ronald Searle Reproductions of works by James Gillray Car fitted with a telescope
.12-Jan-85. Tom Stoppard Inferno (in two languages) by Dante Alighieri Plastic football
.12-Jan-86. Nigel Kennedy Wisden Almanack Violin
.12-Jan-92. Steven Berkoff A gardening book Piano
.12-Jul-09. Hugh Pennington The Cabinet Cyclopedia edited by Dionysius Lardner A brass microscope
.12-Jul-55. Lionel Gamlin No book Back number of The New Yorker
.12-Jul-65. Sir Lewis Casson No book requested Recorder and a 1912 portrait of Dame Sybil Thorndike
.12-Jul-87. Elaine Paige The Complete Works of Charles Dickens Piano
.12-Jul-98. Jack Straw The Franco Prussian War - The German Invasion of France 1870-1871 by Michael Howard Saxophone
.12-Jun-05. Betsy Blair Reading Lyrics: More Than 1,000 of the Century's Finest Lyrics by Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball an ice cream maker
.12-Jun-10. Frank Skinner Teach yourself French A ukelele
.12-Jun-11. Andrea Levy Roget's Thesaurus Mosquito repellent
.12-Jun-53. Ralph Richardson No book His pipe
.12-Jun-61. Richard Murdoch History of the world Golf clubs and balls
.12-Jun-82. Sir Anton Dolin Friends and Memories by Sir Anton Dolin Electric razor
.12-Jun-88. Douglas Hurd Oxford Book of 20th Century English Verse Champagne
.12-Jun-94. Zoë Wanamaker Greek Myths by Robert Graves Samson tobacco and liquorice Rizla papers
.12-Mar-00. Colin Montgomerie Anything by Michael Crichton No luxury chosen
.12-Mar-06. Terence Stamp The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame one of his wheat-free loaves
.12-Mar-42. A. E. Dingle No book No item
.12-Mar-56. Donald Sinden The Complete Works of Shakespeare Lucky charm
.12-Mar-62. Colonel A D Wintle Large blank book Dog whip
.12-Mar-83. Douglas Reeman The Admiralty Seamanship Manual Orchid-growing kit
.12-Mar-89. Gerald Scarfe Anything by Capability Brown River painting by Turner
.12-Mar-95. Nigel Nicolson A Guide to the Universe Telescope
.12-May-02. Sir Aaron Klug A set of books on Roman Republican and Imperial Coinage A set of mixed Greek and Imperial coinage
.12-May-55. Tommy Farr No book Longest bar of soap in the world
.12-May-58. Roy Plomley No book Desk with typewriter and paper
.12-May-84. Hugh Johnson The Complete Works of P G Wodehouse Writing materials and lots of bottles
.12-May-91. Cecil Lewis Sagittarius Surviving by C. S. Lewis Fax machine
.12-May-96. Hugh Laurie A self-learn Italian book (slowly) Family photo album
.12-Nov-54. Robert Henriques No book Oil paints
.12-Nov-56. Donald Campbell No book Cigarettes
.12-Nov-62. Dr Robert Stopford Oxford Book of English Verse Painting materials
.12-Nov-83. Sir Peter Hall The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Photograph of his children
.12-Nov-89. Michael Codron Caroline and Charlotte by Alison Plowman Jigsaw puzzles
.12-Nov-95. Umberto Eco The New York Phone Book Laptop computer
.12-Oct-03. Herbert Kretzmer The Great War in Modern Memory by Paul Fussell a Zippo lighter
.12-Oct-08. Sanjeev Bhaskar The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams A grand piano
.12-Oct-59. Dave Brubeck Encyclopaedia Piano
.12-Oct-64. Jon Pertwee The Culture of the Abdomen: A Cure of Obesity and Constipation by F A Hornibrook Guitar
.12-Oct-86. Sir Fred Hoyle Handbook of physics Portable telescope
.12-Oct-97. Rose Tremain A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking Word processor
.12-Sep-60. Gladys Young London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins Pairs of spectacles
.12-Sep-66. Derek Oldham Encyclopædia Britannica Insect repellent
.12-Sep-93. Isabel Allende All correspondence between her and her mother Paper and pencils
.13-Apr-03. Margaret Atwood The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights a big huge vat of Culpepers Rose Geranium bath salts
.13-Apr-59. Edric Connor Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton Toothbrush
.13-Apr-64. Stan Barstow The Modern Short Story by H E Bates Writing materials
.13-Apr-85. Joseph Allen A number of Sherlock Holmes novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Family pocket watch
.13-Aug-00. Robert Swan Huge copy of The Times atlas - largest available so he can see where he has been (168 countries so far) An accountancy course
.13-Aug-06. Simon Cowell Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins a mirror
.13-Aug-56. Dennis Brain Back number of motor magazines Typewriter and paper
.13-Aug-62. Lionel Tertis Books by H Rider Haggard, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne Portrait of his wife
.13-Aug-83. Peter Bull Brideshead Revisited (in Greek) by Evelyn Waugh Crystal ball
.13-Dec-09. Lord Coe Such Sweet Thunder: Benny Green on Jazz by Benny Green A piano and a guide to playing it
.13-Dec-65. General Frederick Coutts Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Salvation Army crest
.13-Dec-87. Lew Grade The Antiquary by Walter Scott Crate of Montecristo cigars
.13-Dec-92. Professor Ghillean Prance The Natural History of Selborne by Gilbert White Accordion
.13-Dec-98. Dick Francis Men and Horses I Have Known by George Lampton Waterbed
.13-Feb-00. Professor Stuart Hall Portrait of a Lady by Henry James Piano
.13-Feb-11. Celia Imrie Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable A cut glass crystal chandelier with candles
.13-Feb-53. Jean Carson No book An umbrella
.13-Feb-56. Terry-Thomas No book Horse saddle
.13-Feb-61. Antonio Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Crucifix and family photo album
.13-Feb-71. Harvey Smith A selection to sample A radio receiver
.13-Feb-82. Sir Christopher Leaver Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians Wine cellar
.13-Feb-94. Rosemary Verey A Celebration of Gardens by Sir Roy Strong Waterproof pens, paper and folders
.13-Jan-02. Susana Walton The Education of a Gardner by Russell Page downy pillow
.13-Jan-08. Simon Rattle Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Italian coffee machine and grinder
.13-Jan-55. Sir Cedric Hardwicke No book Newspaper
.13-Jan-58. Lionel Hale No book Model theatre
.13-Jan-64. Leslie Baily Anthology of poetry by Walter de la Mare Woodworker tools
.13-Jan-91. Adelaide Hall A book about American history Box of seeds
.13-Jul-08. Felicity Lott Les Misérables by Victor Hugo Lots of champagne and pistachio nuts
.13-Jul-59. Harold Abrahams Book of Quotations by Burton Egbert Stevenson Mircofilm of Bell's life
.13-Jul-64. Vanessa Redgrave Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Coffee and condensed milk
.13-Jul-86. Sir David Wilson The Diary of Samuel Pepys Refrigerator
.13-Jun-04. Karan Bilimoria The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream by Paulo Coelho[1] Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister videos
.13-Jun-60. Professor A C B Lovell Book on musical theory and composition Piano/organ hybrid
.13-Jun-66. Nina & Frederik The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon A harp and a flute
.13-Jun-93. Betty Boothroyd A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth Mace of the House of Commons
.13-Jun-99. John Barry Eternal Echoes by John O'Donohue Grand piano
.13-Mar-05. Stephen Poliakoff My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell a box of plastic straws to fiddle with
.13-Mar-53. Pamela Brown No book Encyclopædia Britannica
.13-Mar-61. Carmen Dragon Book on astronomy Telescope
.13-Mar-71. Patrick Cargill The Spotlight casting directory His Bentley car
.13-Mar-82. George Chisholm The novels of P G Wodehouse Engraved glass and supply of bitter lemon
.13-Mar-88. Brendan Foster The Lakeland Peaks (photographs) by W. A. Poucher Tea
.13-May-01. Sir John Sulston Oxford Anthology of English Verse The microscope used to examine the lineage of the roundworm
.13-May-07. Joanna Lumley A huge atlas Video camera and film
.13-May-52. Fay Compton No book Her two dogs
.13-May-63. Frank Worrell Work on anthropology by Max Gluckman Film projector and cricket films
.13-May-90. Molly Keane A bound copy of the Spectator magazines A bed, netted from snakes and flies
.13-Nov-09. Anthony Julius Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy San Pellegr |
was at 1.6 million tons of sugar, less than what was being produced back in 1910. That kind of news would have shocked the nation decades ago, but the failure of the sugar cane harvest is no longer a concern in Cuba.
Why was the sugar cane industry dismantled?
The downsizing of the sugarcane industry was an economic necessity: the total of 155 mills—which were technologically behind and uncompetitive—was unsustainable for the country. The initial approach was to consolidate the production efficiently, with a cap of 4 million tons a year.
Only the factories capable of producing sugar at a cost of 4 cents a pound or less would remain. And the solution to the unemployment that came as a result: going back to school.
The motives to take such measures were the low productivity of sugarcane fields and the slump on sugar in the global market.
However, the price of sugar began to improve over a decade ago.
From 2017 through 2025, the price of unrefined sugar is expected to level off between 15 and 16 cents per pound, according to the 2016 edition of the “Agricultural Perspectives” from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
Had production in 2001 been maintained (3.6 million tons), about 815 million dollars would have been made from the export of unrefined sugar.
Things weren't going so well
“Today will surely become a historic day” were the first words of Cuban President Fidel Castro during his speech on October 21, 2002 at Lavandero mill. So began the restructuring of the sugar industry.
In the following years, a total of 98 mills would be closed down and more than 65,000 people would receive their full salary for going back to school. The Gregorio Arleé Mañalich mill's turn would arrive on May 14, 2004.
Luis Alberto Pérez (or Nene, as everyone calls him) had worked there since 1967. When he speaks of the closing of the sugar mill, the word he repeats the most is “deception.”
Almost all the interviewees agree: They were never told that the mill would be dismantled.
A team stayed on to work full-time on preserving the place. But before the first year was up, letters began to arrive. They were formulaic documents in which the only things that changed were the names of the pieces to be extracted, the recipient and the date. All were signed by the Cuban minister of sugar at the time, Ulises Rosales del Toro. Only the minister could authorize each extraction. Further responsibilities would be delegated afterwards, however, and the letters would arrive more frequently.
For two years, Juan Carlos Rivero was head of the Closed Factory (the official name given to mills and agro-industrial complexes that had to be closed down) and amongst those who received the letters. “The country had neither money to buy supplies, nor spare parts for the factories that were functioning,” he assures.
Eddy Reyes, 64, is waiting to reach the retirement age at another mill, the Bouris Luis Santa Coloma. Against his will, he had to dismember the installations he had put in place before. With each piece he stripped, he was dismantling 31 years of his own life.
The direct legacy of closing a hundred sugar mills has been a string of communities with engineers and technicians that, suddenly, didn't have any factories to help operate or repair.
The best distributed industrial branch of Cuba and the oldest employment source in the nation were eliminated; and in many ways, no alternatives were created for those lost jobs or for the services in the communities where the mills were located.
We will never know if during his lengthy inauguration speech on October 21, 2002, the Cuban president looked in the faces of those who were listening to him when he guaranteed that everything was going well in the factories that had stopped grinding five years prior.
The impact of closing the sugar mills on people
Two years later, the people's council of Gregorio Arleé Mañalich would realize that, when a mill closes, a lot of things change, but almost never for the better.
When the mill closed, or rather, when it was destroyed, they also stopped paving highways and thus, services declined.
Without work in the town and too old to study, Nene and Eddy had to go work for other mills. They became replacement parts. Without a hopeful future in their isolated town, many other young people finally left too.
In the small neighborhood surrounding the sugar mill, a pasta factory was built, but it couldn't even produce enough noodles to feed the municipality. The scraps of the sugar mill that remained at the base of the new establishment remained untouched, imposing.
At the end of 2016, Nene returned from the Boris Luis Santa Coloma mill to the ruins of the place where he had started working. Forty-nine sugar harvests allowed him to settle in Mañalich with more than 2,000 pesos.
Nene — black, short, with few teeth and a clear voice — is not a spiteful man, but he will never forgive them for lying to him. The distress has consumed him over the last decade. He retired at 65. But it wasn't because he lacked strength; rather, because he was bitter.In 1947 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) began recording the prices of everyday items on a ‘national shopping list’, to help calculate inflation. Through to today the list is updated every year: new products are added, while others are quietly dropped.
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As the prices of the various items in the basket change over time, so does the total cost of the basket, thus movements in consumer price inflation indices represent the changing cost of the shopping basket. By looking into these imaginary baskets we can build up a picture of the changing shopping and eating habits of postwar Britain. Here are some of the highlights…
1 Wild rabbit anyone?
That first list from 1947 contains such things as small white loaf, wild rabbit, tin of corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, prunes, tea, cocoa and condensed milk. It also features Sild, or small herrings, which were sold in tins.
2 Cold comfort for cans
In the 1940s hardly anybody owned a fridge, so tinned food was enormously popular. This explains the presence of canned fish and condensed milk in the basket. Food such as fresh meat and bread, meanwhile, were shopped for daily by the housewife, and carried back home by hand.
Baked beans appeared in the first basket (in 1947) alongside other tinned ingredients such as peas. By 1974 canned tomatoes were also present, as was plenty of canned fruit. But by 2009 the only cans on the list were tomatoes, sweetcorn and baked beans, marking the can’s fall from grace.
3 It’s always time for tea
Unsurprisingly, tea has appeared – in one form or another – in every basket since 1947. Initially this was in the form of loose-leaf tea – teabags did not appear in the basket until 1980.
Sadly, loose leaf was removed in 2002, reflecting a decline in sales. Herbal and fruit teas were added in 2001, but remained for just one year. By 2003 there were only plain old teabags in the basket.
4 A slice of history
Corned beef in cans was present in the first basket in 1947, and by 1980 appeared as two distinct versions: sliced and canned. By 1993 it was gone, replaced by the suspicious-sounding ‘canned meat’. This reflected the move from tinned and potted meats to items such as pâté, pies and charcuterie.
5 Jam on your Weetabix?
Breakfast cereals first entered the basket in 1952. In 1987 oats were taken out and replaced by muesli, perhaps reflecting the 1980s obsession with fibre and jogging. Muesli was quietly dropped in 2006, however.
Perhaps the strangest thing I uncovered while making the programme is that when products like Weetabix and Shredded Wheat were launched, they were intended almost as a bread substitute. Consequently, their early packaging recommended serving with jam or cheese, or in Shredded Wheat’s case, a poached egg. You’ll have to listen to the programme to find out what I thought of this serving suggestion…
6 Bread goes garlic
Another staple that’s been in the basket right from the beginning is the white, sliced loaf. In 1962 ‘sliced and unsliced’ were added, and in 2006 brown bread appeared. Pitta breads were added in 2000, only to come out in 2010 and be replaced by garlic bread. The baguette was added in 2001, only to come out four years later.
7 A fresh perspective
Yoghurt first appeared in the 1974 basket, later joined by fromage frais in 1993, flavoured milk in 1997, and chilled pot dessert in 2001. Baby milk formula was added in 2003, and pro-biotic drinks in 2008. Losses in the dairy section over the years include UHT milk, TT (Tuberculin Tested) milk, and reduced-cost welfare milk.
8 For mash get Smash!
Invented in the 1960s, Smash appeared in the 1974 basket due to a huge increase in sales driven by the famous adverts featuring Martian puppets. In my programme you can hear an exclusive interview with production designer Peter Richardson, who reveals a little-known fact about them.
Smash was removed from the basket in 1987, replaced with frozen oven chips.
9 Sea food and eat it
These first appeared in the 1962 basket, alongside other processed and canned fish such as kippers and sardines. Frozen prawns were added in 1987, but removed a year later, and were not seen again until 2002.
By the 1990s canned tuna appears, alternating with canned salmon.
As you can see, the story of what’s in each year’s basket isn’t just about inflation, or even economics, but the products we’ve always adored, and those we loved and left. Behind this are massive social and technological developments that changed what we ate, and how we shopped. It is the story of us, in a basket.
The Inflating Shopping Basket airs on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday 18 January at 1.30pm. To find out more, click here.
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To read more from Andrew, visit www.foodjournalist.co.uk.A central promise of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign and presidency — that the middle class would not pay more in taxes — is now dividing the Democratic candidates vying to replace him, underscoring how Democrats are split over how far to go with their ambitions for what government can accomplish.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley say the middle class could see at least somewhat higher tax rates to pay for the expansive government programs they favor. They also say the middle class will benefit overall from their plans.
But Hillary Rodham Clinton, for the first time in this campaign, is now committing to the same pledge Obama made: no new taxes on households earning under $250,000 a year. Clinton also took the pledge when she ran for president in 2008 — a position that then aligned with Obama's — but she is making it today in a more populist Democratic environment.
"Hillary Clinton is proposing a bold, ambitious agenda," Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said in a statement, "but in paying for her proposals, she fundamentally rejects the idea that we should be willing to raise taxes on middle-class households. We need to raise these families' incomes, not their taxes."
The split reflects a difference in philosophy and ambition among the candidates. All are proposing to expand government spending beyond the levels of the Obama era. And while they favor many of the same policies — such as government-paid family leave and expanded access to child care — Clinton has pushed less sweeping programs than her rivals.
Clinton’s plans, both announced and forthcoming, appear likely to echo the spending levels of Obama’s most recent budget proposal, which proposed about $2 trillion in additional taxes over 10 years, all concentrated on the wealthy.
Sanders, meanwhile, already has proposed at least one small tax increase that would hit all taxpayers — an increase in the payroll tax to fund a guaranteed paid leave benefit. Analysts say he will almost certainly need to propose others in order to finance his plan to offer government-funded health care to every American.
But Sanders’s campaign says that for all but the richest taxpayers, those tax increases will be more than offset by the publicly provided benefits he is proposing, such as tuition-free higher education and universal child care. Aides argue that, because his health care plan would save consumers so much money, middle-class Americans would actually bring home larger paychecks if his plans are enacted, even if they are paying higher tax rates.
Sanders believes that income and wealth inequality are the greatest issues of our time, said Warren Gunnels, his policy director, who declined to speak directly to the Obama pledge. "We need bold solutions," he added, "to rebuild the middle class of this country."
O'Malley, who is running third in the race, will not endorse the Obama pledge, aides said. They noted his support for the same payroll tax increase that Sanders backs as a means of funding paid family and medical leave for workers. His spokeswoman, Haley Morris, said that in general, "any tax increases would be instituted in a progressive way and concentrated at the top."
All the Democrats’ plans stand in sharp contrast to the Republican presidential contenders. Every GOP candidate has at least sketched the details of a large tax cut plan. Independent analyses of those plans have found they would all produce higher incomes for taxpayers across the board, though in general those gains would be largest, in percentage terms, for the highest income earners.
Obama's 2008 pledge shaped his presidency. Administration officials have acknowledged that he could not endorse the leading paid leave proposal from Democrats partly because it would raise middle class taxes, for instance. Liberals complained the pledge handcuffed his policy ambitions — forcing him only to seek tax revenues from the top 2 percent of earners — while also making it harder for him to negotiate during key moments like the 2012 fiscal cliff. The pledge also opened him up to criticism whenever the administration proposed anything that did ask more of the middle class, such as a tanning salon tax in the Affordable Care Act or a new tax on tobacco to pay for preschool.
New plans for domestic spending
This campaign, none of the Democratic candidates have finished rolling out spending proposals. But the details they’ve released so far, coupled with estimates about the proposals they have hinted at, give a good sense of how their plans might affect taxpayers up and down the income ladder.
Sanders has detailed about $3.5 trillion over 10 years in proposed new spending programs, including an expansion of Social Security, a "College for All" plan, $1 trillion in infrastructure improvements, and 12 weeks of government-paid family and medical leave for any worker who needs it. He supports universal child care but has not said how much it would cost or how he would fund it.
Sanders's total agenda could end up costing perhaps as much as $18.5 trillion more over the next 10 years, if you add the $3.5 trillion in spending programs to the $15 trillion cost estimate of one major study of what it would take to implement the type of fully public health care program Sanders wants. Sanders's campaign argues that estimate is too high, but doesn't provide one of its own.
To offset his spending plans, Sanders has detailed a batch of tax increases mainly targeted at corporations and the highest income earners. Those include new taxes on financial transactions such as stock trades and on income that corporations are sheltering in tax savings overseas, ending a preferential tax treatment that benefits hedge fund managers, boosting estate taxes and eliminating the cap on income subject to payroll taxation for earners who make more than $250,000 a year.
Sanders, along with O'Malley, also endorses a 0.2 percent payroll tax increase across the board to fund paid leave, which sponsors estimate would add up to about $72 a year for a typical female worker.
Overall, Sanders's campaign estimates that his tax proposals would bring in an additional $6 trillion revenue over 10 years, half of that from the financial transaction tax. Other outside estimates suggest the yield from that tax would be much lower — about $500 billion over 10 years, according to the independent Tax Policy Center.
Sanders is also set to propose a tax on the carbon emissions that scientists blame for climate change, refunded to low-income Americans who would face higher costs as a result of the tax.
Health care plan
The biggest middle-class tax question for Sanders is his plan to shift every American to government-funded health insurance, which he has not detailed for the campaign.
"I can confidently say we can’t raise that much by taxing the rich," said Len Burman, who directs the Tax Policy Center.
A single-payer health care bill Sanders introduced in 2013 included an additional 2.2 percent income tax for most Americans — and considerably more for the rich — and added a 6.7 percent payroll tax for all employers. Economists generally believe payroll taxes are passed on to workers, meaning poor and middle-class taxpayers would have seen tax increases totaling nearly 9 percent.
One of the few economic projections of a single-payer plan, by the University of Massachusetts economist Gerald Friedman, estimated that the plan would cost about $1.5 trillion a year, but raise overall income for 95 percent of Americans, after accounting for tax changes and lower health costs. The Sanders campaign says that model should not be used as a guide for the overall costs of their forthcoming plan.
Burman said the revenue estimates in that model appear overly optimistic, which would imply that lower- and middle-income families might need to pay more to fund the program.
Clinton's proposal
Clinton, too, has yet to detail a key piece of her fiscal plans — her tax reform proposal, which would affect several of the other tax plans she has spelled out.
Still, she has proposed several hundred billion dollars in increases on corporations and the rich, including a tax on banks (similar to one that Obama has proposed that would raise an estimated $110 billion over a decade), a limit on deductions for higher earners and the so-called Buffett Rule that would also force high earners to pay more.
Her spending plans total about $1 trillion, with more likely to be announced. They include efforts to reduce the cost of college, to provide paid family and medical leave, and to expand Social Security benefits for widows and some others. Aides have hinted that she could also propose additional tax credits for lower- and middle-income Americans, which would also be offset by tax increases on the rich.
O'Malley has proposed what aides estimate as about $2.5 trillion in tax increases over the next decade, including a financial transactions tax and a carbon tax, which would likely be refunded to consumers.
This story has been changed to make clearer where the $18.5 trillion calculation of Bernie Sanders' spending plans comes from. It's also been corrected to say that the Sanders campaign disputes the $18.5 trillion number because, the campaign says, it overstates the cost of their health care plan.Taylor Swift Does Her Best To Calm Angry Fans After Failing To Release ‘Out Of The Woods’ In The UK
Taylor Swift’s Out Of The Woods stormed to the top of the iTunes charts yesterday after it was finally released. However, when UK fans realised that the single wasn’t actually available in their country, they weren’t happy!
But, Taylor soon noticed some of the comments being made online and decided to post a statement on her Tumblr account, where instead of apologising over the whole thing, she explained her actions, saying that she thought she’d take a tip from her showbiz BFF Ed Sheeran. The message read: “To all my wonderful UK fans, I realize that you are not yet able to get ‘Out Of The Woods’ due to a new strategy my record label is working on in the UK. I’ve never been one to hold my music back from any of you so I will be watching closely to see if this is ultimately a better experience for you, the fans. My good friend Ed Sheeran utilized the same strategy with ‘One’ in the UK and he seemed very happy with the feedback from his fans. But, ultimately, it’s down to you. Let me know. Peace out.”
Sheeran released his track earlier this year as an “instant grat” song on iTunes, which means that the track was delivered early to fans who pre-ordered the album. Taylor’s eagerly anticipated LP 1989 is out on October 27.
Taylor’s latest track has had an amazing reaction online so far, with it rumoured to be about her ex beau Harry Styles. Lyrics include: “Looking at it now it all seems so simple. We were lying on your couch, I remember you took a Polaroid of us, then discovered the rest of the world was black and white, but we were in screaming colour And I remember thinking…” which then leads into the catchy chorus that mainly consists of the words “Are we out of the woods yet?”I will be OK as long as I can consistently keep in my bloodstream a steady flow of that magical stuff with which running injects my psyche.
Alternate headlines — “how not running has made me a miserable bitch”, “Crazy, fat and pitiful”, or “I know I am a self-absorbed whiner, but allow me to continue” or, for Google-bility, “Running injury recovery.”
As many of my friends and readers of our city’s daily paper already understand, I have gone through drug withdrawals. Bad ones. If you want to know the whole gory story, my memoir-ette won a prize in 2011 and was published in a literary journal, and an excerpt ran in the Morning News last year.
But, as badass as it makes me sound, I am not here to brag about my drug addiction, jail time, rehab. The reason I bring it up is because withdrawal from running, though not nearly as intense, bears a striking resemblance to withdrawal from opiates.
As with drugs, I did not quit running because I wanted to. I quit because I was badly injured and had no choice.
Hitting bottom
In classic denial, through the end of springtime, I ran on a fasciitis-riddled plantar as my pace progressively slowed and my well-practiced gait deteriorated into an awkward unbalanced trot.
In desperation I paid a podiatrist some $300 to inject my feet with cortisone; the result was nil.
My intervention came in the form of firm lectures from my training partners Paul Agruso and Chris Stratton, strongly worded Facebook comments (this isn’t going away, was the overriding theme, peppered with some heartfelt sympathy) and, finally my coach’s refusal to further enable me.
After my planned spring marathon (Vancouver) came and went (I did not go), and after I — in a period of grief following my grandfather’s death — decided to walk 50 miles in one night, Coach informed me that he would not coach me for the October St. George marathon. It wasn’t going to happen, he said. He called it tough love, told me to stop running for six to eight weeks, let my foot heal … he didn’t come out and say this, exactly, but I felt that his point was this: If I train you in this condition, you are going to run that marathon very poorly and you will embarrass yourself and thus so you will embarrass me, your coach.
Acceptance
I breathed and exhaled deeply as I read his email — the bittersweet sigh of relief that accompanies surrender.
He did give me motivation. If you take 6-8 weeks off he promised me, I will coach you for your next marathon for free.
The first week of not running was not so bad. I went to movies, read books — I recommend A Visit From the Goon Squad, The Dinner, The Interestings, Outliers, American Pastoral, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: the biography of David Foster Wallace, Back to Blood, Beautiful Ruins (and those are just the ones I liked). I haven’t read so much since my stint in county.
I worked excessively, insomniaticly, irritatingly coming up with all kinds of new ideas for The Advocate’s print and digital publications. I made grand plans that hadn’t a chance of seeing follow-through or fruition. Looking back at that brief period during which no one dropped by my office or asked me to lunch, I think I drove my coworkers away from my line of panic-driven, pseudo-creative fire. I shopped like a the rich teenager in the 1995 classic “Clueless” until Chase Bank alerted me that they had to draw from my savings account to cover a debit card purchase.
Yeah, it was about that time that the withdrawal really kicked in.
Misery
Insomnia, anxiety attacks, irritability. Then there was the sleepiness. I slept for 21 hours one day. Instead of rising at 5 a.m., I began struggling to wrest myself from bed by 7:30 or 8. My ability to write seemed to dwindle—that aforementioned mental fire snuffed out. Some Saturdays I spent in my dark bedroom until noon brooding over my running-group members’ social media updates.
Then there was the worst thing of all …
Let me preface by saying, I mean, it’s not the worst thing that could happen to a person. My friend Angela, while I was going through all this, learned she had cancer for Christ’s sake. Do yourself a favor, stop reading this drivel and go follow her blog. She is a giant inspiration.
Still here? You must be a runner. A glutton for punishment. Where was I? Ah yes, the worst day of all of this shit was the day I stepped on a scale at the doctor’s office. EIGHT POUNDS. I’ve gained eight pounds.
My jeans had felt a bit snug, now that I thought about it. Oh my God. No. I suddenly pined, heartsick, for the days of high mileage and inconsequential nonstop eating.
I am between 5’4-5’5 tall with strong potential for stockiness [stubby thickness], so even two pounds on my frame is noticeable. An eight-pound gain is just a stinging stunning bitch slap.
My thyroid medication probably needs to be adjusted, the doctor said. It could explain the mood swings, brain fog, weight gain, digestive issues and headaches. I knew that wasn’t it. I was experiencing classic withdrawal symptoms.
I was in familiar, miserable territory.
I tried to explain that, while my lack of thyroid historically has been a source of my health problems, this time it was my lack of sweat. My lack of pounding the pavement, sprinting ‘til I puke, struggling up a steep hill, tumbling on the trails, yammering with my friends about ideal marathon weather, fartleks and V02 max.
Dismissively, she suggested something for inflammation, Valerian root and a gluten-free diet. I resisted the powerful urge to pull out a clump of her perfectly coifed hair.
Recovery
After that, I began moderately exercising a bit. I tried pool running, which I liked, but I have the pool from hell, currently algae infested.
I bought a pair of densely padded Hoka One Ones and wore them to the gym where I found that walking and climbing on the Stairmaster was foot-pain free — no impact and I don’t land on my heel at all — and I could at least make my heart race and work up a good sweat. [Still, I suffer from several pounds of flesh on my body that I DO NOT WANT.]
Coach finally contacted me three weeks ago, which marked six full weeks of no running. He was pleased that I had followed instructions and we started with a schedule of 20-minute runs every other day.
The runs would be at a tempo level, pushing max heart rate, in order to improve my fitness quickly without stressing my body too much, he said.
The first of these sessions was performed at Lake Highlands High School’s track. It was 100 degrees at 6 p.m. Underestimating the potential power of a 20 minute run, I started out at about a 6.5 minute mile pace. That didn’t work. Within five minutes, my heart felt like it was going to burst through my chest and explode midair like an overinflated balloon. The subsequent workouts have been run at between a 7:05-7:15 minute-mile pace with a little push at the end.
I am a far cry from where I was last fall, but, hey, I am running again. I will be OK as long as I can consistently keep in my bloodstream a steady flow of that magical stuff with which running injects my psyche.
AdvertisementsLatch is introducing a new smart door lock today that can be controlled with an iPhone. It’s called the Latch C, and in addition to iPhone control through Apple’s HomeKit platform, it has all the same smart features as the original Latch door lock: a built-in camera to see who’s at your door, the ability to use passcodes and cards instead of a key, and a recorded log of who’s come through.
The Latch C is much smaller than the original Latch lock, called the Latch M, because it’s designed for a different type of doorlock. Where the Latch M was built for tall mortise locks, the Latch C is meant for simpler cylindrical deadbolts, which aren’t attached to the knob. That allows the unit be a lot smaller while still offering the same features — though it also means that, like the M, it can only fit on certain types of doors.
Unfortunately, whether your door is compatible with a Latch lock doesn’t really matter, because you still can’t actually buy one. Rather than sell directly to consumers, Latch has built its business around selling locks to the real estate companies that build and operate apartment buildings. It’s hoping new and existing apartments will outfit residents’ doors with Latch locks, giving the units a high-tech perk.
Latch offers conveniences to real estate companies, too. Those companies want locks that log comings and goings for security reasons, and Latch provides a website for building owners to manage all of their installed locks and the ability to audit who’s come through them. Locks cost $399 each (it also sells an electronic model called the Latch R), and they require an ongoing subscription to Latch’s management service.
Latch isn’t sharing how many doors its locks are installed on yet, nor will it say when it plans to start selling directly to consumers, which its website suggests will happen eventually. “It is less typical for individuals to own their own units in [modern apartment buildings] and so we've focused on selling to large building owners directly,” Latch CEO Luke Schoenfelder wrote in an email to The Verge.
As for other smart platforms, like Google Assistant and Alexa, Schoenfelder said that Latch sees “a variety of interesting opportunities” but said that Apple has “done a phenomenal job” addressing security concerns. It should also be possible for the Latch M to eventually be updated with HomeKit support, though Schoenfelder only said that additional details of Latch’s HomeKit implementation would be announced in the future.This was a home run meal for my husband and me. It's a good recipe for a lot of reasons: we like to eat lots of vegetables, we like to do some gluten-free options a few nights a week, and I like to eat low-carb almost all of the time. And, once we learned that Cabot Cheddars are lactose-free, recipes like this, that use cheese as a binder, became an option for us.
For my son, this recipe was a big miss. Our 4 year-old really loves cauliflower, especially when it's roasted. But when you start messing around with his pizza and combining the two, that's when he draws the line.
I looked around online for a recipe to start with and stumbled upon this one from Fit Sugar. It was a good starting point, but with a little tweaking of the recipe, you will get a more consistent (and flavorful) "pizza dough". This recipe, when cooked in a pan or on a griddle could be used as a bun too. I'll post more if we end up making any cauliflower buns for our burgers!The humble tomato could be a suitable carrier for an oral vaccine against Alzheimer’s disease, according to HyunSoon Kim from the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB) in Korea and colleagues from Digital Biotech Inc. and the Department of Biological Science at Wonkwang University.
Although their research is still in the early stages, it is a promising first step towards finding an edible vaccine against the neurodegenerative disease.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia and it progresses over a long period of time. It is thought to be caused by the accumulation of human beta-amyloid, a toxic insoluble fibrous protein in the brain, which leads to the death of neurons. Reducing the accumulation of beta-amyloid may inhibit the degeneration of the nervous system and therefore prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. One approach is to stimulate the immune system to reduce beta-amyloid in the brain.
Kim and colleagues’ aim was to develop a plant-derived vaccine against Alzheimer’s disease, since beta-amyloid is toxic to animal cells. Tomatoes are an attractive candidate as a vaccine carrier because they can be eaten without heat treatment, which reduces the risk of destroying the immune stimulation potential of the foreign protein. The researchers inserted the beta-amyloid gene into the tomato genome and measured the immune responses to the tomato-derived toxic protein in a group of 15-month-old mice.
They immunized the mice orally with the transgenic tomato plants once a week for three weeks, and also gave the mice a booster seven weeks after the first tomato feed. Blood analyses showed a strong immune response after the booster, with the production of antibodies to the human foreign protein.
The authors conclude: “Although we did not reveal a reduction of existing plaques in the brain of mice challenged with tomato-derived beta-amyloid…this study represents a unique approach in which transgenic plants expressing beta-amyloid protein are used to produce a vaccine.” The team is currently looking at strategies to increase the potency of the tomato-based vaccine, because fresh tomatoes contain only 0.7% protein and levels of foreign protein are even lower.Six Brothers Charged With Allegedly Sexually Abusing Sister
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Six brothers from a North Carolina family have been accused of sexually abusing a now 16-year-old girl.
Eric, 27, Jon, 25, Matthew, 23, Nathaniel, 21, Benjamin, 19, and Aaron Jackson, 18, allegedly abused the teenager for over 10 years, starting when she was 4. While parents John Jackson, 65, and Nita Jackson, 54, were reportedly aware of the incidents and at one point witnessed the acts, they did not intervene, stated WVEC.
According to the blog Spiritual Sounding Board, two of the brothers attended Hope Baptist Church, which is headed by Scott Brown, who "has had very close ties with the now defunct Vision Forum Ministries and recently fallen Christian patriarchal leader, Doug Phillips."
The site also claims that the victim is the brothers' younger sister.
"It's disgusting that you would think, that parents knew that something like this was going on and just let it go," Sheriff Eric Tilley told 13News Now. "That's disgusting."
Authorities first heard of the incident after one of the brothers repented of it to his pastor and the church leader convinced him to go to authorities in 2012. Two of his brothers corroborated his claims and the victim earlier this year also claimed they were true.
"Said, you know, that's not a normal situation. That's not the way a normal family lives, this is absolutely wrong and to do the right thing, you need to go and talk with the authorities," Tilley explained.
"When he came in and told us that, our initial belief was that we probably wouldn't get far with this case. We probably knew we were gonna get some resistance because this family is, like I said, they're close-knit. They stay to themselves, you know, they didn't go to school, so they're not really out socially," Tilley said.
Curtis Trueblood, who lives several miles away from the Jacksons, described the family as a "secretive bunch."
Another neighbor, Bette Butler, whose son grew up with the Jacksons, said she "never suspected anything."
"They first moved here, we did have them to dinner a couple times. They seemed like really normal people, normal children," Butler told WVEC. "There wasn't a lot of interaction between the Jacksons and people in the area much. I mean, they pretty much kept to themselves."
According to WVEC, "although the brothers supposedly were home-schooled, their level of education seemed low. The oldest, Eric, had difficulty writing his name when he spoke to investigators."
The family, the majority of which moved to Colorado in 2013, is scheduled to appear in court on May 19. The brothers are currently in prison in North Carolina, each under secured bonds of up-to $150,000, while the parents paid $15,000 bond and returned to Colorado.
The family has 11 children. The victim reached out to Child Protective Services after North Carolina authorities traveled to Colorado to learn more about the allegations.Last weekend anti-immigration activists staged a protest in Infernetto, a suburb of Rome. The demonstrators objected to a refugee center in the neighborhood, which they said brings crime and instability to the area.
The following video shows Mario Borghezio, an MEP for Lega Nord, speaking out at the demonstration. Many thanks to par0 for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:
Below are excerpts from a report on the event posted by PressTV:
Italian activists stage protest against refugee center Nearly 100 Italian activists and local residents have gathered in a neighborhood near the capital, Rome, to show their anger at the activities of a center which hosts refugees and minor migrants. The protest was held in Infernetto neighborhood on the outskirts of Rome on Saturday. It was organized by far-right movement CasaPound, and was joined by anti-immigrants party Northern League which accuses foreigners of crimes in the neighborhood. CasaPound chief Simone Di Stefano claimed that the government of Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi cared more about illegal migrants than Italian citizens. Security forces were deployed outside the refugee center in order to avoid any violence.
Video transcript:Posted 03 September 2013 - 04:07 AM
conclude those numbers are 'Man Hours' of combat
1623 average |
% say their greater concern about government anti-terrorism policies is that they have gone too far in restricting the average person’s civil liberties, while 35% say they are more concerned that policies have not gone far enough to protect the country. This is the first time in Pew Research polling that more have expressed concern over civil liberties than protection from terrorism since the question was first asked in 2004.
As concern about civil liberties has grown, the issue now divides members of both parties. Roughly four-in-ten Republicans (43%) and Democrats (42%) say their greater concern over anti-terror policies is that they have gone too far in restricting civil liberties, up sharply from three years ago (25% and 33% in 2010, respectively).
Republicans and Democrats also express similar opinions about news coverage of secret government anti-terrorism programs: Nearly identical percentages in both parties (45% of Democrats, 43% of Republicans) say that the news media should report information it obtains about the secret methods the government uses to fight terrorism, while 51% in each party say it should not.
This marks a change in opinion among both parties since 2006, when Bush administration anti-terror surveillance programs faced scrutiny. In May 2006, a Gallup/USA Today poll found that most Democrats supported news reporting on secret anti-terror programs, while most Republicans said the press should not divulge this information.
Many Who Think Gov’t Has Accessed Their Data Support the Program
The public’s views of the government’s anti-terrorism efforts are complex, and many who believe the reach of the government’s data collection program is expansive still approve of the effort overall. In every case, however, those who view the government’s data collection as far-reaching are less likely to approve of the program than those who do not.
People who believe the government is collecting what is actually being said in emails and phone calls are divided over the overall program: About as many approve (47%) as d isapprove (50%) of the government’s collection of phone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts despite the impression that it is not limited to metadata.
Even among those who believe their own communications have been read or listened to, 40% approve of the program, while 58% disapprove.
Of those who say the government is using data for purposes other than to investigate terrorism, 43% approve of the government’s data collection; 53% disapprove. Among the small minority (22% of the public) that says the data is only being used to investigate terrorism, 71% approve while just 23% disapprove.
And those who say federal courts do not place adequate limits on the information the government can collect disapprove of the program by a 62%-36% margin. Conversely, those who say there are adequate limits approve of it, 75%-21%.
Some Suspect Political Motives in Use of Data
A broad majority of the public (70%) believes that the government also is using the data it collects through the NSA program for purposes other than to investigate terrorism. When those who express this view are asked an open-ended question about what other purposes the data is being used for, a range of responses are given, with many focusing on general concerns about government monitoring and spying.
About two-in-ten (19%) say the government is using this data to spy or “be nosy,” and another 14% say it is being used for general purposes or monitoring.
But some say the government is collecting this data for political purposes: 13% say the government has a political agenda, while another 5% say it is being used for general profiling or targeting, to target interest and religious groups or for tax purposes.
Rising Concern over Civil Liberties
Nearly half of Americans (47%) say their greater concern about government anti-terrorism policies is that they have gone too far in restricting the average person’s civil liberties; 35% say their greater concern is that they have not gone far enough to adequately protect the country. There has been a 15-point rise in the percentage saying their greater concern is civil liberties since Pew Research last asked the question in October 2010. This is the first time a plurality has expressed greater concern about civil liberties than security since the question was first asked in 2004.
The increase in concern about civil liberties has taken place across the board, with double-digit shifts in opinion among nearly all partisan and demographic groups. Republicans prioritized security over civil liberties by a 58%-25% margin in 2010. Today, Republicans are as likely to say their bigger concern is civil liberties (43%) as security (38%), a balance of opinion nearly identical to that among Democrats (42% civil liberties, 38% security).
While this change has been broad-based, the transformation among Tea Party Republicans stands out. Today, most Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters who agree with the Tea Party are more concerned that government programs are going too far in restricting civil liberties (55%). In October 2010, Tea Party Republican voters by about three-to-one (63% to 20%) said the programs did not go far enough in protecting the country.
Among Democrats and independents, increasing percentages also say their greater concern is that anti-terror policies have curbed civil liberties. About four-in-ten Democrats (42%) express this view, up from 33% three years ago. And the share of independents expressing greater concern over civil liberties has risen 17 points since 2010.
Those under the age of 30 stand out for their broad concern over civil liberties. By about two-to-one (60%-29%) young people say their bigger concern about the government’s anti-ter rorism policies is that they have gone too far in restricting the average person’s civil liberties rather than not going far enough to protect the country.
There is also a substantial gender gap: by a 51% to 29% margin men are more concerned that government policies have gone too far in restricting civil liberties. Women are divided, with 42% more worried about civil liberties and 40% more concerned that government policies haven’t gone far enough to protect the country.
Modest Partisan Differences in Perceptions of Data Collection
Overall, Democrats approve of the government’s data collection program by a 57%-36% margin, while Republicans (44% approve, 50% disapprove) and independents (47% approve, 48% disapprove) are more divided.
Republicans and independents also perceive the program as more far-reaching in scope and less limited. For example, 64% of Republicans and 67% of independents believe the government is collecting not only metadata but also what is being said in phone calls and emails; slightly fewer (58%) Democrats share this view.
However, these gaps in opinion are relatively modest, as half or more Democrats believe the program is not sufficiently limited by courts (51%), collects the content of communications (58%) and uses the data for purposes other than terrorism investigations (60%).
Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who agree with the Tea Party strongly disapprove of the NSA program. Overall, 62% of Tea Party Republicans disapprove of the government’s data collection program, while just 34% approve. By contrast, Republicans and Republican leaners who do not agree with the Tea Party are divided in their views of the program (51% approve, 45% disapprove).
Tea Party Republicans also express far more concern about the scope of the program. For example, fully 87% of Tea Party Republicans believe the government uses the data it collects for purposes other than terrorism investigations. When asked what other purposes the data is used for, the top answer among Tea Party Republicans – volunteered by 32% – is that the data is used to pursue political objectives or to target political opponents.
Should the Media Report on Government Anti-Terror Methods?
The public is divided over whether the news media should report on information it obtains about the secret methods the government is using to fight terrorism. About half (47%) say that the media should report on the government’s secret methods, while the same percentage says they should not; overall opinion on this question is little changed from May 2006.
Both Republicans and Democrats are split on this issue – 43% of Republicans and 45% of Democrats say the media should report on secret methods to fight terrorism, while 51% of both parties say that they should not.
In 2006, there were large partisan differences on this question. At that time, Democrats thought the media should report this information by a 59%-38% margin. Most Republicans (68%) thought the news media should not report on government anti-terrorism methods, while just 26% thought that they should.
On Terrorism, Concerns about Both Government and Media
The public’s division of opinion on whether or not the media should report the government’s anti-terror methods is informed by the fact that majorities agree both with two separate statements: that the government is too secretive and that media reports can harm anti-terror programs.
When asked if the media reports too much information that can harm the government’s anti-terrorism programs, 53% of the public agrees with this statement, while 43% disagree. At the same time, most (56%) also agree that the government keeps too much information about its anti-terrorism programs secret from the public.
Comparable majorities of both Republicans and Democrats express concerns that the media reports too much information that can harm government anti-terrorism programs and that the government keeps too much information about anti-terrorism programs secret from the public.
Overall, 28% of respondents agree with both statements. Among this group slightly more (55%) say the media should not report on the government’s secret anti-terrorism methods, while 41% say that they should.
Age and Views of Civil Liberties, Gov’t Surveillance
As noted, young people are more likely than older people to express concern that the government’s anti-terrorism policies go too far in restricting civil liberties.
And majorities of those under 30 (55%), as well those 30 to 49 (53%), say the news media should report on secret methods the government uses to fight terrorism. Older Americans are more opposed to the media covering secret anti-terror tactics.
Yet the large age differences about civil liberties, security and secrecy don’t translate into an equally sizeable divide over the NSA surveillance program itself. About as many young people approve (46%) as disapprove (49%) of the government’s data collection program. The age differences in overall opinions about the program are modest, with about half in older age groups approving of the program.Taxing trusts as if they were companies and applying a new top marginal tax rate on incomes of more than $1 million would raise billions of dollars for the Commonwealth budget and alleviate pressure to slash welfare programs for the genuinely needy, the Greens have said.
The country's third political force has commissioned an updated independent costing of the two proposals originally put forward by the Parliamentary Budget Office, as an alternative to a raft of harsh spending cuts being considered by the Abbott government.
Another option: The Greens are suggesting a new income tax rate as an alternative to harsh spending cuts by the Abbott government. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
The move has been calculated to illustrate the ways that Australia's rich and poor are being cast in the Abbott government's narrative of a budget emergency.
These measures have yet to be announced but speculation is rife in Canberra that the first Hockey budget could contain decisions to tighten eligibility for the age pension, make GP visits more expensive through the application of a co-payment by patients of $6, and even see a crackdown on eligibility for the Disability Support Pension.A regular question from my mailbag:
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I am in the process of up grading my computer. Where can I get a list of the WUSB for Linux?
Wireless USB adapters are pretty popular for desktop and laptop usage in home. It is capable of sending 480 Mbit/s at distances up to 3 meters and 110 Mbit/s at up to 10 meters. Newer N series can work at 270Mbit/s at up to 300 meters. However, 50-100 meters are acceptable ranges. Unfortunately, finding Linux compatible USB wireless adapter is a big challenge due to driver issues. Over a past few years, I’ve used and installed various USB wireless adapters and created my own small HCL for it. In this quick blog post I will list all working USB wireless adapter.
Buffalo WLI-UC-G300N
Buffalo’s Wireless-N WLI-UC-G300 compact USB 2.0 adapter is fully compatible with Linux. Currently I’m using this device with Ubuntu Linux 10.4 and it works out of box. No driver installation is required. Simply add your wireless WPA2 password and you will be hooked up to wireless network. The driver in latest version of Ubuntu kernel is broken and you need to install the driver from source code. (Driver Link for RT2870)
Asus USB-N13
Asus USB-N13 802.11n/g/b network adapter supports USB 2.0 wireless and speed up to 300Mbps Wireless data rates. I get superb connection speed upto 270Mbps and it was auto detected by Linux. (Driver Link for RT2870)
Belkin F5D8053 N Wireless USB Adapter (ver 3)
Belkin F5D8053 version 3 also works with Linux. It supports USB 2.0 wireless and speed up to 300Mbps at up to 300 meters. I’ve tested this one with Fedora Linux. (Driver Link for RT2870)
AboCom WU-5204
AboCom WU-5204 is another compact adapter which is fully compatible with Linux. It complies with IEEE 802.11n draft 3.0 and IEEE 802.11 b/g standards and works with USB 2.0/1.1. interface. This one worked and detected, however after some time it started to drop traffic for multimedia stuff. If possible avoid this one due to poor performance.
D-Link DWA-140
The D-Link RangeBooster NUSB Adapter (DWA-140) is a 802.11n compliant wireless client for your Linux desktop or notebook PC. I’ve tested this one with Fedora and Debian Linux. Like all other adapter it supports WPA and WPA2 security features. (Driver Link for RT2870)
EDIMAX EW-7718Un
EW-7718Un complies with 802.11n draft 2.0, the next generation wireless standard. With the advanced MIMO technology, it can support the data transmission rate up to 300Mbps. EW-7718Un stable wireless connection and high bandwidth enable you enjoying the network applications without any interruption with Linux based systems. (Driver Link for RT2870 #2 # 2 link)
TRENDNET TEW 664UB
TEW-664UB is 300Mbps dual band wireless N USB adapter. It is compliant with IEEE 802.11n standard and backwards compatible with IEEE 802.11g, IEEE 802.11b and IEEE 802.11a devices. It supports both WPA and WPA2 security.
SMC WUSBS-N3
The EZ Connect N 150Mbps Wireless USB2.0 Adapter (SMCWUSBS-N3) enables wireless connectivity to your desktop or notebook computer and provides improved throughput and range while maintaining full backwards compatibility with the Wireless-G (802.11g) and Wireless-B (802.11b) standards.
ZyXEL NWD-211AN and NWD-270N
ZyXEL NWD-211AN and NWD-270N both works with Linux operating systems. It complies with 802.11n (2.4GHz and 5GHz) and backwards compatible with IEEE 802.11a/b/g. It supports wireless security transmission with WPA/WPA2 and 802.1x.
Sparklan WUBR-501
Sparklan WUBR-501 use USB 2.0 interface and speed up to 300Mbps. It support WPA and WPA2 security.
AirLink101 AWLL6090
AWLL6090 Wireless 300N USB Adapter delivers speeds up to 300Mbps. This USB adapter is fully backward compatible with 802.11b/g and RoHS compliant.
ConnectGear WU260N
ConnectGear WU260N Wireless N USB Adapter 802.11n/g/b supports speed upto 300Mbps with USB 2.0 or 1.1 ports. It’s also backward compatible with the existing IEEE802.11g and 802.11b standards for existing wireless networks. Both WPA and WPA2 are supported by this device.
Penguin 802.11G USB Wireless Network Adapter
It is one of the few USB wifi cards with a chipset that has free drivers and firmware for 802.11N. Almost impossible to find elsewhere. May be one of the only that is even compatible with free distributions like Trisquel.
Notes
Most of the above devices are automatically installed. If not try updating your kernel version. I hope this post will save some time for readers while purchasing USB wireless adapter for Linux operating systems.
The list is for information and ready references only. Please do your own research before purchasing any device listed here.
See also:
HowTo Install Device Driver Under Ubuntu Linux.
Share on Facebook TwitterNRA Board Member Cites The Holocaust As Reason To Not Fill Out Gun Safety Survey December 12, 2013 4:45 PM EST ››› Blog ›››››› TIMOTHY JOHNSON
National Rifle Association board member Scott Bach wondered on NRA News how the mayor of Jersey City could support a gun safety survey because the mayor is a retired Marine and his grandparents survived the Holocaust. Bach is the head of the official New Jersey NRA affiliate organization, Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs, and has served on the NRA board since 2003. On December 10, Associated Press reported that Jersey City, New Jersey Mayor Steven Fulop included a six question survey about gun safety in instructions for gun vendors to bid on contracts worth $350,000 to provide Jersey City with firearms and ammunition. Among the survey's inquiries are questions about whether the vendor sells assault weapons to the general public and if they take steps to prevent illegal gun trafficking. Fulop told AP that he hopes other cities will follow his lead of inserting a "social responsibility component" into the bidding process for government contracts: A 37-year-old former Marine, Fulop said he hopes larger cities will join the effort. Nearly every other industry, from construction to the garment industry, has some social responsibility component, he said, so why not gun manufacturers, dealers and vendors?
On the December 11 episode of NRA News' Cam & Company, Bach claimed that Fulop's survey was evidence he "is not getting it," in part because his grandparents survived the Holocaust:
BACH: Succeeding [the previous mayor] is a guy named Steve Fulop, who is actually relatively young, but it seems like it's a requirement if you're going to be a Jersey City mayor you have to by default be anti-gun. And here is the interesting thing about this guy, Cam. He's an ex-Marine. Well, what I should say is, he worked for Goldman Sachs in the financial industry and was close to 9-11 when it happened and he was motivated to join the Marines for a few years, which he did. His grandparents were Holocaust survivors according to Wikipedia. So you've got to wonder why he is not getting it. CAM EDWARDS, HOST: Right. BACH: And you know, look, I'm calling for a boycott of Jersey City by manufacturers, they should all refuse to fill out this questionnaire. You should not be politicizing the process of procuring firearms for your law enforcement agency, you shouldn't be politicizing that.
Right-wing media and the NRA frequently distort the history of the Holocaust in order to falsely suggest that restrictions on gun ownership in Germany were responsible for Hitler's ascent to power. In a July 2012 interview with Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, a fringe group that has been criticized by the Anti-Defamation League, Bach suggested, "Ironically, Hitler was pro-gun control."PARIS (Reuters) - The man tipped to unseat Nicolas Sarkozy as French president accidentally backed an austerity plan hatched by Sarkozy’s conservative government when it was put to a vote in parliament.
Voting records showed that Socialist Francois Hollande, the pollsters’ favourite to win next year’s presidential ballot, broke rank with his party to side with the conservative camp when the National Assembly voted on the austerity measures on Wednesday.
An aide of Hollande offered an explanation for the error: Hollande had asked another Socialist to register his vote in his absence and the colleague erroneously voted yes rather than no in an electronic ballot, both for himself and for Hollande.
The government’s 12-billion-euro austerity plan, which includes the abolition of tax breaks and a higher tax on sugary drinks, was approved by the lower house of parliament by a margin of 163 votes to 97, so it is set to sail through parliament and would have done so irrespective of the embarrassing mishap.
Jerome Cahuzac, the man asked to execute the proxy vote for Hollande, is head of the parliamentary finance committee and seen by some as a possible finance minister if the left wins power in a double dose of presidential and parliamentary elections between late April and early June 2012.
Hollande currently enjoys a comfortable lead over others in the competition to select a Socialist presidential challenger, in a primary contest that will conclude in October. Regular polls of voter intentions also consistently show him beating Sarkozy in the presidential showdown.March 9, 2014 at 11:45 AM
Here’s why Seahawk free-agent-to-be defensive end Michael Bennett decided to wait to see what might be out there before signing with anyone — the deal Minnesota’s Everson Griffen got today from the Vikings.
Griffen signed what is being reported as a five-year deal worth a total of $42 million, with $20 million guaranteed.
Griffen, like Bennett, was due to be an unrestricted free agent Tuesday, and generally was ranked behind Bennett on the list of potentially available defensive ends. NFL.com, for instance, slotted Bennett eighth on its list of the top free agents (and third among DEs) with Griffen at 19th (and fourth among DEs).
Griffen, who played at USC for Pete Carroll, is almost exactly two years younger than Bennett (Bennett will turn 29 on Nov. 13), but Bennett has the better numbers (17.5 sacks the last two seasons, while Griffen has that many in the last three).
So expect that Bennett and his agent, Drew Rosenhaus, will examine this deal closely — which calls for $27 million over the first three years — and will want something similar, if not a bit more (here’s one analysis calling the Griffen a potential disaster).
Will the Seahawks, though, want to give Bennett $10 million a year over three or four years?
If so, it would make him the second-highest paid player on the team (for now) behind Percy Harvin, who is due to make $13.4 million in 2014, and Russell Okung ($11.24 million). (Source for salaries here).
By this time next week, we’ll undoubtedly know the answer to that question.
What is already clear is that the $10 million boost in the salary cap — to $133 million in 2014 from $123 in 2013 — is heating up the market, the effects of which Bennett (and Rosenhaus) unquestionably wanted to gauge before locking Bennett into anything, especially considering this is the one moment in his career when he has a chance to really cash in.
Bennett turned out to be one of the bigger bargains in the NFL in 2014, playing on a one-year deal that ended up paying him $4.8 million.
Bennett, though, is clearly moving into the big time now. As I was finishing this, I saw this Tweet from the NFL’s Media PR account:
Tomorrow on @NFL_AM catch the debut of a new weekly segment with Martellus & Michael Bennett. Airs around 8:35 AM ET — NFL Media PR (@InsideNFLMedia) March 9, 2014
We’ll see what that means down the road.In March 2015, the Hatnote team (volunteer developers Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi) announced that the “Humble Hashtag is now on Wikipedia”, launching the first hashtag search tool for Wikipedia edits.
Every Wikipedia edit is accompanied by an edit summary, a short description of the changes made in each revision. If you include a hashtag in the edit summary, you will see your edit appear on the search page alongside other similar edits.
One year later, hashtags are providing vital insight into Wikipedia editing events in over a dozen languages. This post explores some of the success stories made possible by dedicated volunteers using hashtags on Wikipedia.
Mobilizing the world’s librarians
One of Wikipedia’s biggest movements has been the Wikipedia Library’s #1lib1ref. In January 2016, the Wikipedia Library (@WikiLibrary) asked librarians and Wikipedia volunteers around the world to imagine “if every librarian added one more reference to Wikipedia.”
This campaign continues today, its global momentum still building in part by #1lib1ref usage on mainstream social media, but also on Wikipedia itself.
Hashtags not only spur interest, but are prove effective in archiving contribution history and gauging editor reach. Previously editors would report their edits to organizers, who really had to work to maintain complete records. Now, new editors need little to no explanation and, The Wikipedia Library organizers can watch the contributions roll in.
That said, even the most experienced editors need a reminder. Getting remote participants around the world to write useful edits summaries continues to be a challenge — and we expect the 1250 edits with the hashtag to underestimate participation in the campaign by as much as 50%. For our notes on best practices and and more about the #1lib1ref campaign, check out our lessons learned.
So easy a robot can do it
Wikipedia editing never stops, and volunteer automation in the form of bots help keep the edits going around the clock. These bots fill tedious gaps, usually with small edits that add up to make a big difference, allowing more editors to work on harder problems.
One of these tireless bots is User:Cyberpower678’s Cyberbot II. This bot fixes dead links on English Wikipedia by pointing to backups provided by the Internet Archive. But in its thousands of edits per day, Cyberbot II also has other jobs, like fighting spam. By simply adding #iabot to its archive link edits, the bot keeps a record of the deadlink task within its other work, and everyone can see it has replaced links on almost 90,000 pages—over 200,000 links saved!
Similarly, on Wikidata, Wikipedia’s structured data sister project, there have been a number of tools transforming the tedious into something easy and fun, like Magnus’s Wikidata Game. The Wikidata Game and other similar tools now use hashtags to show how different people contribute to Wikidata.
Fostering diversity
Still other hashtags have been used to maximize the impact of our communities working on improving balance on Wikipedia. Take, for example, the usage of the hashtag during a recent editathon at the Helsinki University Library Kaisa House in Finland focused on prominent women.
Photo by Wikimedia Finland, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Organizers asked the event’s 100+ participants, many of whom were new editors, to use the hashtag #satanaista, meaning “100 Women” in Finnish. One of the event’s organizers, Teemu Perhiö of Wikimedia Finland (Suomi), said, “hashtags were easy to teach to the audience as it is something they are used to in other social media.” For the organizers, hashtags provided an easy way to explain a very particular part of Wikipedia’s design and culture: “the edit summary is sometimes confusing; people don’t know what to write, so now at least they had simple guideline to it, just add the hashtag!”
For Finnish Wikipedia, the visibility of the hashtags makes them a catchy convention. Bigger Wikipedias see dozens of edits per minute, often burying hashtagged summaries. Perhiö writes “edits with hashtags were visible on our Recent Changes feed, making the hashtag more meaningful in Finnish Wikipedia due to the smaller editor base.” For them, the right hashtag signified a well-meaning edit: “Experienced Wikipedians noticed the hashtag and could easily realise when edits were related to the event. Knowing this, Wikipedians could tune their approach and assume good faith more easily.”
Other editors have used hashtags to help follow editing related to the March Art+Feminism event, the Wikipedia Gender Gap, and editing related to the Eemhuis in Amersfoot, Netherlands.
Hashtags for every Wikimedian!
Ultimately, we hope to see the hashtag become useful for a whole range of Wikimedia communities and projects, and you can help. In the short term, experiment with the hashtags in your own language community! If you use the hashtag in a new or novel way, let us know!
If you plan to use hashtags on a currently unsupported Wikimedia wiki or discover a bug, report an issue to Hatnote on Github. Also, if you care as much about community organization as we do, join the conversation about making hashtag support an integral part of Mediawiki!
Alex Stinson, Project Manager, The Wikipedia Library
Stephen LaPorte*
*While Stephen works with the Wikimedia Foundation, his involvement here has been only in his volunteer capacity.
All screenshots in this article are from Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi, public domain/CC0.BOSTON (CBS) – The fate of Boston’s bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics is now in the hands of the U.S. Olympic Committee.
Mayor Marty Walsh says he won’t put the taxpayers at risk and sign a host city agreement without getting the chance to put proper protections in for taxpayers and protect them from cost overruns.
Walsh called a hastily arranged news conference Monday to address reports that the USOC wants Walsh to sign the agreement right away or Boston would lose it’s bid.
“I refuse to mortgage the future of the city away. I refuse to put Boston on the hook for overruns,” Walsh said, adding that it’s now up to the USOC to decide if they will continue with Boston’s bid.
“They want us to sign the contract as soon as possible,” Walsh told reporters, but noted, he can’t do that.
“They didn’t give us a date, but I’m assuming it’s soon,” he said.
“If committing to signing a guarantee today is what’s required to move forward, then Boston is no longer pursuing the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic games,” Walsh said.
There has been no comment yet from the USOC.
The USOC’s board members were scheduled to have a conference call with Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker at 9:30 a.m., reportedly to get his stance on the Boston 2024 bid.
There’s no word yet on what happened in that call.
But Baker said last week he won’t commit to the bid until he sees the full report from a consultant group he commissioned to analyze the bid.
That report isn’t expected to be released until next month.
The official deadline for the committee to submit a U.S. city bid to the International Olympic Committee is September 15.
If the USOC pulls Boston’s bid, it’s believed Los Angeles would take its place.
Watch: Entire Mayor Walsh News Conference
WBZ NewsRadio 1030’s Kim Tunnicliffe reportsBob Weir, Mickey Hart and Steve Kimock Are in the Studio
It appears as if Mickey Hart, Bob Weir and Steve Kimock are in the studio for some type of session and/or rehearsal. Hart posted the above photo to his Facebook page last night with the caption, “Men at work, searching for the grail.”
Interestingly enough, the top comment on the post is from Bill Kreutzmann, who says, “Save me a seat, Mick!”
Whether or not Weir and Hart (and potentially Kreutzmann) are meeting up to run through songs for the Fare Thee Well shows remains to be seen, however Trey Anastasio did offer up some insight into the rehearsal process, saying that he and Weir planned to meet up sometime in the near future to start working through material.Woke up this morning to some unexpected roster changes (Universe and Arteezy leaving EG and joining Secret instead of Misery and w33). What surprises me the most is that Universe is leaving EG but with that said it’s impossible to know what has been going on in the team or what kind of offer he got so not much more to say. Always sad for the players that gets kicked but on the bright side two of em just won a Major. I guess almost everyone has their eyes set on TI though but winning a Major is huge as well! Hope everything turns out well for everyone in the end!
It’s gonna be interesting to see what happens with the invites for the Manila major, how many Chinese teams that Valve will invite. I think the Starladder tournament (SL iLeague Dota Invitational) where LGD and VG are playing will decide whether or not they will receive invites. If they end up finishing last at Starladder, together with the bad results at the Shanghai major it’s probably hard to justify an invite for them, but at the same time it’s weird to not invite any Chinese teams at all so all of them will have to fight for two slots in the qualifier.. Oh well, we’ll see what happens! 🙂
The “Spring cleaning” updates regarding game play was for example about hit boxes when selecting wards. I’m a bit 50/50 here – one part of me really dislike that you can see the neutral camp boxes because I’ve enjoyed that part of the game with knowing the exact spots to block camps and where to de-ward. At the same time I understand that for a new player it’s very hard to get into the game and know all these things so in that sense it’s a good change. Not much to do about it though, I should just be happy I don’t have to sit and practice wards spots anymore! 😀
Cheers,
AkkeI found this on wikipedia. A left-handed individual may be known as a southpaw, particularly within sports in the United States. It is widely accepted that the term originates in baseball[12]. Ballparks are often designed so that the batter is facing east, in order that the afternoon or evening sun does not shine in his eyes. This means that left-handed pitchers are throwing from the south side. The first use of the term is credited to Finley Peter Dunne. However, the Oxford English Dictionary lists a non-baseball citation for "south paw", meaning a punch with the left hand, as early as 1848[13], just three years after the first organized baseball game. In boxing (not just in the United States) someone who boxes left-handed is usually referred to as southpaw. They are often considered trickier opponents than the more common right-hander. The term is also used to refer to a stance in which the boxer places his right foot in front of his left. (In the film Rocky, Rocky Balboa says the term came from a boxer named Paul, whose left arm always faced south to New Jersey.)
Cheryl · 3 years ago 0 Thumbs up 0 Thumbs down Report AbuseSome 2,500 people — including hundreds of families — currently live in squalid conditions inside the camp in Grande-Synthe, which is built on a patch of marshland by the A16 motorway that connects Dunkirk to the port city of Calais. Dunkirk, which is a smaller port with less security than Calais, has been attracting migrants who are hoping to get to the UK by ferry.
The shooting, he added, appeared to be a "settling of scores" between rival bands of smugglers. Investigators are still determining what set off the dispute. When contacted by VICE News Wednesday, a spokesperson for Grande-Synthe town hall characterized the shooting as an incident "between smugglers" and declined further comment on the situation.
"We were informed last night that they were directly involved in the shooting," he said.
Eric Fouard, Dunkirk's public prosecutor, told VICE News that the four people in custody were Iraqi Kurds who were injured in the shooting.
Four migrants were taken into custody on Wednesday following a shooting Tuesday at the Grande-Synthe migrant camp near Dunkirk, in northern France.
Read more
Four migrants were taken into custody on Wednesday following a shooting Tuesday at the Grande-Synthe migrant camp near Dunkirk, in northern France.
Eric Fouard, Dunkirk's public prosecutor, told VICE News that the four people in custody were Iraqi Kurds who were injured in the shooting.
"We were informed last night that they were directly involved in the shooting," he said.
The shooting, he added, appeared to be a "settling of scores" between rival bands of smugglers. Investigators are still determining what set off the dispute. When contacted by VICE News Wednesday, a spokesperson for Grande-Synthe town hall characterized the shooting as an incident "between smugglers" and declined further comment on the situation.
Some 2,500 people — including hundreds of families — currently live in squalid conditions inside the camp in Grande-Synthe, which is built on a patch of marshland by the A16 motorway that connects Dunkirk to the port city of Calais. Dunkirk, which is a smaller port with less security than Calais, has been attracting migrants who are hoping to get to the UK by ferry.
The Grande-Synthe camp is seen as a strategic location by the people smugglers who operate around the port of Dunkirk and on a nearby service area. Aid workers have described the conditions in Grande-Synthe as far worse than those in Calais's infamous "Jungle" settlement — a precarious camp that houses nearly 5,000 migrants and refugees.
Shots rang out at the camp around 4:30pm on Tuesday, triggering a massive police intervention. Riot police were also dispatched to the scene, cordoning off the area and interrupting traffic in the neighboring area. Local residents were ordered to stay indoors.
Police and riot police moved into the camp around 6:30pm, carrying out searches to locate any weapons or suspects. "All the officers found were 9mm cartridges — five in total — that came from a handgun," said Fouard.
"By [Wednesday] morning, the situation was back to normal," a spokesperson for the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) told VICE News.
MSF is one of the only humanitarian aid groups with a regular presence in the slum — a sprawling tent city in a flood-prone area.
In Photos: Dunkirk's Refugee Wasteland, Even Worse Than the Calais Jungle
"Our teams were on site earlier this morning and they will carry on |
persistent uncertainties in the chronology of archaeological sites at the so called Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition in Europe (23⇓–25) and in the taxonomic affiliation of their inhabitants during this period (26⇓–28).
Recent excavations at Gorham’s Cave led to the discovery in an area at the back of the cavity, below basal archaeological level IV, of an abstract pattern engraved into the bedrock. Level IV is an archaeological horizon containing exclusively Mousterian artifacts (29⇓–31) deposited between 38.5 and 30.5 cal kyr BP (29, 32) (SI Appendix, Table S1). In this paper, we describe this engraving, provide additional contextual data demonstrating its attribution to Mousterian Neanderthals, reconstruct how it was created, and discuss implications of our findings for Neanderthal culture and cognition.
Gorham’s Cave Gorham's Cave is located in Gibraltar, a small promontory situated at the southern extreme of the Iberian Peninsula (Fig. 1). The eastern side of Gibraltar faces the Mediterranean Sea and is subjected to intense wave action, which has led to the formation of steep cliffs and large sea cavities (33). Gorham’s Cave is one of these caverns. In the cave, the surface of fresh rock is a white, slightly crystallized lime-dolostone of Jurassic age. In its natural state, the same rock is light gray, fine-grained, and rough because of surface weathering caused by condensation of sea spray, mainly during the summer season, when the humid easterlies are dominant. Within the cave, the weathering of this rock has produced a network of 10–40 mm deep × 1–9 mm wide dissolution cracks (SI Appendix, Fig. S1). Fig. 1. Location of Gorham’s Cave, Gibraltar, in the Iberian Peninsula and schematic map of the Gibraltar Peninsula with altitudes and contours at 100-m intervals (Upper Left), topographic plan of Gorham’s Cave showing the location of the engraving (Upper Right), and interpretative geological section of Gorham’s Cave based on the work of Jiménez-Espejo et al. (33) (Lower). (Inset) Location of levels III and IV within the general cave sequence. Starting in 1989, sections of Gorham’s Cave have been excavated as part of the Gibraltar Caves Project, under the supervision of the Gibraltar Museum. The long-term occupation of this site by Neanderthals first came to light in the 1950s (34), and numerous subsequent excavations in the cave entrance have been performed (35). The inner sector was excavated at the beginning of this century by the Gibraltar Museum, and the first results were published by Finlayson et al. (29). Fig. 1 shows a chronostratigraphic interpretative section of Gorham’s Cave, based on the work of Jiménez-Espejo et al. (33) previous publications (29, 34, 36⇓–38), and new data. The nature and sedimentary features of the fill of the cave differ between the entrance and the inner sector. The sequence at the entrance is characterized by a massive aeolian accumulation related to transgressive coastal dunes that migrated during Marine Isotope Stage 3 highstand substages and/or cold, arid periods. These sandy sediments, coming from nearby pocket beaches, covered the emerged shore platform (32) and reached the foot of the cliffs in places even climbing the slopes as thick sand ramps. In the inner sector (also known as the Upper Gallery), the sedimentary sequence is thinner and composed mostly of fallen fragments of roof and wall, aeolian dust, and karstic clay, owing to the cave morphology. X-ray diffraction (XRD) indicates that the sediments inside the cave are composed predominantly of clay minerals, calcite and quartz, with small quantities of dolomite, ankerite, and feldspars (29). In this sector, archaeological levels III and IV are of clearly different textural composition. Level III, of a mean depth of ∼60 cm, consists of a sandy sediment with dark-brown clay in a sandy matrix with a strong organic component that includes discrete lumps of charcoal. Fallen fragments of angular limestone and speleothem are a feature of the middle part of this level. Level IV is a 25- to 46-cm–thick beige-colored pure clay horizon with an abundance of discrete lumps of charcoal and a hearth (29, 32) (SI Appendix, Table S1). Levels III and IV also differ in elemental composition, with the former containing close to twice the Mg/Al and the highest K/Al ratio. Such marked variation suggests a sudden change in environmental conditions (29). Level IV is attributed to the Mousterian, based on the technology and typology of the stone tools found therein (30, 31) (SI Appendix, SI Text, Fig. S2, and Table S2). The 294 lithics from this level are composed chiefly of three varieties of flint and a fine-grained quartzite, which can be found on fossil beach deposits near the cave and in flint seams in the Jurassic units of the rock. Technological analysis of the assemblage indicates that the knappers used discoidal and Levallois reduction methods. Evidence for this includes seven discoidal cores and three Levallois cores, two of which were prepared using the recurrent centripetal technique; identification of a range of deliberate platform preparation types, including monofacial, bifacial, and multifacial faceting; the presence of Levallois flakes; and the dominance of flakes over blades. The size of the flint flakes appears to be conditioned by the small size of the nodules available in the breccia at the entrance of the cave. The retouched tools most often seen in the level IV assemblage are sidescrapers and denticulates. Notches and pieces with abrupt retouches are present as well. Lithics with Upper Paleolithic technological and typological affinities are absent in this level (31). In contrast, the lithics from the overlying level III lack Middle Paleolithic features, display Upper Paleolithic affinities, and include tools and debitage pieces diagnostic of the Solutrean (29) (SI Appendix, Fig. S3 and Table S3). No tools and debitage pieces characteristic of the Early Upper Paleolithic (Aurignacian, Gravettian) are found in this assemblage. The vertical distribution of culturally diagnostic artifacts recovered in the 90-cm band of sediment above the engraving shows no indication of admixture between the two levels or localized intrusion of Upper Palaolithic items into Mousterian level IV (SI Appendix, Fig. S4). This indicates that the engraving was carved into the bedrock before the accumulation of Mousterian level IV and was protected by at least 40 cm of sediment after deposition of that level. Radiocarbon dating has provided a large time span for level IV, ranging from 38.5 to 30.5 cal kyr BP, controversially interpreted as possible evidence of a late Neanderthal survival in southern Iberia (26, 29, 37). Such controversy does not appear to have significant implications for the dating of the engraving, which logically must be older than the oldest—and for this reason, probably also more reliable—14C determination from level IV (38.5 cal kyr BP), obtained from a sample collected at the very bottom of this level.
The Engraving The engraving is found on a flat area located at the center of a 1-m2 natural platform of the bedrock elevated 40 cm over the cave floor (SI Appendix, Fig. S5). Covering an area of ∼300 cm2, it consists of eight deeply engraved lines (L1–L8) forming an incomplete criss-cross pattern, obliquely intersected by two groups of three (L9–L11) and two (L12 and L13) short thin lines (Fig. 2). The overlying 40-cm level IV sediment was excavated during the 1997–2005 and 2011–2012 field seasons. The engraved pattern differs strikingly from the 1- to 4-cm–deep alteration cracks and other networks of natural fissures present on the exposed surfaces of the fine-grained lime-dolostone of the cave (SI Appendix, Fig. S1). Fig. 2. (A) Engraving from Gorham’s Cave. (B) Engraved lines L1–L13. Dark gray and light gray identify old and recent breaks, respectively. (SI Appendix, Fig. S21 shows the order of the engraving lines, breaks, and formation of the duricrust.) Note that the “Analysis North” shown here was used only to describe the order of the engraving lines. Three thin layers are identified on the engraved rock surface (Fig. 3 and SI Appendix, Fig. S6): a white 2- to 4-mm–thick lower layer 1, a light-brown 0.5-mm–thick intermediate and discontinuous layer 2, and an upper black 0.1- to 1-mm–thick layer 3. The engraved lines are covered only by layer 3, whereas the unmodified rock surface is covered by all three layers. Mineralogical and elemental analysis revealed marked differences in composition across these layers (SI Appendix, Figs. S7 and S8). Layers 1 and 2 contain a substantial proportion of calcite and dolomite coming from the substrate, along with neoformation of hydroxylapatite [Ca 5 (PO 4 ) 3 OH]. Layer 3 is a duricrust composed of Mn-rich hydroxylapatite [Mn 2 Ca 3 (PO 4 ) 3 OH] (39). Such differences and microstratigraphy indicate that layer 1 is a white alterite that formed as a result of ancient weathering of the lime-dolostone substrate. It was on this weathered rock surface that the engraving was made. Subsequently, the rock was covered by deposition of archaeological level IV, consisting of blown dust/sand, karstic clay, guano, and archaeological remains. As it fell on the sediments, percolating water and bat acidic urine (rich in phosphate ions) altered minerals composing level IV and caused the migration of cations toward the bottom of this level, at the contact between the engraving-bearing alterite and the sediment. Fig. 3. Formation of the three layers of rock alteration in which the engraving is located. Phase 1 refers to the process of alteration by weathering of the exposed lime-dolostone surface (layer 1). The archaeological engraved marks were made on this weathered (soft) surface, which was covered by the Middle Paleolithic sediments of level IV (phase 2). The downward migration of phosphorus and manganese and the upward migration of magnesium and calcium generated two new alteration layers (2 and 3) from the original weathering layer 1 (phase 3). The duricrust layer 3, composed of Mn-rich apatite, protected the original engraving with a black endured coat. Finally, the archaeological excavations at Gorham's Cave exposed this ancient engraved rock surface (phase 4). The manganese component of layer 3 likely derives from the decomposition of organic matter present on the surface during the accumulation of stratigraphic level III. This is consistent with the high proportion of organic matter observed in level III and mechanisms proposed to account for the deposition of manganese in cave environments (40). Epigenesis of the calcareous substrate by phosphorous- and manganese-rich solutions led to differentiation of layers 2 and 3 from the top of layer 1. In the engraving, where the weathered lime-dolostone composing layer 1 was removed by the engraving process, a slight epigenesis of the rock occurred, forming only layer 3. This type of epigenetic process is responsible for the excellent preservation of the grooves’ microfeatures by hardening of the bedrock surface; layer 3 has protected the engraving with a thin mineral coat (Fig. 3). Chemical analysis of the duricrust (SI Appendix, Figs. S7 and S8) and observation of lime-dolostone weathering patterns resulting from condensation on the cave wall and bedrock suggest that at the moment at which the engraving was made, the surface of the otherwise extremely hard lime-dolostone was affected by some degree of weathering that facilitated the engraving process.
Discussion Our results demonstrate that formation of the duricrust preserved the same diagnostic features on the engraving as those documented experimentally when the engraving was reproduced on the same rock type (Fig. 4 and SI Appendix, Fig. S11). These features include distinct outlines of groove sections, internal striations produced by contact with protruding asperities of the engraving tool, and clues indicating the order of the engraving at intersections (Fig. 4 and SI Appendix, Figs. S14–S19). A comparison with experimental engraving shows that L1–L8 were engraved with a robust lithic point by repeatedly passing the tool tip into the groove in the same direction, and that L9–L13 were created by single strokes with a similar tool (SI Appendix, Fig. S20). Striations left on a flat lime-dolostone block when experimentally cutting mammal skin with a stone tool clearly differed from those discovered at Gorham’s Cave (SI Appendix, Fig. S10). According to our experiments, a minimum of 54 strokes were needed to engrave the widest and deepest line (L4), and between 4 and 30 strokes were needed to engrave each of the other multiple stroke lines (Fig. 5 and SI Appendix, Tables S4 and S5). We calculated that the number of strokes needed to carve the complete pattern ranged from 188 to 317. These figures must have been even higher if the lime-dolostone was only minimally weathered when the engraving occurred. Considerable effort and neuromotor control are required to deepen lines on this rock type with multiple strokes without accidentally exiting the main groove and marking the surface adjacent to it or producing fringed terminations. No accidental exits and only a single fringed termination, at the end of L1, were detected. A study of line-end morphology, crossings, and changes in line direction after intersections revealed that horizontal L1 and L2 were made first and engraved from left to right followed by L3–L8, which were incised from top to bottom. L1 was deepened by a single stroke at this stage or when L9–L11 and L12 and L13 were engraved (SI Appendix, Figs. S19 and S21). Each of these two groups is consistent with the use of a single tool in one session, from top left to the bottom right. Engraved lines L4–L6 are damaged by the removal of two potlids occurring before formation of the duricrust, suggesting that the engraved pattern remained visible for some time before being covered by accumulation of level IV and the ensuing creation of the duricrust. This alteration layer was subsequently damaged by desquamations exposing the underlying white lime-dolostone (SI Appendix, Figs. S17–S20).
Conclusions The oldest secure evidence for representational and abstract depictions has been reviewed recently (27). Engraved geometric designs earlier than the Early Upper Paleolithic have been reported in both Africa and Eurasia. A number of cases have been of unclear nature (41, 42) but a consistent number of objects bearing finely engraved patterns are present from Middle Paleolithic/Middle Stone Age contexts. Nevertheless, the Gorham’s Cave engraving represents the first case in which an engraved pattern permanently marks a space within a habitation area in a cave. The oldest radiocarbon dating of level IV, ∼39 cal kyr BP, fixes a terminus ante quem for the production of the engraving. MHs were present in Western Europe at this time but had yet to reach the southern end of the Iberian peninsula (29, 43). Apart from the painted dots from El Castillo, which are of uncertain cultural and taxonomic attribution, no cave or mobiliary art is known for this period in Europe. The well-known striking instances of Aurignacian (MH) depictions from Germany and France (44⇓–46) are more recent than the Gorham’s Cave engraving and bear no apparent similarity to it. This argues against the possibility that Neanderthals produced this design under the cultural influence of MH and instead suggests independent invention. Although a similar inference was recently made with respect to some technological innovations, such as lissoirs (47), this is the first example of nonutilitarian engraving. Up to now, symbolic thought among the European hominins that preceded MHs has been inferred indirectly from burials, the use of black and red pigments (9), perforated and pigment-stained marine shells (10, 11), and cut marks resulting from the extraction of feathers or ornamental alteration of bird claws (12⇓⇓–15). The engraving at Gorham’s Cave represents the first directly demonstrable case in which a technically elaborated, consistently and carefully made nonutilitarian engraved abstract pattern whose production required prolonged and focused actions, is observed on the bedrock of a cave. We conclude that this engraving represents a deliberate design conceived to be seen by its Neanderthal maker and, considering its size and location, by others in the cave as well. It follows that the ability for abstract thought was not exclusive of MHs.
Methods Mineralogical Analysis. Mineralogical analysis was carried out at the University of Huelva and Rovira i Virgili University by powder XRD on a Bruker AXS D8-Advance diffractometer using Ni-filtered CuKα radiation at 40 kV and 30 mÅ. Randomly oriented powders were scanned from 3° to 65° 2θ with a step size of 0.02° and a counting time of 0.6 s per step. Oriented aggregates were obtained from sedimentation and were scanned from 1° to 30° 2θ using a step size of 0.02° and a counting time of 1.2 s per step. The samples were also examined by scanning electron microscopy on carbon-coated loose powder mounts, using a JEOL JSM-5410 instrument operated at 20 kV and equipped with an energy-dispersive X-ray analytical system (Oxford Link ISIS) and back-scattered electron imaging. Experimental Engraving. Seven stone tools (SI Appendix, Fig. S9) were used to experimentally incise three weathered blocks of lime-dolostone. The blocks were recovered during the excavation of level IV at the back of the cave. The stone tools were Mousterian archaeological implements found out of context in the outer area of Gorham's Cave. SI Appendix, Table S4 summarizes information on the tools used and the experimental protocol. Four actions were performed: (i) single stroke lines produced by a unique continuous displacement of the tool tip over the block surface; (ii) multiple stroke lines produced by repeatedly passing the tool tip or a cutting edge into the groove in the same direction; (iii) multiple stroke lines produced by repeatedly passing the tool tip into the groove with a to-and-fro movement; and (iv) incisions produced when cutting a fresh pork skin with flint and microquartzite blades. The maximum and minimum widths of the incisions were recorded with a digital caliper after each new passage of the tool. The morphology of incision start and end points was recorded as well; on multiple stroke lines, the following were recorded: (i) number of incisions necessary to reach the unweathered lime-dolostone; (ii) occurrence of incisions corresponding to the accidental exiting of the tool tip in the middle or at the end of the main groove; and (iii) superficial lines running close and parallel to the main groove resulting from accidental contact of the tool tip with the block surface during the engraving process (48, 49). Experimental engraving was photographed with a motorized Leica Z6 APOA, equipped with a DFC420 digital camera linked to an LAS Montage and Leica Map DCM 3D computer software. Section, width, and 3D models of selected portions of the experimental engraving were produced by exporting depth maps obtained with the LAS Montage into the Leica Map DCM 3D software. The Gorham's Cave engraved lines were extensively examined and photographed with macro lenses and a HIROX VCR-800 digital microscope at magnifications ranging from 20× to 160×. The microscope was moved over the engraving using an arm attached to a photo tripod, to avoid vibrations and contact with the rock. Particular attention was given to documenting (i) the occurrence of surface features, from the literature (48, 49) or produced experimentally in the framework of the present study, which could be used to reconstruct the craftsman’s action, and (ii) the type of tool used and the order of the engraved lines. The location of the duricrust in relation to the engraving and the state of preservation of the engraving were examined as well. The width, depth, and sections of the archaeological engraving were calculated with TIVMI software (http://projets.pacea.u-bordeaux.fr/TIVMI/), using the 3D model for the engraving generated using Agisoft Photoscan Standard Edition. The widths obtained with this method were verified by comparing them with those measured on photos of the archaeological engraving.
Acknowledgments We thank Philip Kenny for illustrating Fig. S5 (SI Appendix), and Montserrat Montcusí (Universitat Rovira i Virgili) and Juan C. Fernández-Caliani (Universidad de Huelva) for help with the geochemical analyses. The excavations and scientific research associated with Gorham’s Cave and Vanguard Cave were funded by Her Majesty’s Government of Gibraltar. This research also was supported by funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Projects CGL2010-15810/BTE, CGL2012-38434-C03-03, CGL2012-38358, CGL-BOS-2012-34717, and OAPN 261/211), Generalitat de Catalunya (Project 2014 SGR 900), the European Research Council (Program FP7/2007/2013, TRACSYMBOLS 249587), Marine International Campus of Excellence (CEIMAR), and Project Origines II, Aquitaine Region. R.B. is the recipient of a Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral research fellowship (Generalitat de Catalunya and COFUND Marie Curie Actions, EU-FP7).
Footnotes Author contributions: J.R.-V., F.G.P., and C.F. designed research; F.dE., R.B., and J.R. performed research; J.R.-V., F.dE., R.P.J., A.Q., G.F., D.A.F., J.M.G.L., J.S.C., J.J.N., S.F., L.M.C., M.A.B., and S.F.J. contributed new analytic tools; F.dE. analyzed data; F.dE. coordinated the manuscript and conducted the experiments and microscopic analysis of the archaeological and experimental engravings; F.G.P., R.P.J., J.M.G.L., and M.A.B. provided data concerning the archaeological context and participated in the excavation and research project; R.B. coordinated the manuscript; A.Q. created the 3D reconstruction of the engraving; G.F., D.A.F., and S.F. participated in the excavation and research project; J.S.C., J.J.N., and S.F.J. provided contextual data and participated in the research project; and J.R.-V., F.dE., R.B., J.R., and C.F. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
↵*This Direct Submission article had a prearranged editor.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1411529111/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.× San Diego leaders declare state of emergency ahead of El Niño
SAN DIEGO — The San Diego City Council Monday unanimously declared a state of emergency because of anticipated El Niño rain conditions this winter in an effort to ease the regulatory burden for clearing clogged storm channels.
Councilman David Alvarez said numerous channels in the city are choked with vegetation, sediment and other items like mattresses, and are prone to flooding if the expected heavy and repetitive rains hit.
He said the declaration will be transmitted to Gov. Jerry Brown, with a cover letter urging him to declare a state emergency before the bigger storms hit in order to ease the regulatory process. Brown is considering such a declaration, according to state officials.
In emergency situations, such as when a major storm is imminent, the city can go to the Army Corps of Engineers to get the necessary permits, the councilman said. However, that has to happen a few days before a storm hits, and he wants work done well in advance.
Councilman Scott Sherman said permits necessary to clear the channels in normal situations have to go through the five or six regulatory agencies before they are approved, because of environmental laws.
A member of the public, Charles Douglas, told the council that he’s very concerned with the condition of South Chollas Creek near where he lives.
“We had a rain in September — it kind of rained — and the channel filled and there was concern it was going to overflow,” Douglas said. “That was only after two or three hours of rain.”
Kris McFadden, of the city’s Transportation and Stormwater Department, said city crews cleared out six channels in the most recent fiscal year, including two in flood-prone areas — Murphy Canyon Creek near Qualcomm Stadium and Soledad Creek in Sorrento Valley.
Work has resumed in the Tijuana River Valley, and Alvarado Creek was cleared out recently, McFadden said.
According to Alvarez, 25 channels are at risk for flooding. The worst, besides South Chollas, are:
Via de la Bandola in San Ysidro
Engineer Road in Kearney Mesa
Pomerado Road in Rancho Bernardo
Washington Street in Hillcrest and Little Italy
Parkside in Paradise Hills
Section Four of Auburn Creek in City Heights
Cottonwood Channel in Shelltown
Chollas Creek in the College Area
Red River Drive and Conestoga Drive in Allied Gardens
The mayor’s office has not supported the call for a declaration, in part because of concern over lawsuits. Mayoral officials have said the lawsuits aren’t just costly to the city, but prevent storm channel maintenance from taking place.× Suspect in killings at PA Turnpike toll booth was retired state trooper
FULTON COUNTY, Pa.– A press conference held by the Pennsylvania State Police on Sunday afternoon, revealed details about a deadly attempted robbery at a PA Turnpike toll booth earlier in the day.
Investigators say around 7:00 a.m., a man confronted two turnpike employees at exit 180, the Fort Littleton interchange, in Dublin Township, Fulton County.
The suspect is identified as 55-year old Clarence Briggs, a retired trooper with the Pennsylvania State Police. Briggs is from Newville, Cumberland County.
Officials say Briggs displayed a handgun and ordered both employees to enter the turnpike office building. While inside the building, Briggs attempted to tie up both of the employees, when a struggle began and Briggs fled the building. Both employees left the building, and at the same time, a fare collection vehicle arrived at the interchange.
Turnpike employee Daniel Crouse, age 55, and the fare collection vehicle security guard Ronald Heist, age 71, were then shot and killed. Briggs then began to fire shots at the fare collection vehicle. The driver of that vehicle was able to flee on foot. Briggs then gained access to the fare collection vehicle and drove it a short distance on Route 522 to an area where his car was parked. Briggs attempted to unload money from the fare collection vehicle and place it in his car.
Troopers arrived at the scene minutes after the original call for help. The first trooper on scene encountered Briggs and gunfire was exchanged. Briggs was shot and died from his injuries at the scene. The Troop G, Hollidaysburg, major case team was activated to investigate. The investigation is ongoing.
While employed with PSP, Briggs was assigned to Troop T in Newville. He retired honorably in 2012.
Investigators say turnpike toll collector Daniel Crouse, had been on the job less for than three months. Security guard Ronald Heist, was a retired police officer from the York City Police Department.
The Fort Littleton exit will remained closed until approximately 9:00 Monday morning.Republican presidential candidate John Kasich talks to The Washington Post about the race to win delegates, Donald Trump and race relations in the U.S. (The Washington Post)
Republican presidential candidate John Kasich talks to The Washington Post about the race to win delegates, Donald Trump and race relations in the U.S. (The Washington Post)
Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) criticized his party for a lack of ideas Wednesday in a wide-ranging and occasionally combative interview with The Washington Post’s editorial board.
Kasich, who sees the April 26 primary in Maryland as a way to increase his delegate total, argued that neither of his rivals could win the presidency, because of their negativity.
“If you don’t have ideas, you got nothing, and frankly my Republican Party doesn’t like ideas,” Kasich said. “They want to be negative against things. We had Reagan, okay? Saint Ron. We had Kemp, he was an idea guy. I’d say Paul Ryan is driven mostly by ideas. He likes ideas. But you talk about most of ’em, the party is knee-jerk ‘against.’ Maybe that’s how they were created.”
[Read the transcript of John Kasich’s interview with the Washington Post edtiorial board]
After Tuesday’s New York primary, where weeks of campaigning landed Kasich half a dozen delegates, the governor repeatedly emphasized his conservative credentials while taking care to define what “conservative” was.
Republican presidential candidate John Kasich met with The Washington Post editorial board on April 20. This is a full audio recording of that conversation. (Adriana Usero)
“I’m gonna kill the Commerce Department,” Kasich said. “I don’t know why you don’t have an Education Department tied to the Labor Department.”
Kasich derided the idea of a carbon tax — “I’m not big on tax increases” — and when challenged on the math behind his tax-cut plan, which many analysts say would increase deficits, he mocked the pretenses of experts.
“The Center for a Responsible Budget — what have they ever balanced?” he asked. “When there is certainty, both on the regulatory side, on the tax side, and on the spending side, you basically get economic growth. And look, if we find out that we’re getting off the path, then we’ll have to adjust.”
For more than a month, Kasich has been mathematically eliminated from winning the Republican nomination with the pledged delegates awarded in primaries. Tuesday’s result in New York came close to slamming the same door on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), something the senator addressed in an impromptu news conference Wednesday. While Cruz went on to call Kasich a “spoiler,” the Ohio governor agreed with him on one point: Front-runner Donald Trump was not entitled to the nomination if he failed to reach a simple majority of 1,237 delegates.
“One time I made an 83 on my math test, and I did better than everybody else, and I asked the teacher: How come I don’t have an A?” Kasich said. “The teacher said, ‘An A is 90.’ I said, ‘Oh, I get it.’ Say he gets in there with 1,100 — go get the rest of ’em.”
Kasich went on to imagine a convention where he could appeal to Trump voters by respecting them. Citing his work in Ohio to calm tensions after a police shooting in Cleveland, Kasich said he’d advanced past his “bombast years, where I was pounding on everybody.” He boasted of Ohio’s fracking boom but emphasized that the state had probably “the most” regulation of the natural gas industry in the country.
He also rejected the idea that he had moderated by opposing “birthright citizenship” when he was a congressman and endorsing it as a governor.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) speaks with the editorial board at The Washington Post on Wednesday. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
“I probably signed onto some bill,” shrugged Kasich. “Somebody probably walked up to me on the floor and said, ‘how ’bout putting your name on this?’ ”
At other points, Kasich vigorously defended his record. He said that changes to Ohio’s early voting law, opposed by Democrats, were simply fair and had been requested by local officials.
“Do you think 28 days of voting is restrictive?” Kasich asked. “How many other states have 28 days of early voting?”
Kasich made a few stabs at populism, criticizing the President Obama-era Federal Reserve for its multiple rounds of quantitative easing. To Kasich, that only resulted in companies “buying up more of their stock and making the rich richer.” He was otherwise light on criticism of the Obama administration.
On the District, Kasich dismissed the idea of statehood or a vote in Congress.
“I just don’t see that we really need that, okay?” Kasich said. Referring to the Republicans who have stopped such proposals, Kasich said that “they know that’s just more votes in the Democratic Party.”
But as he pondered the question some more, Kasich softened.
“They send me a bill, and I’m president of the United States?” he said. “I’ll read your editorials.”The Indiana Transportation Museum announced it was suing the cities of Noblesville and Fishers, and the Hoosier Heritage Port Authority.
Indiana Transportation Museum chairman John McNichols and lawyer Samuel Bolinger announce a lawsuit against the Hoosier Heritage Port Authority on Friday. Lauren Chapman/IPB Lauren Chapman/IPB
The Indiana Transportation Museum will sue the Hoosier Heritage Port Authority and the cities of Noblesville and Fishers for money lost when it was was ordered to close an historic stretch of track.
On one side, the Hoosier Heritage Port Authority and the cities of Noblesville and Fishers are concerned the Indiana Transportation Museum doesn’t have enough money to keep its tracks in working order. City officials from Noblesville and Fishers want to see the Nickel Plate tracks transformed into trails.
On the other side, museum board chairman John McNichols says the tracks and annual Polar Bear Express and State Fair trains contribute to the economies of those cities.
“We have proposed many times, along with other organizations, to look at rails with trails,” McNichols says. “The only conversation we’ve heard is what trails will do, we’ve not heard the negative impact, especially economically, of ripping up the rails.”
The Hoosier Heritage Port Authority claim the tracks are unsafe. It closed them and suspended train operations three days before the 2016 State Fair – in spite of an earlier Federal Railroad Administration inspection that deemed the tracks were safe.
The Indiana Transportation Museum says the suspension cost it more than $500,000.
The tort is the first step in filing a federal lawsuit to retrieve those funds. But McNichols says the best outcome would allow the museum to resume train operations.
The Indiana Transportation Museum is a nonprofit museum, opened in 1960. Although it’s entirely run by volunteers, the trains, crews and track are certified by the Federal Railroad Administration.On June 30th, Infragistics' own Brian Lagunas presented a joint webinar for Infragistics and Pluralsight titled “MVVM Made Simple With Prism”. Take a look!
Here is the abstract from that webinar:
“WPF developers have been using the MVVM design pattern since it was first introduced by John Gossman back in 2005. While MVVM has become the standard for the majority of WPF developers, there are a number of issues that have become side effects of the separations created by MVVM. In a lot of cases, more questions than answers are the result of using the MVVM pattern: “How do I make the connection between the View and ViewModel?”, “How do I invoke actions in my ViewModels?”, etc. In this joint webinar presented with Pluralsight, Infragistics’ own Brian Lagunas will answer all these questions and more as he walks us through simplifying our WPF applications by using the features of Prism to implement MVVM.”
Attendees of this webinar can find our demo application source code here on GitHub and can view the presentation slides here.
Thank you to everyone that attended - we hope you found some value in the session. Feel free contact Brian Lagunas on his blog, connect with him on Twitter @brianlagunas, or leave a comment below for any questions or comments you may have.Vince Carter moved into 25th in all-time NBA scoring with his 18 points in the Memphis Grizzlies' incredible triple overtime win in San Antonio against the Spurs last night. Carter passed Robert Parish, the previous 25th ranked player at 23,334 points, and now has a couple of other NBA greats within his sights.
Vince obviously isn't going to be catching LeBron James, as LBJ is likely to continue shooting up the list. However, we are likely to see Carter pass Charles Barkley this season and he could easily end up passing Allen Iverson next season with the Grizzlies if he's still healthy.
If Carter passes Iverson, that will provide Grizzlies fans with a bit of satisfaction after their previous attempt to retread an old superstar ended with egg on their face. And to the contrary, Vince Carter has a chance to legitimately contribute to a championship run with the Memphis Grizzlies while giving fans a few snapshots of NBA history along the way.
21st - 25th All-Time NBA Scoring Leaders | FindTheBestMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Patrik Runald, senior manager for security research at Websense told the BBC's Katty Kay that the scale of the attack was "worrying"
Hundreds of thousands of websites appear to have been compromised by a massive cyber attack.
The hi-tech criminals used a well-known attack vector that exploits security loopholes on other sites to insert a link to their website.
Those visiting the criminals' webpage were told that their machines were infected with many different viruses.
Swift action by security researchers has managed to get the sites offering the sham software shut down.
Code control
Security firm Websense has been tracking the attack since it started on 29 March. The initial count of compromised sites was |
71]
Wrongful death civil trial
Following Simpson's acquittal of criminal charges, Ron Goldman's family filed a civil lawsuit against Simpson. Daniel Petrocelli represented plaintiff Fred Goldman (Ronald Goldman's father), while Robert Baker represented Simpson.[72] Superior Court Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki presided,[72] and he barred television and still cameras, radio equipment, and courtroom sketch artists from the courtroom.[73] On October 23, 1996, opening statements were made, and on January 16, 1997, both sides rested their cases.[74]
On February 5, 1997, a civil jury in Santa Monica, California unanimously found Simpson liable for the wrongful death of and battery against Goldman, and battery against Brown. Simpson was ordered to pay $33,500,000 in damages. In February 1999, an auction of Simpson's Heisman Trophy and other belongings netted almost $500,000, which went to the Goldman family.[75]
The Goldman family also tried to collect Simpson's NFL $28,000 yearly pension[76] but failed to collect any money.[77]
In 1997, Simpson was evicted from the estate in which he had lived for 20 years, at 360 North Rockingham Avenue, after defaulting on the mortgage. In July 1998, the house was demolished by its next owner, Kenneth Abdalla, an investment banker and president of the Jerry's Famous Deli chain.[78] The property's address has since been renumbered to 380 North Rockingham Avenue.[79]
A 2000 Rolling Stone article reported that Simpson still made a significant income by signing autographs. He subsequently left California for Florida in 2000, settling in Miami. In Florida, among a few states, a person's pensions and residences can't be seized to collect debts under most circumstances.
On September 5, 2006, Goldman's father took Simpson back to court to obtain control over Simpson's "right to publicity", for purposes of satisfying the judgment in the civil court case.[80] On January 4, 2007, a federal judge issued a restraining order prohibiting Simpson from spending any advance he may have received on a canceled book deal and TV interview about the 1994 murders. The matter was dismissed before trial for lack of jurisdiction.[80] On January 19, 2007, a California state judge issued an additional restraining order, ordering Simpson to restrict his spending to "ordinary and necessary living expenses".[80]
On March 13, 2007, a judge prevented Simpson from receiving any further compensation from the defunct book deal and TV interview, and the judge ordered the bundled book rights to be auctioned.[81] In August 2007, a Florida bankruptcy court awarded the rights to the book to the Goldman family, to partially satisfy an unpaid civil judgment. Originally titled If I Did It, the book was renamed If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer, with the word "If" reduced in size to make the title appear to read I Did It: Confessions of the Killer. Additional material was added by members of the Goldman family, investigative journalist Dominick Dunne, and author Pablo Fenjves.[82]
Other legal troubles
The State of California claims Simpson owes $1.44 million in back taxes.[83] A tax lien was filed in his case on September 1, 1999.[84]
In the late 1990s, Simpson attempted to register "O. J. Simpson", "O. J.", and "The Juice" as trademarks for "a broad range of goods, including figurines, trading cards, sportswear, medallions, coins, and prepaid telephone cards".[85] A "concerned citizen", William B. Ritchie, sued to oppose the granting of federal registration on the grounds that doing so would be immoral and scandalous. Simpson gave up the effort in 2000.
In February 2001, Simpson was arrested in Miami-Dade County, Florida, for simple battery and burglary of an occupied conveyance, for yanking the glasses off another motorist during a traffic dispute three months earlier. If convicted, Simpson could have faced up to 16 years in prison, but he was tried and quickly acquitted of both charges in October 2001.[86]
On December 4, 2001, Simpson's Miami home was searched by the FBI on suspicion of ecstasy possession and money laundering. The FBI had received a tip that Simpson was involved in a major drug trafficking ring after 10 other suspects were arrested in the case. Simpson's home was thoroughly searched for two hours, but no illegal drugs were discovered, and no arrest or formal charges were filed following the search. However, investigators uncovered equipment capable of stealing satellite television programming, which eventually led to Simpson's being sued in federal court.[87]
On July 4, 2002, Simpson was arrested in Miami-Dade County, Florida, for water speeding through a manatee protection zone and failing to comply with proper boating regulations.[88] The misdemeanor boating regulation charge was dropped, and Simpson was fined for the speeding infraction.[89]
In March 2004, satellite television network DirecTV, Inc. accused Simpson in a Miami federal court of using illegal electronic devices to pirate its broadcast signals. The company later won a $25,000 judgment, and Simpson was ordered to pay an additional $33,678 in attorney's fees and costs.[90]
Las Vegas robbery
On the night of September 13, 2007, a group of men led by Simpson entered a room at the Palace Station hotel-casino and took sports memorabilia at gunpoint, which resulted in Simpson's being questioned by police.[91][92] Simpson admitted to taking the items, which he said had been stolen from him, but denied breaking into the hotel room; he also denied that he or anyone else carried a gun.[93][94] He was released after questioning.
Two days later, Simpson was arrested[1] and initially held without bail.[95] Along with three other men, Simpson was charged with multiple felony counts, including criminal conspiracy, kidnapping, assault, robbery, and using a deadly weapon.[96][97] Bail was set at $125,000, with stipulations that Simpson have no contact with the co-defendants and that he surrender his passport. Simpson did not enter a plea.[98][99]
By the end of October 2007, all three of Simpson's co-defendants had plea-bargained with the prosecution in the Clark County, Nevada, court case. Walter Alexander and Charles H. Cashmore accepted plea agreements in exchange for reduced charges and their testimony against Simpson and three other co-defendants, including testimony that guns were used in the robbery.[100] Co-defendant Michael McClinton told a Las Vegas judge that he too would plead guilty to reduced charges and testify against Simpson that guns were used in the robbery. After the hearings, the judge ordered that Simpson be tried for the robbery.
On November 8, 2007, Simpson had a preliminary hearing to decide whether he would be tried for the charges. He was held over for trial on all 12 counts. Simpson pleaded not guilty on November 29, and the trial was reset from April to September 8, 2008.[101] Court officers and attorneys announced, on May 22, 2008, that long questionnaires with at least 115 queries would be given to a jury pool of 400 or more.[101]
In January 2008, Simpson was taken into custody in Florida and flown to Las Vegas, where he was incarcerated at the county jail for violating the terms of his bail by attempting to contact Clarence "C. J." Stewart, a co-defendant in the trial. District Attorney David Roger of Clark County provided District Court Judge Jackie Glass with evidence that Simpson had violated his bail terms. A hearing took place on January 16, 2008. Glass raised Simpson's bail to US$250,000 and ordered that he remain in county jail until 15 percent was paid in cash.[102] Simpson posted bond that evening and returned to Miami the next day.[103]
Simpson and his co-defendant were found guilty of all charges on October 3, 2008.[104] On October 10, 2008, Simpson's counsel moved for a new trial (trial de novo) on grounds of judicial errors and insufficient evidence.[105] Simpson's attorney announced he would appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court if Judge Glass denied the motion.[105] The attorney for Simpson's co-defendant, C. J. Stewart, petitioned for a new trial, alleging Stewart should have been tried separately and cited possible misconduct by the jury foreman.[105][106][107]
Simpson faced a possible life sentence with parole on the kidnapping charge, and mandatory prison time for armed robbery.[108] On December 5, 2008, Simpson was sentenced to a total of thirty-three years in prison,[109] with the possibility of parole after nine years, in 2017.[2] On September 4, 2009, the Nevada Supreme Court denied a request for bail during Simpson's appeal. In October 2010, the Nevada Supreme Court affirmed his convictions.[110] He served his sentence at the Lovelock Correctional Center where his inmate ID number was #1027820.[111]
A Nevada judge agreed on October 19, 2012, to "reopen the armed robbery and kidnapping case against O. J. Simpson to determine if the former football star was so badly represented by his lawyers that he should be freed from prison and get another trial".[112] A hearing was held beginning May 13, 2013, to determine if Simpson was entitled to a new trial.[113] On November 27, 2013, Judge Linda Bell denied Simpson's bid for a new trial on the robbery conviction. In her ruling, Bell wrote that all of Simpson's contentions lacked merit.[114]
Release from prison
On July 31, 2013, the Nevada Parole Board granted Simpson parole on some convictions, but his imprisonment continued based on the weapons and assault convictions. The board considered Simpson's prior record of criminal convictions and good behavior in prison in coming to the decision.[115] At his parole hearing on July 20, 2017, the board decided to grant Simpson parole. He was released on October 1, 2017, having served almost nine years.[116][117]
Popular culture
Book
Pablo Fenjves ghostwrote the 2007 book If I Did It based on interviews with Simpson. The book was published by Beaufort Books, a New York City publishing house owned by parent company Kampmann & Company/Midpoint Trade Books.[118] All rights and proceeds from the book were awarded to the family of murder victim Ron Goldman.[119]
Films and television
Films
Series and miniseries
Exhibits
The Bronco from Simpson's police chase is on display in Pigeon Forge Tennessee's Alcatraz East Crime Museum.[132][133]
See alsoThe study shows that krypton-85 from nuclear fission enhances air ionization and, thus, interferes with the atmospheric-electrical system and the water balance of the earth atmosphere. This is reason for concern: There are unforeseeable effects for weather and climate if the krypton-85 content of the earth atmosphere continues to rise. There may be a krypton-specific greenhouse effect and a collapse of the natural atmospheric-electrical field. In addition, human well-being may be expected to be impaired as a result of the diminished atmospheric-electrical field. There is also the risk of radiochemical actions and effects caused-by krypton-85-containing plumes in other air-borne pollutants like the latters' transformation to aggressive oxidants. This implies radiation smog and more acid rain in the countries exposed. This study summarizes findings gained in these issues by various sciences, analyses them and elaborates hypotheses on the actions and effects of krypton-85 on the air, the atmosphere and the climate. (orig./HP)Labour Education Minister Jan O'Sullivan has come under fire from Fine Gael TDs for insisting no-one should be forced to baptise their child to get them into a particular school.
Labour Education Minister Jan O'Sullivan has come under fire from Fine Gael TDs for insisting no-one should be forced to baptise their child to get them into a particular school.
Fine Gael TDs rounded on Ms O'Sullivan for broaching the divisive subject of school patronage so close to a general election.
And she was criticised for not doing enough to ensure parents are not forced to baptise their children to secure school places.
Speaking to the Irish Independent yesterday, Ms O'Sullivan said she would like to see the education system changed so church schools could not pick and choose children based on their faith.
Ms O'Sullivan was hitting back at Archbishop Diarmuid Martin who defended the rights of Catholic run schools to give preference to baptised children.
"I don't think anyone should feel forced to baptise their children, if it is not something that they want. And I don't think the church want that either she said," the minister said.
However, Fine Gael Junior Minister and Tipperary TD Tom Hayes said the Coalition should focus on selling the message of a stable economy rather than drift into debates on contentious issues.
"We need to focus on the economy and job creation in the run-up to the election instead of coming up with ideas that are going to ruffle feathers in parts of the Government," Mr Hayes said.
Cork North West TD Aine Collins said she understood the problems facing families trying to get school place but also said now is not the time to have the debate.
"From an election point of view, now is not the time to have a debate you can't win because you are not going to make everyone happy by doing it," she said.
Dublin North TD Alan Farrell said it was not an issue faced by the vast majority of his constituents.
"The problem with enrolment in my constituency relates to bricks and mortar not the signs hanging over the door," Mr Farrell said. However, Fine Gael TD for Dublin Bay South Eoghan Murphy said he had been urging the minister to address the issue for almost a year.
Transport Minister Paschal Donohoe said there was a need to "refocus" the Government's efforts in divesting school patronage.
Renua leader Lucinda Creighton called for more diversity in school choices. "I know of examples where parents are having to leave jobs because of the absence of nearby schools with an ethos they support," she said.
"We have to give priority to kids from the local areas going to State funded schools," he added.
A Department of Education spokesman said the minister could not introduce changes as the laws governing religious ethos are under the Department of Justice.
A Department of Justice spokesman said the laws in place are there to reflect the "Constitutional provision of the protection of religious freedom".
Irish IndependentNorth Street Labs
The tinkerers at North Street Labs retrofitted an NES zapper with a ridiculously powerful laser capable of catching vulnerable objects like matches on fire.
The laser is strong enough to max out a 2W laser meter. That's some serious strength. As North Street Labs points out, goggles are an absolute must at all times when handling the zapper. There is a physical turn key safety switch to keep it from accidentally going off.
This gets us into the requisite safety warnings. This may look like the zapper you used for Duck Hunt, but it doesn't act like it. This project has a laser powerful enough to light things on fire, burn skin, and permanently damage your eyesight.
If you get into North Street Lab's DIY directions for making your own, you will want to proceed with care. Get the right goggles to handle the laser you're working with. Don't point it anything living. Don't point it at anything inanimate you don't want to catch on fire within a safe and controlled environment. In summary, don't be stupid with this awesome hack.
(Via Geekologie)Author:Beth Pariseau
Source URL: http://searchitoperations.techtarget.com/news/450410884/Kubernetes-multicloud-orchestration-pushes-Docker-portability-forward
Enterprises that watch from the sidelines have a new milestone to note, as Kubernetes and Docker reach production on the bleeding edge of IT.
A rare bird has been spotted, and more are likely to follow — a Kubernetes and Docker environment that is federated across multiple service providers’ clouds and automates the distribution of container workloads based on data gravity and processing requirements.
Calsoft Whitepaper: Proliferation Of Cloud Integrated Storage (CIS) This whitepaper throws an in-depth light on how CIS is playing crucial role for efficient backups, faster data access, reliable storage, scalability and disaster recovery solutions. Download
Such Docker portability between clouds has been the promise of the container technology and the orchestration environments that manage it, but until the arrival of Kubernetes 1.5.1 last month, this multicloud orchestration wasn’t practical, said Michael Bishop, CTO at Alpha Vertex Inc., a financial technology startup in New York.
Click here to read news.
Container Ecosystem Services Calsoft has deep expertise in containerization of Storage and Networking products. With our in-depth understanding of various containerization technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Coreos, we have helped ISVs to design and develop solutions in and around these technologies.
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Like this: Like Loading...In the statement released by the Sharks, Bismarck du Plessis apologised for his behaviour.
JOHANNESBURG - Cell C Sharks hooker Bismarck du Plessis has apologised to Blue Bulls lock Victor Matfield for his behaviour and actions against him during Saturday's Super Rugby match at Loftus Versfeld Stadium.
The match between the Sharks and the Blue Bulls proved to be a physical encounter which was contested passionately by the respective teams on the day.
On reflection, Bismarck realised that he acted inappropriately with his choice of language used and released a statement on Thursday evening, apologising for his out-burst during the game.
In the statement released by the Sharks, du Plessis said he was sorry.
"I am blessed to be able to play the game I love professionally and by my very competitive nature, whenever I take to the field, I play the game hard and always strive to play fairly. Sometimes during heated exchanges one finds it difficult to control emotions and as a result things get said, which we are not proud of." Watch: The clash between Bismarck du Plessis and Victor Matfield
He added, "What I said on Saturday, which was clearly visible especially to the youngsters watching was inappropriate and I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to everyone that I let down."
He went on to thank his supporters for always being there for him and that he would like to remain an inspiration to his younger fans.
"I always strive to be a good role-model for the youngsters out there and I thank our fans for their invaluable support."National Review / Digital September 7, 2015 Music
Rewriting Beethoven
BY JAY NORDLINGER
Salzburg I TS really hot here, as everyone keeps pointing out. The weather may be the most boring subject in the world, but sometimes you cant avoid it. A local lady told me, This is the hottest summer weve had in 200 years that would be about 25 years after Mozart, who was born and raised here, but during the life of Beethoven, for example. Even in the best of times, the coolest of times, the halls are hot at the Salzburg Festival. The Grosser Saal of the Mozarteum, I long ago nicknamed the Grosser Sauna. In all the halls this summer, patrons are sweating buckets, soaking their finery. Ladies beat fans determinedly. Europeans like to knock air conditioning as a weird American vice, but a summer like this, in venues like these, can make you appreciate that vice as never before. Enough of complaining about the weather, on to complaining about the opera productions. This season, Salzburg is staging Fidelio, Beethovens lone opera. He sweated over this piece as he did no other. He wrote no fewer than four overtures for it, trying to get it right. He got the overture right, and everything else too. Fidelio is, among other things, one of the greatest paeans to political freedom in all of art. It is also one of the greatest paeans to love, and, specifically, to marital love. Leonore applies to work in a prison, for she suspects that her husband, Florestan, is being kept there. Which turns out to be true. Florestan is a political prisoner of the corrupt, evil Pizarro. Leonore disguises herself as a young man and calls herself Fidelio (meaning the faithful one). At the last minute, Florestan is saved, Pizarro is vanquished, and husband and wife are reunited. Beethoven pours forth the white of C major. He bathes the stage, the ear, and the heart in light. Seldom is music so jubilant and affirmative. Fidelio is a work that expresses Beethovens highest ideals. Salzburgs new production is at variance with it. I hate to start an opera review with the production, and almost never do for a production hogs enough attention as it is. Marilyn Horne (the great American mezzo-soprano) once said to me, Critics spend the first two-thirds of their review on the production, and mention the singers at the end. But if a production takes over an opera, it probably has to take over your review, too. And I might point out to Miss Horne, in self-defense, that I began this review with the weather... For Fidelio, Salzburg engaged Claus Guth, a German stage director. He has a long history here. Deploring his production of Mozarts Marriage of Figaro in 2006, I wrote, Salzburg has taught me something I never knew: that you can completely alter the story of an opera without changing a word of the libretto simply by having the characters act in unprescribed and novel ways. I added, If stage directors really want to create new operas, they should write their own. Their obsession with painting mustaches on Mona Lisas is both childish and reprehensible. I did some more harrumphing in 2008, on the occasion of another Guth production of another Mozart opera, Don Giovanni: The point is, the production and the opera dont match. The director has wrenched the opera away from the composer and librettist. More harrumphing followed in later years. And now (at last) to the current festival, and the Guth Fidelio. I do not deplore it wholesale. Guth and his team do interesting things with light and shadow. The production is noirish. The director eliminates Beethovens dialogue, which is maybe not so bad but he replaces it with long, silent pauses, which are meant to be dramatic. Instead, they stick out like sore thumbs, stopping the opera (on which Beethoven worked so hard, to get right). Jonas Kaufmann as Florestan in Salzburgs new production of Beethovens Fidelio
(© Salzburger Festspiele/Monika Rittershaus) These pauses are not entirely silent either, for Guth employs big, amplified, spooky noises, which are fashionable in opera productions now. At one point, there is a loud piercing noise, and I swear that, at first, I thought a hearing aid had gone haywire, as often happens in concert halls and opera houses (where senior citizens are numerous). Leonore has a doppelgänger, dressed like her, who is constantly flashing her hands, in what appears to be sign language. Why? I dont know, and, frankly, I dont much care. I could probably crack open my program, to see what the director or someone else has to say. But Im too stubborn to do that: I think that theaters meaning should be fairly plain from the stage. I do not think a play or opera should require Cliffs Notes and this goes double or triple for a canonical work like Fidelio. When Florestan is saved, he and Leonore do not reunite and exult, as Beethoven conceives. They do what the director conceives. Evidently mad, Florestan recoils from Leonore. She sings, Oh, what boundless happiness! My husband in my arms! He sings, Leonore in my arms! After untold sorrows, what surpassing joy! But are they in each others arms? Of course not. That would be too much like right, as an old southern friend of mine would say. They are apart, with Leonore looking on in confusion and fear. In the final scene, Florestan apparently rejects Leonore, probably out of madness rather than conscious choice. He then appears to die. This is not Fidelio. It is some other story. And it flatly contradicts the music and the libretto. In fact, it negates these things, kills them. Reflecting on his field, architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright said, A building ought to be a grace to its environment, not a disgrace. So it is with opera productions. Enough of the production, for now on to the music-makers. Conducting this affair is Franz Welser-Möst, who is almost a local boy: He was born in Linz, about 80 miles to the northeast. For the past 14 years, he has been the music director in Cleveland. He was also, until recently, the music director of the Vienna State Opera. Speaking of which, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra serves in the pit for Fidelio. On the night I attended, neither Welser-Möst nor the VPO had a particularly good overture. The music was dry and scrappy, and it achieved nothing like its emotional impact. Near the beginning, the horns did some stumbling, which is rare for the VPO. It almost made me homesick for the New York Philharmonic. Welser-Möst did not improve as Act I proceeded. The orchestra was heavy, and loud, too, covering up the singers. The quartet (Mir ist so wunderbar) was earthbound, missing its sublimity. The march to which Pizarro and his crew enter was hurried, missing its pomp, swagger, and menace. Many onsets were faulty, which is, again, rare for the VPO. Yet Welser-Möst was never less than adequate, and he had a big moment in Act II. So did Beethoven. The orchestra played another of those four overtures the one known as Leonore No. 3 as used to be done with some regularity in Fidelio, but which is almost never done today. Here, Welser-Möst conducted his heart out, and the VPO played in like manner. They brought the house down. The last pages of the opera, sad to say, did not shine, bathe, and uplift as they should. They were fast, hard, and undifferentiated. But I could appreciate Welser-Mösts energy, and it crossed my mind that he was trying to make up for, or distract from, the travesty on the stage. In the title role of Leonore, a.k.a. Fidelio, was Adrianne Pieczonka, the Canadian soprano. You have heard bigger Leonores, but few so sincere and affecting. I had forgotten how moving Komm, Hoffnung can be. And Pieczonkas voice has plenty of cutting power. Florestan was Jonas Kaufmann, the German tenor, a huge star over here (and a big enough one in America, too). I have often written of the Cult of Kaufmann. I dont quite get it. He is a fine tenor, and I have heard him give superb performances, as well as mediocre ones. He is probably the best Parsifal (in Wagners opera of the same name) we have. But a cult? In any case, he sang like he deserved one in this Fidelio. He is underpowered for the role: an essentially lyric tenor, rather than a heroic one. (Incidentally, an historic heroic Florestan, Jon Vickers, died in July.) But he uses to maximum effect what he has. Nor did he strain, on this evening. His crescendo at the beginning of Florestans monologue Gott! Welch Dunkel hier was memorable. As an actor, he executed Claus Guths plan to a T. Or so it seemed to me, from the seats. I will shaft the rest of the cast to return to the production. Operas usually give directors a lot of leeway. That is certainly true of Fidelio. But there is leeway and there is hijacking. A longtime patron here in Salzburg reminisced almost tearfully about the 1950s production of Fidelio by Herbert von Karajan (who of course conducted too). On the stage at the end, she said, you saw the light and redemption of the music and the story. Everything matched. This was Beethovens true Fidelio. Now, we should beware nostalgia, and we should recognize that some traditions exist to be junked. But a modicum of fidelity, in an opera production, is desirable, and needed. The faddists are so clever, said Lorin Maazel to me in a 2009 interview, because they paint you into a corner. Their trick, he elaborated, is to say, If you object to us, youre a conservative, youre a fuddy-duddy, youre a living anachronism! What we do is new! Maazel was a major conductor here in Salzburg, as he was all over the world. He died last summer. It was because of Euro-dreck, as he called it, that he stopped coming to Salzburg. Guth and his Fidelio are not Euro-dreck. Herr Guth is a serious and talented man. But I wish he and his confreres would apply their talents to new works plays, operas, TV shows, videos? of their own. If you dont like Beethovens happy ending, dont go to, or direct, Beethovens opera. (Which, not that anyone asked, is, gun to my head, my favorite opera. Probably.)Updated at 6:45 p.m. ET
Authorities investigating the deadly bombings at the Boston Marathon have zeroed in on a man seen on surveillance video near the site of the attack.
Sources say investigators are trying to identify a person described as a young white man who is standing in the crowd near the scene of the second bombing just before the device exploded, reported CBS News correspondent Bob Orr. A surveillance camera at a nearby Lord and Taylor department store captured images of the man who was carrying a backpack and talking on a cell phone.
The man was wearing a black jacket, a grey hooded sweatshirt and a white or off-white baseball cap backwards. He is 6 feet or 6-feet-2-inches tall with a medium build.
Investigators say the man, who seemed to be alone, put the backpack on the ground. Then, when the first explosion occurred at the finish line about 100 yards down Boylston Street, he took off. Just a few seconds later, the second bomb exploded near where the man had been standing.
Investigators now are going through cell phone logs to determine who made calls from that location near the time of the explosions. Sources say the FBI is working with a list of names of cell phone owners and attempting to match one of those to the unknown man on the surveillance
Sources say forensic experts tape will attempt to use facial recognition software and compare the images from the surveillance camera to photo IDs connected to known cell phone users. Officials say so far they have not identified that mystery man and they're not yet calling him a suspect.
CBS News senior correspondent John Miller said that the big case Wednesday was whether to make the case to release that photo and go out and say this is the person who is being sought or to hold that back.
"It's been a tough call," said Miller. "For investigators, there's always a difficult choice because if the person doesn't know you're looking for him, he may stay in place, you may catch up to him. if he does know you're looking for him, he may run. On the other hand, if you don't get him, it's always great to enlist 20 million or so more eyes in the public who may be able to give you a location right away. That's not going to happen tonight anymore. It was going to happen earlier -- they've rethought that. It may happen with the release of that picture tomorrow. They're reassessing.
Meanwhile, investigators have found the lid of a pressure cooker that apparently was catapulted onto the roof of a nearby building, a law enforcement source said Wednesday.
The law enforcement source confirmed to CBS News senior investigative producer Pat Milton Wednesday that the lid was found on the top of a building near the attack site.
The developments come after an intelligence bulletin issued to law enforcement and obtained by The Associated Press and the Reuters news agency late Tuesday included pictures of a mangled pressure cooker, a torn black bag, a circuit board and a battery connected to wires, all of which the bulletin said were from the two bombs used in the attack.
The blasts killed 8-year-old Martin Richard, of Boston, and 29-year-old Krystle Campbell, of Medford, Mass. On Wednesday, CBS News confirmed that the third fatality has been identified as Lu Lingzi, a 23-year-old graduate student at Boston University from Shenyang, China.
Both explosive devices appear to have been placed in sealable metal pots called pressure cookers and packed with nails and ball bearings designed to amplify the damage from the explosions, Orr previously reported.
Investigators believe the bombs were hidden in black nylon backpacks and housed inside the pressure cookers. Pressure-cooker bombs can help boost the power of relatively small devices by briefly constraining the blast. When the cookers do explode, they can add large chunks of metal to the shrapnel spray.
The improvised explosive devices have been popular with terrorists. Al Qaeda published a how-to recipe in an online jihad magazine. Several of the bombs were used in the 2006 attack on trains in Mumbai, India. Pressure cooker explosives have been recommended for lone-wolf operatives by al Qaeda's branch in Yemen.
The FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly pleaded for members of the public to come forward with photos, videos or anything suspicious they might have seen or heard.
"The range of suspects and motives remains wide open," Richard DesLauriers, FBI agent in charge in Boston, said at a news conference Tuesday. He vowed to "go to the ends of the Earth to identify the subject or subjects who are responsible for this despicable crime."
President Obama branded the attack an act of terrorism but said officials don't know "whether it was planned and executed by a terrorist organization, foreign or domestic, or was the act of a malevolent individual."
Mr. Obama plans to attend an interfaith service Thursday in the victims' honor in Boston. He has traveled four times to cities reeling from mass violence, most recently in December after the schoolhouse shooting in Newtown, Conn.
Heightening jitters in Washington, where security already had been tightened after the bombing, the Secret Service quarantined a suspicious letter addressed to Mr. Obama that is being tested for the toxin ricin, CBS News learned Wednesday.
On Tuesday, a letter addressed to a senator and initially tested positive for ricin was intercepted at a mail facility outside the capital, lawmakers said.
There was no indication either episode was related to the Boston attack. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday's letter was addressed to Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, of Mississippi.
Mother of Boston bombing victim speaks out
Martin: The symbol of the tragedy
FBI appeals for videos, photos of Boston bombings
In Boston, scores of victims remained in hospitals, many with grievous injuries, after the twin explosions near the marathon's finish line killed the three people, wounded more than 170 and reawakened fears of terrorism. A 9-year-old girl and 10-year-old boy were among 17 victims listed in critical condition.
DesLauriers confirmed that investigators had found pieces of black nylon from a bag or backpack and fragments of BBs and nails, possibly contained in a pressure cooker. He said the items were sent to the FBI laboratory at Quantico, Va., for analysis.
The FBI said it is looking at what a Boston television station said are photos sent by a viewer that show the scene right before and after the bombs went off. One photo shows something next to a mailbox that appears to be a bag, but it's unclear what the significance is.
"We're taking a look at hundreds of photos, and that's one of them," FBI spokesman Jason Pack said.
Investigators said they haven't determined what was used to set off the explosives.
DesLauriers said there had been no claim of responsibility for the attack.
He urged people to come forward with anything suspicious, such as hearing someone express an interest in explosives or a desire to attack the marathon, seeing someone carrying a dark heavy bag at the race or hearing mysterious explosions recently.
"Someone knows who did this," the FBI agent said.
The bombs exploded 10 or more seconds apart, tearing off victims' limbs and spattering streets with blood, instantly turning the festive race into a hellish scene of confusion, horror and heroics.
Doctors who treated the wounded corroborated reports that the bombs were packed with shrapnel intended to cause mayhem.
"We've removed BBs, and we've removed nails from kids. One of the sickest things for me was just to see nails sticking out of a little girl's body," said Dr. David Mooney, director of the trauma center at Boston Children's Hospital.
Dr. Peter Burke, chief trauma surgeon at Boston Medical Center, said Wednesday that the hospital performed seven amputations on bombing patients. He said a large volume of fragments pulled from the victims were sent to the pathologist and available for police to review.
Burke said two of the hospital's patients, including a 5-year-old child, remain in critical condition. He said he expects both to survive but "until they are home, I won't be satisfied."There is one old tag, or proverb, that has long ago lost whatever truth or wisdom it may have had: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”
Today we know names hurt. We do not abide genuinely contemptible language directed at minorities, people of other |
Power’s facility, there have been multiple shutdowns, costs have ballooned and the original promise of capturing 90 percent of the carbon from the plant hasn’t even come close to being realized.
Kemper, expected to open soon after more than two years of delays, is aiming to capture up to 65 percent of carbon emissions from a coal gasification plant.
Northam, from the University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources, said on its face, capturing carbon and keeping it out of the atmosphere is “not magic, and it’s not a technology that is difficult.”
It is, however, expensive, and industry hasn’t been excited about investing in it, instead relying on government money. A report by the Congressional Research Service estimates that between 1997 and 2008, the Department of Energy provided $900 million for activities related to CCS. In 2009, DOE stepped up its game, allocating $3.38 billion in funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for carbon capture projects, according to an analysis by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.
Since then, Northam would characterize funding as “spotty,” which has reduced research to “fits and starts.”
“The only way you reduce the costs is through re-engineering of things you’ve already tried,” he said. “So in order to deliver carbon capture, we’ve got to demonstrate projects, and I have a very strong sense that the federal government needs to motivate that to happen.”
Some Wyoming lawmakers are incensed that the federal government has passed down regulations like the Clean Power Plan while mistakenly pointing to carbon capture as a solution.
“It’s not ready for prime time, it’s just not. The technology is not there,” said Republican state Rep. Norine Kasperik. “And what the Clean Power Plan has done is make our highest technological mines and power plants illegal to build.”
She said what Wyoming needs is time, enough time for the technology to catch up on carbon capture and sequestration.
And she thinks the country owes the state that, after relying on Wyoming coal to cheaply power much of the country for decades.
“Coal is in our blood,” she said. “Coal has been good for this country.”
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500Nearly nine years ago, the world was rocked by the worst financial crisis since 1929. The collapse of Lehman Brothers set off a domino effect of bank failures which rippled round the world. Massive runs on financial markets pushed interest rates sky-high: investors dumped riskier investments and fled for the safety of traditional havens. Fearing a repeat of the 1930s, central banks poured money into distressed markets and propped up asset prices with massive asset purchase programs, while governments rescued failing banks. In 2009, the G20 embarked on a coordinated program of fiscal expansion designed to restore trade, promote growth and reduce unemployment around the world.
The emergency measures worked. Although there was a deep recession, the feared depression did not materialize. True, GDP fell significantly in most countries, and unemployment rose. But the dangerous deflationary spiral of the Great Depression was averted.
But the cost of the crisis caused fiscal deficits to balloon. In the UK, for example, the fiscal deficit rose from 3% of GDP in 2007 to 10.8% of GDP by 2009. Deficit to GDP is of course a ratio: part of this rise was due to a sharp drop in GDP. But the size of the deficit in British pounds also increased, reaching an unprecedented £90bn in April 2009. Furthermore, bank bailouts had temporarily increased Britain’s debt in relation to GDP to over 50%. “Will there be buyers for gilts?” wondered the Guardian, as financial commentators talked of fiscal consolidation to restore confidence.
The Greek crisis in 2009 exposed the fragility of countries with high debt to GDP ratios and very high fiscal deficits. Fear of a buyer’s strike fed further calls for fiscal consolidation, which were amplified by the release in January 2010 of Reinhart & Rogoff’s now-infamous paper purporting to show that high debt/GDP levels were detrimental to economic growth.
In May 2010, the UK elected a government on a mandate to pursue a front-loaded program of fiscal consolidation. It did just that, raising taxes on households and businesses, and making deep cuts to government spending. Within a year, the UK’s recovery had tailed off and there was talk of renewed recession. Years later, both the deficit and the debt remain elevated - though we are all bored with fiscal austerity now.
The UK was not the only country to replace fiscal expansion with fiscal austerity, to the detriment of its recovery. Many other countries did so to, to a greater or lesser extent.
But the fate of Greece stands out. From 2010 onwards there were repeated bailouts, accompanied by harsh fiscal austerity measures that were supposed to reduce the debt/GDP level to something sustainable. They failed dismally. Now, seven years on, Greece’s economy has shrunk by over a quarter, unemployment remains well over 20% (and double that for young people) and it is still barely growing. And to crown it all, the IMF says its debt is now unsustainable. The austerity measures didn’t even achieve what was intended. What an absolute, mammoth, catastrophic failure of public policy.
In a new paper presented at Jackson Hole last week, the economists Alan Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko showed that, contrary to popular belief, fiscal expansion after a major financial shock such as that in 2008 did not cause debt/GDP ratios to rise. In fact, the researchers found that debt could become more sustainable, not less, after fiscal stimulus:
For a sample of developed countries, we find that government spending shocks do not lead to persistent increases in debt-to-GDP ratios or costs of borrowing, especially during periods of economic weakness. Indeed, fiscal stimulus in a weak economy can improve fiscal sustainability along the metrics we study.
Fiscal stimulus works. What a pity we did not allow ourselves to do it, much.
But what about Greece? Surely fiscal austerity was necessary there?
Well, maybe. “The experience of Greece and other countries in Southern Europe is a grave warning about the political risks and limits of fiscal policy,” say the researchers. “Bridges to nowhere, “pet” projects and other wasteful spending can outweigh any benefits of countercyclical fiscal policy.”
But they nevertheless find that fiscal expansion works even when debt/GDP levels are high. “The penalty for a high debt-to-GDP ratio does not appear to be high at the debt levels experienced historically for developed countries,” they say.
So when Greece's debt was a mere 100% of GDP, fiscal expansion could have been a good strategy. Now, of course, Greece’s debt/GDP ratio is off the chart, because of the aforementioned catastrophic failure of public policy. The researchers warn that their results are uncertain at very high debt/GDP levels. So fiscal expansion might now be too late for Greece. What a tragedy.
“We have been giving catastrophically bad advice to countries with high debt to GDP ratios”, said Jason Furman, the former chair of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers who is now at Harvard.
Too right. And Greece has paid the price.
But it is not just Greece that has paid. If Auerbach and Gorodnichenko are right, then the policy path since 2010 has been wrong for many more countries. They have truncated their recoveries and hurt their populations by embarking on premature fiscal consolidation, while cudgeling central banks into somehow conjuring up a recovery that monetary policy is incapable of producing at the lower bound. As a result, there has been a prolonged and wholly unnecessary global slowdown, which will leave lasting scars, particularly on the young.
What a complete, utter, disastrous failure of public policy, not just for Greece but for the world.Following the Indian Supreme Court ruling that privacy will be a fundamental right, the focus has shifted to how companies will respond. Until now, there has been little clarity on data collection by many Indian startups, and even lesser understanding of how the data is being used. But legal experts and startup founders believe this ruling will usher an organized and transparent approach to data collection, storage and usage by India’s digital leaders.
The legal impact of the Supreme Court ruling
In August 2017, a nine-judge bench ruled unanimously that the right to privacy is a fundamental one for Indians. This ruling is widely believed to have an impact on India’s ambitious Aadhaar scheme, as the central government now must convince the Supreme Court that collecting iris scans and fingerprint samples from citizens does not violate their privacy.
Read more on Forbes: India Learns That With New Tech, Security Advancements Must Follow
Members in the startup ecosystem and legal experts believe that once the legislation is passed, it will have a lasting impact on data protection and privacy across India. Stephen Mathias, partner and co-chair of technology law at Kochchar & Co., says, “The manner of personal data collection will change. Right now, consent is being given by consumers without them necessarily knowing why their data is being used. Hopefully, there will be some standard as to when businesses can use individuals’ data, which balances competing interests of protecting individual privacy and allowing businesses to use big data.”
On the heels of the privacy ruling is another case that will shape the future of data collection in India. Two individuals filed a case in the Delhi High Court challenging the August 2016 policy of the messaging platform WhatsApp to share user information with its parent entity Facebook. The ruling of the high court has been appealed and is currently being argued in the Supreme Court. The government has since established the BN Srikrishna Committee to draft a data protection framework for Indian citizens. Kartik Maheshwari, leader, Nishith Desai Associates says, “The draft law is expected in about eight to 10 months. With respect to a data protection regulation, whether in the form of a new legislation or an amendment to the existing law, it is hoped that the burden of compliance for small and medium-sized businesses should not be cumbersome.”
Startups prepare for transparency
India’s startups have welcomed the privacy ruling, and are eager to see protocols being set pertaining to data collection and use. Bala Parthasarathy, cofounder of fintech startup Moneytap, says, “This ruling empowers the consumer. There is a significant level of data abuse today and this ruling will now force startups to define specific guidelines on data collection. Once they sketch the outlines for data use, customers will be more forthcoming about sharing personal information.”
While regulatory bodies such as SEBI, RBI and TRAI are currently working on specific guidelines on data sharing and usage, startups can take corrective steps in preliminary stages of data collection. Suhas Gopinath, cofounder and CEO of HappyEMI says, “Startups have to employ responsible ways to gather data, devise better user interface and experiences that make the consumer aware of the data being collected, stored and used. In addition, digital and offline campaigns must be deployed to educate users about the right to privacy. A user’s ignorance about this ruling cannot be treated as consent.”
Blockchain for better security
But, there’s a lot of data out there that Indian businesses have access to. India’s smartphone users are expected to reach 299.24 million this year. App Annie’s research states that Indians spend more than four hours each day browsing apps. From booking cabs to conducting financial transactions, there’s a growing presence of online activity through apps, most of which access the personal data of users.
To safeguard data structures and user privacy, blockchain technology could be a solution, suggests Mohit Mamoria, blockchain enthusiast and founder-CEO of GODToken. “Data storage and collection should be built on a secure platform. Startups should invest in blockchain to protect customer data and guarantee anonymity. An encrypted identity on a blockchain requires a user’s permission to get unlocked.”
Read more on Forbes: On Bitcoin, India's Government And Tech Companies Find Common Ground
A KPMG report stated that Indian banks and insurance companies are amongst the first in the country that have shown a marked interest in developing a blockchain infrastructure by collaborating with fintech companies. As startups embrace a secure platform for data collection, blockchain could assume a greater role for startups to store their data safely.
While the country awaits the privacy ruling to become a law, Indian startups can work towards establishing best practices towards data collection and usage. With an impetus to digitize India, the ecosystem can set new benchmarks in data privacy.Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has today announced the formation of Woz U, an online university designed to make tech education more affordable.
While the initiative is an online-only one for now, Woz says that the plan is to offer brick-and-mortar campuses in more than 30 cities across the U.S. and around the world …
NordVPN
Woz U is intended to benefit both students and businesses alike, helping bring people into the workforce and providing a new source of trained tech workers for companies looking to hire.
“Our goal is to educate and train people in employable digital skills without putting them into years of debt,” said Wozniak, who co-founded Apple Computer and invented the Apple II computer that launched the personal computing revolution. “People often are afraid to choose a technology-based career because they think they can’t do it. I know they can, and I want to show them how.”
To help identify the best education track for each student, Woz has created an app to guide them.
Current programs will train computer support specialists and software developers; data science, mobile applications and cybersecurity programs are coming soon. All Woz U programs incorporate the latest technologies and skills in high demand by tech employers, and programs include comprehensive career services.
Woz U will also provide school districts with K-12 STEAM programs designed to nudge suitable students toward a career in tech, as well as subscription-based and customized training for companies.
Woz U is a free download from the App Store. Pricing for the courses has not yet been announced.
Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news:Black Veil Brides frontman Andy Biersack is currently in the studio working on his new Andy Black album with producer John Feldmann (Sleeping With Sirens, 5 Seconds Of Summer). Thanks to a new post on the BVB singer’s Instagram account, we now know that both Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump and the Used guitarist Quinn Allman have lent their talents to the record. You can check out the epic photo, along with a brief message from Biersack, below.
Read more: Here’s three My Chemical Romance members and Sum 41 in the same room
“The intention is to finish both [the Black Veil Brides and Andy Black] records concurrently,” Biersack claimed at the second annual APMAs. “I have almost all the material worked on for Andy Black. We're going to get in, start working with John Feldmann and do a Black Veil record, then I'm going to try to [get] an Andy Black record done.”
“I have something like 45 songs for Andy Black right now,” he added.
Watch: Black Veil Brides vocalist Andy Biersack jumps into crowd to take on heckler
Black Veil Brides released their first live DVD, Alive And Burning, earlier this summer. The band debuted their latest studio album in 2014 via Universal/Republic Records. In case you missed it, watch them cover Mötley Crüe’s “Kickstart My Heart” on their recent headlining tour with Memphis May Fire.Long ago, a small radical Christian sect left England in search of religious tolerance. They were people who abandoned their families and social lives to live together in a communal, equal setting marked by simplicity and celibacy. Officially known as the United Society of Believers, they called themselves Shakers—but now, reports David Sharp for the Associated Press, the death of one in their ranks means there are only two Shakers left in the world.
When Sister Frances Carr died at age 89 earlier this week, she reduced the number of Shakers in the last active community of its kind to two. The Shaker village at Sabbathday Lake in New Gloucester, Maine, has been in operation since 1783, when it was founded by a group of Shaker missionaries. The United Society of Believers sect had already existed since 1747. It was created by a group of English Quakers and exiled Camisard Protestants who had unsuccessfully fought for their religious freedoms in France before fleeing to England. The sect became known for their ecstatic worship—ceremonies that included trembling, shaking, and what one historian calls “frenzied screeching and whirling.” The name Shaker grew out of the group’s reputation as “Shaking Quakers” known for that physical worship, and Shakers shook up the religious establishment by including things like spiritualism and frenetic dances in their worship.
This violently expressive behavior soon made Shakers unwelcome in England and they migrated to the United States. There, they lived communally, embracing pacifism, equality of the sexes, and anti-slavery views decades before these were anywhere near the cultural mainstream. “The celibate Shaker ‘family’ was not one of blood relations; rather, all referred to themselves as brothers and sisters,” notes the National Park Service.
Inside Shaker communities, simplicity and hard work reigned. Labor and craftsmanship were seen as ways to worship God, and Shakers became known for producing high-quality furniture, food and household goods. Despite their celibacy, they had plenty of help. Shakers often raised orphans until adulthood. In addition, some people came into and left the community on a temporary basis, spawning the term “Winter Shakers” to describe those taken in by Shakers in exchange for their labor during the harsh New England winters.
But in 1961, Sabbathday Lake, the only Shaker colony remaining, stopped accepting new members, Carol Oppenheim reported in the Chicago Tribune. The challenging commitments of celibate, communal life have since caused the number of Shakers to dwindle from several thousand to just two. But though the Shaker tradition is now associated with a bygone era commemorated by old buildings and elegantly spare furniture, the sect is still hanging on.
Now, writes Sharp, 60-year-old Brother Arnold Hadd and 78-year-old Sister June Carpenter are the only Shakers in the community. Both are determined to continue forward, proving that their religious beliefs remain anything but a historic footnote.Ever since Ron Paul announced that he was seeking the nomination of the Republican Party for president, I have heard some assorted libertarians complain about his stance on abortion. This includes both libertarians who support Dr. Paul and libertarians who oppose him. Although the arguments of both groups differ, they basically end up saying either:
I support Ron Paul even though he is wrong on abortion.
I don’t support Ron Paul because he is wrong on abortion.
True, there are usually some other issues included as well (like immigration), but Dr. Paul’s opposition to abortion seems particularly to inflame some libertarians — even to the point of stating or implying that he is not a libertarian or that opposition to abortion is anti-libertarian. The question then is a simple one: Is Ron Paul wrong on abortion? We know that Dr. Paul is a physician who has delivered over 4,000 babies, but that in and of itself doesn’t mean that he is opposed to abortion. So, what exactly does Ron Paul think about abortion? Here are some of his published statements: The right of an innocent, unborn child to life is at the heart of the American ideals of liberty. My professional and legislative record demonstrates my strong commitment to this pro-life principle. In 40 years of medical practice, I never once considered performing an abortion, nor did I ever find abortion necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman. In Congress, I have authored legislation that seeks to define life as beginning at conception, H.R. 1094. I am also the prime sponsor of H.R. 300, which would negate the effect of Roe v Wade by removing the ability of federal courts to interfere with state legislation to protect life. This is a practical, direct approach to ending federal court tyranny which threatens our constitutional republic and has caused the deaths of 45 million of the unborn. I have also authored H.R. 1095, which prevents federal funds to be used for so-called “population control.” Many talk about being pro-life. I have taken and will continue to advocate direct action to restore protection for the unborn. Abortion on demand is no doubt the most serious sociopolitical problem of our age. The lack of respect for life that permits abortion significantly contributes to our violent culture and our careless attitude toward liberty. As an obstetrician, I know that partial birth abortion is never a necessary medical procedure. It is a gruesome, uncivilized solution to a social problem. As an obstetrician-gynecologist, I can assure my colleagues that the partial-birth abortion procedure is the most egregious legally permitted act known to man. Decaying social and moral attitudes decades ago set the stage for the accommodated Roe vs. Wade ruling that nationalizes all laws dealing with abortion. The fallacious privacy argument the Supreme Court used must some day be exposed for the fraud that it is. Reaffirming the importance of the sanctity of life is crucial for the continuation of a civilized society. There is already strong evidence that we are indeed on the slippery slope toward euthanasia and human experimentation. Although the real problem lies within the hearts and minds of the people, the legal problems of protecting life stems from the ill-advised Roe v. Wade ruling, a ruling that constitutionally should never have occurred. I believe beyond a doubt that a fetus is a human life deserving of legal protection, and that the right to life is the foundation of any moral society. Why would a libertarian have a problem with these statements? Why should it be considered libertarian to kill a baby in the womb or unlibertarian to oppose such killing? And even worse, why would a libertarian say that it was unlibertarian to advocate killing foreigners in an aggressive war but not non-libertarian to kill a baby in the womb? There are two kinds of “pro-choice” libertarians. The first recognizes that abortion is not a settled issue in the libertarian community and therefore hesitates to castigate fellow libertarians who oppose abortion as anti-libertarian or unlibertarian. They are civil, amiable, and likable — like Walter Block. The newest Libertarian Party platform takes a neutral view of abortion: Recognizing that abortion is a sensitive issue and that people can hold good-faith views on both sides, we believe that government should be kept out of the matter, leaving the question to each person for their conscientious consideration. We oppose government actions that either compel or prohibit abortion, sterilization or any other form of birth control. The second, and more vocal, group of these libertarians is made up of those who are adamant in their belief that opposition to abortion is anti-libertarian or unlibertarian. When a radical, pro-abortion feminist makes a statement like “fetuses are parasites who derive all their nutrients from the bodies of their hosts, and quite often pose to their hosts serious health complications and risks. Any woman carrying a fetus is being generous,” it doesn’t surprise me in the least. But some “pro-choice” libertarians make statements that are just as outrageous. Abortion is legitimate not because a women’s body is her own and a fetus is not really a human being anyway, but because a woman’s body is her own and abortion of an unwanted fetus falls under her legitimate right to defend her person from unwanted violations of her body. From the beginning, the right of abortion should have been rooted in the liberal rights of the individual and the equality of the right to self-defense. Those who support abortion should advance the principle that abortion is a component of a women’s sovereign right of self-defense of her life against unwanted violations of her body, just as every man has the sovereign right to defend his life against aggression from muggers, thieves or politicians, by using whatever amount of coercive force is necessary to repulse the attack on his life or property. Forcing pregnant women to carry to term is akin to slavery, and in the same way I would not tolerate a state that permitted slavery, I am unwilling to tolerate the banning of abortion at the state level. There are several reasons why many Christians have an aversion to libertarianism. I won’t get into those here, except to say that being a militant supporter of abortion on demand is certainly one of them. The non-aggression axiom is central to libertarianism. The essence of libertarianism is that it is wrong to threaten or initiate violence against a person or his property. Force is justified only in self-defense. “Libertarianism,” as explained by Murray Rothbard, the twentieth century’s greatest proponent of it, is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral, or aesthetic theory; it is only a political theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life. Political theory deals with what is proper or improper for government to do, and government is distinguished from every other group in society as being the institution of organized violence. Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal. Libertarianism, therefore, is a theory which states that everyone should be free of violent invasion, should he free to do as he sees fit except invade the person or property of another. What a person does with his or her life is vital and important, but is simply irrelevant to libertarianism. Killing someone is the ultimate form of aggression. Especially a helpless, defenseless fetus that is only guilty of suddenly waking up in a womb. The fetus certainly had no control over being a parasite, aggressing against a woman, invading a woman’s body, or adding unwanted pounds to his host — but its mother certainly did. If an unborn child is not entitled to protection of life, then to be consistent, libertarians should have no problem with the abortion of a fetus from one month old to nine months old. The nine-month old fetus is no more viable than the one-month old one. In fact, a one-month old baby has the same degree of viability. I hate to be so crude, but leave all three of them unattended on a table in a hospital and see what happens. So again I ask: Why should it be considered libertarian to kill a baby in the womb or unlibertarian to oppose such killing? This has nothing to do with giving the government greater control over a woman’s body; it has everything to do with preventing aggression and protecting innocent life. This being said, the solution is not a federal law or a constitutional amendment banning abortion. The federal government should not have anything to do with abortion for the simple reason that it should not have anything to do with the majority of what it is currently involved in, and especially crime fighting. That is part of the police power of the states. As I have previously written about Ron Paul’s position on abortion: Ron Paul believes that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided because abortion is simply not a constitutional issue. He doesn’t think there is any serious argument based on the text of the Constitution that there exists a federal “right to abortion.” He maintains that the federalization of abortion law is not based on constitutional principles, but on a social and political construct created out of thin air by the Supreme Court. Since the federal government has no authority to involve itself in the abortion issue, a federal law banning abortion in the states would be just as wrong as Roe v. Wade. So even if a libertarian thinks Ron Paul is on the wrong side of the abortion question, because he, unlike most pro-lifers who look to politicians and federal judges for their salvation, wants to remove the federal government from the abortion debate, there is no reason to not support him because he opposes abortion. Although I strongly disagree with him on the subject of abortion, a recent writer on this site made what I thought was a profound statement about Ron Paul and abortion: “Perhaps Dr. Paul would like to see most, maybe all abortions outlawed. Maybe he has good reason for feeling that way. But so what? The President of the United States cannot unilaterally declare abortion illegal. Who would want to live in a country where he could?” He also recognized the non-calamity that would result should a President Paul appoint additional pro-life justices to the Supreme Court: The Supreme Court cannot simply outlaw abortion nationwide. Instead, the Court could simply rule that it has no jurisdiction over state abortion laws, and send the matter back to state legislatures. Why would that be so terrible? It is unlikely that most states would enact a complete ban on abortions. In 2006, a comprehensive ban was put to the voters in South Dakota by means of referendum. The referendum failed in what is one of the most conservative states in the Union. If Roe v. Wade were overturned and abortion laws were once again made the provision of the states, there would be nothing unlibertarian about supporting state laws making abortion a crime just as laws against murder, manslaughter, and wrongful death are considered legitimate actions of the states. I believe that the antagonism toward Dr. Paul among some libertarians is deeper than the abortion question. There is a larger issue lurking here. Some libertarians consider libertarianism to be a lifestyle rather than a political philosophy. These DC/PC libertarians have some strange ideas:
The more you emphasize alternative lifestyles the more libertarian you are.
The more you support pornography the more libertarian you are.
The more drugs you take the more libertarian you are.
The more religion you reject the more libertarian you are.
These “lifestyle” or “cosmopolitan” libertarians, some of whom — to the detriment of their cause — are condescending, pompous snobs, are not content with personally and culturally conservative libertarians (like Ron Paul) tolerating diversity; they want them to likewise celebrate depravity. They apparently don’t know the difference between libertarianism and libertinism. And what makes this even worse is that some of them are also liberventionists — justifying the sending of U.S. troops into other countries to bomb, maim, and kill for the very state they decry. Is Ron Paul wrong on abortion? Not in the least.
The Best of Laurence M. VanceSome users prevented from accessing email system after IT contractor at Croydon NHS messages all 1.2 million employees
Sending an email to everyone in the company is usually a guaranteed way of making yourself unpopular, but the potential for annoyance is even greater if you have 1.2 million colleagues.
On Monday, NHS staff complained on Twitter about a “test email” sent by an IT contractor at Croydon NHS to everyone in the organisation, as well as replies to all in response to the message, leading to claims that the entire email system had crashed.
One health service statistician estimated that at least 186m emails, including replies to all asking to be taken off the distribution list, had been sent, clogging up people’s inboxes. NHS digital said 840,000 accounts were affected.
Gavin (@68_gavin) Another waste of a working day due to some pillick in #nhsmail sending email to entire directory, unable to connect and do my job #epicfail
James Andrews (@aptaim) Hmmmm... wonder if this is why I can't log in to #NHSmail at the moment?! https://t.co/wBvuREsB6X
Project iHypE (@PIhype) If you're trying to get in touch with us today, please be patient, it seems #NHSmail has gone down for the time being. We'll reply ASAP. A
Colin McDonnell (@Malignanthero) Slow handclap for the individual that sent a test email to the entire NHSMail user base, and bravo to those that "replied to all"... pic.twitter.com/zkg5uG7t2M
Graham Hyde (@GrahamHyde) #nhsmail 1.2 million people have received approx 151 emails in error this morning. That's 186 million needless emails so far today.
A message to NHSmail users described the global email as a “high severity service incident”. It said: “An issue with a distribution list has meant that several test emails have been widely received by users. This has been exacerbated by recipients replying in response and increasing the volume of emails associated with the list.
“The impact of this issue has meant that some users are unable to access OWA [Outlook web access] due to the volume of emails being circulated. The distribution list has been removed and associated emails are being traced and cleared. In the meantime, users will experience slow performance with OWA and email delivery delays from internal and external sources to nhs.net addresses.”
In a statement dictated over the phone due to the problems with the email system, an NHS Digital spokeswoman said: “Some users have experienced short delays in the NHSmail system this morning. Action has been taken to resolve this issue.
“A number of email accounts have been operating slower than normal due to an NHSmail user setting up an email distribution list which inadvertently included everyone on the NHSmail system. As soon as we became aware of the issue, we deleted the distribution list so that no one else could respond to it. We anticipate that the issue will be rectified very soon.”
Complaints to the NHSmail helpdesk have trebled since the email system was introduced in May. The secure email service is approved by the Department of Health for sharing patient-identifiable and sensitive information.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked some tough questions during Tuesday's town hall meeting in Fredericton, particularly in relation to the Phoenix payroll "nightmare."
Roxanne Merrill Young asked Trudeau about the new payroll system, which she called a "nightmare," and which has left some federal employees sporadically paid or not paid at all for stretches of work.
Trudeau said he understands the anger and frustration provoked by the failure of the Phoenix system and called the problems unacceptable.
"It's a situation that cannot continue and one that we take extremely seriously," he said.
Trudeau said employees didn't know how to use the new payroll system when it was brought in.
Trudeau answers question on Phoenix payroll at Fredericton town hall. 6:32
But people in Miramichi, where the system is administered, are working around the clock to fix it, he said.
"Everyone deserves to get paid what they're owed in a timely matter," he said.
At the town hall meeting, questions from New Brunswickers covered a range of topics, including marijuana policy, protection of the environment, job creation, and what Trudeau's daughter wants to be when she grows up.
"She is an eight-year-old princess or rock 'n' roll star," he said. "I impress on my daughter she can be whatever she wants. I also impress upon her brothers she can be whatever she wants."
watch two young girls present the Prime Minister with flowers as he takes questions in Fredericton. 0:26 Laura Shaw, a student at the University of New Brunswick asked the prime minister how government planned to decrease the number of sexual assaults on university campuses.
"We need to support survivors... we need to address huge challenges within workplaces... we need to talk about it more if we want to be a truly equal country," Trudeau said.
He also spoke about volunteers at McGill University's sexual assault centre.
"Violence against women and girls happens too often."
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked some tough questions during Tuesday's town hall meeting in Fredericton. 5:41 After the town hall meeting, Shaw said she appreciated Trudeau's thoughtfulness in answering the question.
"That really means a lot," she said. "Men are so crucial and the impact they can have on their peers is much more than women can have on men."
A Grade 12 student in Fredericton asked how Canada can ensure respect and inclusion within its own communities after flaring racial tensions in the United States.
"It's easier to get people to close in," he said. "Diversity is a sort of strength... it creates opportunities."
Matt DeCourcey, the Fredericton MP, spoke at the morning event and thanked everyone for attending. Diane Lebouthillier and Fisheries Minister Dominic LeBlanc, along with mayors and local council members, also attended.
"This is a community town hall, you're here to share your stories … and ask your questions to your prime minister," DeCourcey said.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fields questions at a town hall meeting at the Cultural Centre in Fredericton on Tuesday. (Andrew Vaughan/Canadian Press)
The Fredericton Chamber of Commerce, which hosted the community meeting, closed pre-registration for the event on Monday "due to huge response" and said pre-registration doesn't guarantee entry.
Trudeau's stops in Nova Scotia on Monday and New Brunswick on Tuesday coincide with the release of a public opinion poll suggesting the prime minister and his government continue to enjoy "historic highs" in popularity in this region.
In a quarterly survey of more than 1,500 people, 73 per cent of respondents were satisfied with the government's performance and 62 per cent support Trudeau.
Selfies in Saint John
Sarah Podpallock, an intensive care unit nurse and Trudeau fan, was very happy to get her selfie with the prime minister. (Rachel Cave/CBC) Following the morning event in Fredericton, Trudeau travelled by motorcade down the highway to Saint John and visited the Market Square atrium at 1:30 p.m., where he was greeted by a large, enthusiastic crowd.
It resembled a celebrity event, with hundreds of people — mainly millennials — eager to see him and get a selfie to document the nation's leader's approximately 30-minute visit.
Intensive care unit nurse Sarah Padpallock screamed with giddy joy at her selfie.
Mike Biggar entertained the hundreds of people who packed into Saint John's Market Square atrium on Tuesday for a chance to see Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. (Rachel Cave/CBC) "I'm a whole-hearted Trudeau fan," she said.
"I think it's really cool that he came to Saint John, New Brunswick, and that he came into the crowd and spoke to us and took selfies. It was cool."
Trudeau didn't take any questions during the Saint John leg of his "listening tour," and faced no resistance as he worked the crowd for about 30 minutes, under the watchful eye of his security detail and Saint John Police Force officers.
"OMG! He is beautiful!" a teenage girl squealed.
Then he proceeded to Hampton for a quick stop at Tim Hortons at 2:20 p.m. People squeezed in and the crowd spilled over, lined up outside the door. Some were standing on chairs to try to catch a glimpse of the prime minister.
The Tim Hortons in Hampton wasn't big enough to accommodate the crowd that gathered to see Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday. (Rachel Cave/CBC) Trudeau is scheduled to fly to Sherbrooke, Que., next for a 7 p.m. ET town hall session at Colonel Gaétan Côté Armoury.
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deeply researched, often strongly critical articles on all aspects of the nuclear cycle since 1978. A must-read for all those who work on this issue!Image caption The Scottish population is getting older
The number of people living in Scotland has reached a new high, according to the latest official figures.
At the end of June last year the population stood at 5,313,600 - up 18,200 since the last census on 27 March 2011.
Although there were more births than deaths, the rise was mainly due to people moving into Scotland.
Women continue to outnumber men in Scotland, with nearly 160,000 more females.
The figures also revealed that, since the 2001 census, Scotland's population had become older.
There were rises of 14% in those aged 75 and over, 16% in the 60 to 74 age group, and 14% among those aged 45 to 59.
Among younger people, there were falls of 6% in the under-16 age group, and 9% in those aged 30 to 44.
Male mortality
Overall there were 159,320 more women in Scotland than men last year, widening the gender gap which had been evident in previous census data.
The Scottish government welcomes the contribution these new Scots can make to our economy and society Fiona Hyslop, External Affairs Minister
The report said: "Among older people, particularly those aged over 75, the higher number of females reflects the longer expectation of life for women, partly as a result of higher rates of male mortality during the Second World War.
"The two baby booms of 1947 and the 1960s can also be seen, with a sharp peak at age 65 and another peak between the ages of around 40 and 50.
"These baby boomers, along with relatively low fertility rates since the 1960s, are the main reasons why Scotland's population is likely to age in the future."
Scottish government minister Fiona Hyslop accepted there was an ageing population and said it was "excellent" to see the under-fives population had increased by 3,050 since the 2011 census.
A country like ours needs people, particularly young people, to come in to work and increase the tax base Gavin Brown, Scottish Conservative Party
She added: "The net in-flow of 14,300 more people coming to Scotland from overseas than leaving is proof that Scotland is an attractive and dynamic nation and one where people want to make a life for themselves.
"The Scottish government welcomes the contribution these new Scots can make to our economy and society, and we are working hard to attract the best international talent to our universities and our workforce."
After publication of the figures, the Scottish Conservative Party expressed concern that the population was now growing at a much slower rate.
Finance spokesman Gavin Brown said: "A country like ours needs people, particularly young people, to come in to work and increase the tax base - that is absolutely essential for the economy.
"It could just be a one-year blip, but the minister in charge at the Scottish government needs to find out why this is and what can be done, and explain as quickly as possible what the solution will be."Kyrgyzstan has applied for membership in the Customs Union, an economic and geopolitical entity Russia is using to expand its influence in its former Soviet territory (current members are Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan). In some ways, Customs Union membership will hurt the Kyrgyz economy — higher tariffs will be imposed, and Kyrgyzstan will lose some autonomy in making foreign trade decisions. However, abstaining from the Customs Union would be riskier than joining because Moscow already has a great deal of leverage over Bishkek. More important, Kyrgyzstan's membership will enable Russia to more easily pressure other Central Asian countries — Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — into joining the union.
Effects on the Kyrgyz Economy
Unlike the other Customs Union members with robust exporting economies, Kyrgyzstan is reliant on imports. Kyrgyzstan is not economically self-sufficient; it depends on Russia, China and its Central Asian neighbors to fulfill its basic needs. Russia provides almost 34 percent of Kyrgyzstan's imports and nearly 70 percent of its petroleum, and, as Kyrgyzstan's main export recipient, purchases 17.3 percent of Kyrgyz exports. China is another major trade partner. Kyrgyzstan imports electronics, meats, clothing and produce and exports 75 percent of these inexpensive Chinese goods to other Central Asian countries and to Russia. Uzbekistan sends natural gas to Kyrgyzstan's cities and its northern and southern regions, and Kazakhstan provides 5-7 percent of Kyrgyzstan's petroleum supplies.
Joining the Customs Union will affect the import-oriented Kyrgyz economy in several ways. As a member, Kyrgyzstan will have to use the union's average tariff rate of 10.6 percent — more than twice Kyrgyzstan's current 5.1 percent tariff. Value-added tax (VAT) will also increase with Customs Union membership; Kyrgyzstan's current VAT rate is 12 percent, but the union's is 17 percent. These higher tariffs are meant to facilitate trade within the union and make it more difficult to trade outside the bloc. However, higher import fees mean higher prices for consumer goods, including automobiles, medicines, computers and clothing, imported from non-Customs Union member countries. This will diminish Kyrgyzstan's ability to import and re-export inexpensive Chinese goods. (The price increase for Chinese imports likely will even affect Kyrgyzstan's black market.) China sees Kyrgyzstan as an important market because its role as a re-exporter creates a trade corridor in Central Asia, but Kyrgyz participation in the Customs Union would undermine the corridor's importance.
Customs Union membership will also affect Kyrgyzstan's freedom to control its own foreign trade policies. Members of the bloc's governing body, the Customs Union Commission, do not have an equal say in making decisions. Currently, Russia has 57 percent of the votes, while Kazakhstan and Belarus each have 21.5 percent. Kyrgyzstan will have to check with other union members and get Russia's approval before making policy decisions on foreign trade.
Kyrgyzstan's membership in the Customs Union could also jeopardize its relationship with the World Trade Organization (WTO). Kyrgyzstan is the only Central Asian country with WTO membership, but joining the Customs Union would conflict with its responsibilities as a WTO member. The Kyrgyz government knows that even if it joins the union in 2012 its membership will not activate for another two to three years, so it has time to sort through the details and come up with a solution to the dilemma. Bishkek could withdraw from the WTO or ask for an adjustment of WTO rules (Russia was able to join the WTO despite being in the Customs Union, though Kyrgyzstan's circumstances are different since it was in the WTO first).
Kyrgyzstan's Perspective on Membership
Bishkek knows that Customs Union membership will create problems, but it also knows that not joining the bloc will come with a price. Kyrgyzstan likely would face pressure from Customs Union member countries, particularly Russia, which has numerous levers in Kyrgyzstan. Not only do the countries share strong economic ties, but Russia also guarantees Kyrgyzstan's security. Kyrgyzstan is a member of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, and Russia has several military installations on Kyrgyz soil, including an air base at Kant for which Russia pays rent. Furthermore, many Kyrgyz workers in Russia send home remittances, and Russia provides Kyrgyzstan with loans and grants.
Perhaps the most obvious lever Russia has in Kyrgyzstan is energy. In 2010, Russia increased tariffs for its fuel exports to Kyrgyzstan, which put pressure on then-leader Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who was ousted in a Russian-supported revolution. Current Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev persuaded Moscow to drop the tariffs, but there is nothing preventing Russia from imposing tariffs again. As it has done with other countries, such as Ukraine, Russia could even sever energy supplies retributively. However, if Bishkek complies with Moscow's wishes and joins the Customs Union, Russia could offer concessions instead, such as increased financial aid or lowered energy prices.
Atambayev understands the risks of resisting Russia, but there are other factors to consider. The Kyrgyz opposition is suspicious of the Customs Union, and its leaders have spoken out against rushing into membership. Given Kyrgyzstan's political and social volatility, Atambayev will have to maneuver carefully. Kyrgyzstan's domestic political and security situation in 2012 will certainly be a factor in the pace at which membership proceeds.
Central Asia's Likely Course
After Kyrgyzstan, the country most likely to join the Customs Union is Tajikistan. Dushanbe already has expressed interest in the union, and its economic and security dependence on Moscow makes it easy for Russia to persuade. However, Tajikistan has not yet started any official processes to join the bloc, and Moscow has made it clear that Kyrgyzstan must join first. Once it joins, Tajikistan will feel many of the same economic effects of membership that Kyrgyzstan will experience, since both countries have import-heavy economies.
When Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan join the Customs Union, Uzbekistan will find itself almost entirely surrounded by Customs Union members. Thus far, Uzbekistan has shown no interest in joining the bloc; in fact, it has criticized the union, calling it a method of politically motivated integration. Uzbekistan's neighbor, Turkmenistan, has remained quiet on the issue and previously has endured economic hardship just to preserve its isolation and independence. While Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan go through the membership process, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan will have time to resist the union. But once the union closes in on them geographically, the last two holdouts in Central Asia could become easier for Russia to pressure into membership.
It is unclear how long Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan will be able to resist joining the Customs Union, but resistance most likely will be short-lived. If most of the Central Asian countries are in the union, it will be difficult economically and politically to remain outside the institution.
The Customs Union is one phase of Russia's plan to exert its influence in its near abroad. The next phases are the creation of a Common Economic Space and the Eurasian Union. Moscow does not want to recreate the Soviet Union, since that entity proved infeasible. Rather, it wants to build a system in which it can influence its former Soviet republics without being responsible for the day-to-day domestic workings of each state. Though Moscow will encounter some resistance, its resurgence into Central Asia will move forward, and Kyrgyzstan's membership in the Customs Union is a crucial step.Canada Soccer’s Women’s U-17 Team leaves Weifang, China after gaining invaluable experience at the Four Nations Tournament with a 3-1 loss to China, a 1-1 draw with the USA and a 3-1 loss to Japan. Jordyn Huitema will return to Canada as a new record holder as the first Canadian to score for all three levels of Canada Soccer’s National Teams in one year.
Canada 1:3 China
The match against China was one of two halves, with evident nerves contributing to a slow start for the Reds, but the second half had China on their heels and showed Canada’s attacking strength.
“We are really proud of how the team played, especially in the second half,” said Bev Priestman, Canada Soccer National EXCEL Director 14-20, after the first match. “In the first half, the nerves were evident, especially for the players putting the Canada shirt on for the first time, so we challenged them at halftime to be brave and really get on ball a little bit more. We had lots of chances in the second half, Jordyn Huitema and Jayde Riviere, who both also featured in the U20 tournament, came on and really changed the game with their experience and quality on the ball. Huitema scored an excellent goal, and could have had four or five more, having come inches of the post a few times.”
Huitema’s 83rd minute goal was her fourth of the year, following one against the USA for the U-20 team in Australia earlier in July, and two for the Women’s National Team against Costa Rica in June.
Canada 1:1 USA
Canada came out strong against its regional foes but went into halftime down a goal after the US converted a corner in the 21st minute. Coming out of halftime with renewed determination, Canada drew even with the US in the 51st minute when Ariel Young converted a Canadian corner.
“I thought the girls vastly improved from our first game here, having got the nerves out of the way,” said Priestman after the draw. “We defended very well, but we also had some very good chances, particularly in the first half. It was a gritty performance and the team will gain confidence from this match, having really found belief in themselves and brought alive what we’ve been asking of them.”
Canada 1:3 Japan
Canada’s final match against former youth champions Japan, showed continued determination and further prepared the team for the upcoming CONCACAF qualification campaign. Canada’s goal came on a cross into the middle of the box, when Teni Akindoju picked up the ball off a teammate’s deflection, slipped past a sprawling defender and put it hard and high over the keeper.
“I saw some of our best possession and bravery on the ball this tournament against Japan,” said Priestman. “With in-game injuries to key players, there were some really tired legs in the second half due to the use of unplanned subs and the girls put it all out there for their country. I was particularly pleased with the first half, I felt we were dangerous while disciplined and able to deal with the problems Japan threw at us, but later in the second half the accumulated fatigue against a good Japanese team was evident.”
Summing up the experience, Priestman expressed continued appreciation for the efforts of the EXCEL group and hope for the future of this squad as they head towards the next qualification tournament.
“This is really just the start for the group, and they showed huge growth over a short period,” she said. “The important thing from here is that the learnings are used to keep pushing both individuals and the group forward in their daily Regional EXCEL Centres and future National EXCEL camps. The experience of playing two top Asian teams preparing for qualifiers and the US so early in a cycle can’t be underestimated as it really allowed us to take a snapshot of where we are currently and provided us with a great starting point to build upon. The tournament also provided us with an excellent practice run for future tournaments coping with travel, the heat, tight turnarounds and related pressures, all of which these players will be exposed to in the future, so it was an excellent development experience overall.”
The Four Nations Tournament in Weifang, China was a key touchpoint prior to CONCACAF qualification for the FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup Uruguay 2018, and provided Canada Soccer’s technical staff with an opportunity to assess the group and better understand the curriculum needs going in to 2018’s major events, as well as the development needs of individuals in their journey towards the Women’s National Team.
Canada Soccer Women’s National EXCEL Program brings together the best with the best at the national youth level. Operating across the U-14 to U-20 age groups, the program is designed to deliver an aligned talent structure and system that progresses more top players to Canada’s Women’s National Team.
The Canada Soccer EXCEL program featured 39 young Canadians born between 1998 and 2003 in the two friendly tournaments in Australia and China in July, providing crucial international experience to Canada’s youth squads.
Jordyn Huitema, Jayde Riviere and Maya Antoine represented Canada in both the U-20 and U-17 competitions. Canada Soccer’s EXCEL System has already produced eight Women’s National Team players and Olympic bronze medalists, and the development is continuing in full stride as EXCEL players who have already played with the Women’s National Team, including Sarah Stratigakis, Gabrielle Carle, and Jordyn Huitema competed for Canada in Australia.Car-free hiking destinations near Vancouver
Transit-accessible hiking destinations.
Car-free hiking destinations.
Where to hike in or near Vancouver if you have no access to a car?
Owning a car in Vancouver may come off as a luxury, with the gas and minimum insurance prices. Personally, I prefer owning a personal vehicle (right now I commute on a motorcycle), to avoid the stress from using public transit at most times; but my girlfriend, despite my offer to buy her a motorcycle or a scooter, chooses to use TransLink.
Luckily, TransLink’s area of service covers a lot of suburban locations, that are pleasant getaway from the everyday life. The ones that came to mind are listed below, and grouped by the general proximity to one another.
(Visit translink.ca or maps.google.ca for route planning)
1. Grouse Mountain (Bus #232, #236):
Grouse Mountain is a very popular destination for tourists and local residents. You can either take the gondola both ways, or hike up and take the gondola down. Hiking back down is not recommended, especially outside summer, as the top 1/4 of the route is very steep, and gets icy and slippery, so you are endangering yourself and others around you.
Capilano Lake + Canyon
Grouse Grind
BCMC Trail (like Grouse Grind, but with 1/3 of traffic)
2. West West Vancouver Area (Bus #250/#250A, #251, #252, #253, #254, 255, #256, #258, #259, #C12):
Horseshoe Bay area is incredible during both the warmer and colder months. Lighthouse Park and Whytecliff park are about 10 km away from each other, so you will need to take another short bus ride from one to another; although Lighthouse Park is big enough for a day stroll on its own. In addition to the exceptional views of the city and the water, there are a lot of hiking trails throughout.
If you like old buildings, visit the Point Atkinson Battery in the Lighthouse Park- it was built for defending the city during the WWII.
Lighthouse Park & trails nearby
Whytecliff Park + Point Atkinson Battery
Whyte Lake
Caulfield Park & Erwin Park
3. Deep Cove (Bus #211, #212, #C15)
Deep Cove is an excellent place to visit during the Summer, and is not a bad destination for the colder months. Be aware, that during the rainy season the trails will be more dangerous as they get more slippery.
Quarry Rock
Cates Park
4. Lynn Valley (Bus #228, #229):
Lynn Valley Suspension Bridge is a good alternative to Capilano Bridge: it is free to visit, and there is far less traffic. It is smaller than its rival, but the surrounding area has a lot more to offer: you can hike around the Rice Lake, cliff jump at Lynn Canyon, do the Lynn Loop or visit the Twin Falls. There are much longer trails heading North, if you feel like continuing with your journey.
Rice Lake
Lynn Valley Suspension Bridge
Cliff jumping at Lynn Canyon
Lynn Loop
5. Buntzen and Belcarra (Bus #C25, #C26):
Diez Vistas is an excellent, albeit a longer (6-7 hours) hike. Buntzen Lake also has shorter trails, if you are not a big fan of longer walks. Belcarra Park is within a walking distance from Buntzen, and there are a few trails connecting the two.
Keep in mind, that Belcarra is on the other shore right across the Deep Cove, so you may be able to make your way there on a kayak, if the water is temper.
Buntzen Lake
Sasamat Lake
Diez Vistas
Belcarra Park
6. Simon Fraser Unversity (Bus #135, #143, #144, #145)
Often underestimated, SFU (Burnaby campus) has a whole lot of hiking trails with various difficulties. There are some foot trails, and some trails that you can ride on a bicycle. Barnet Marine Park is just across the highway.
— edit Aug.28 2014 —
7. Deer Lake/Burnaby Lake (thanks, /u/ThanksThanksObama) (Bus #110, #123, #129, #144; there are a few other ways to get to Burnaby Lake, refer to TransLink/Google Maps for route planning)
Burnaby Lake and Deer Lake are a good option, if you do not feel like going to far, but still want to temporarily seclude from the city chaos.
8. Green Timbers Urban Forest (thanks, /u/ThanksThanksObama) (Bus #502)
Unfortunately, I have not seen nor heard of this park. But, hey, it is there and you can visit it anytime you feel like it (unless the access is restricted by the respective agencies).
Other helpful articles and pages:
http://www.car-free.ca/bc-car-free/hiking/
http://www.vancouvertrails.com/regions/?sort=&filter=transit
As always, if you have any suggestions or comments, I’m all ears!Felicia Day's Success With The Guild Highlights The Importance Of Authenticity With A Community
from the keep-it-up dept
As buzz built, Day and her company, Knights of Good Productions, signed with ICM new-media head George Ruiz. "At one point, there were 25 different offers on the table," Ruiz says, "including from some major studios and networks and even a director with several $100 million films."
Day turned down every one. "She said, 'George, don't make me take this deal!' " he says. So by the time Microsoft came calling, the agent had a new approach: The Guild is not for sale, but you can license it.
The Seattle-based behemoth bit. Microsoft pays an undisclosed fee to debut each season exclusively on the company's Xbox Live, MSN, and Zune platforms (season four debuted in mid-July). "There is a common perception about Microsoft," says Day. "Especially when we first signed with them, the fans had reservations." But she was impressed that it got what she was doing and didn't want to interfere. "Microsoft doesn't even give me notes [on scripts]!"
Just about a year ago, we wrote about how actress Felicia Day had turned her web production, into a big success, by building a community of fans, connecting with them, and then coming up with some interesting ways to make money from that, including a unique sponsorship deal with Microsoft. Reader tuna points us to a Fast Company profile that updates us on how the last year has gone, and it sounds like things have only improved over time.One of the keys to the success is that she chose the sponsorship deal with Microsoft, in large part because it let her retain creative control over the project -- allowing it to remain authentic and true to what her fans wanted and expected.This is a key point that often gets lost in business model discussions. When we talk about different offerings, it's amazing how much people discount the importance of authenticity as a scarcity. We see it all the time with companies who want to sponsor something, and then have tremendous level of control -- losing all of the authenticity and, with it, much of the value (and, eventually, audience). It's nice to see a situation where a company (in this case, Microsoft) properly recognized when not to get too involved.
Filed Under: authenticity, community, felicia day, the guildTurns out, Donald Trump’s federal judge nominees are a lot like him: online wingnuts without impulse control.
John Bush, now a lifetime-appointee appellate judge, blogged for years under the pseudonym “G. Morris.” Under that name, he spread Birtherism and reposted threats to shoot Obama supporters. Then he lied about doing so to the Senate. Then the Senate confirmed him anyway, on a party-line vote, with not a single Republican breaking ranks. He’ll likely still be on the bench in 2050.
The Senate is also poised to confirm Damien Schiff, another right-wing blogger who has opined on his blog that the entire New Deal and Great Society programs (including Social Security and Medicare) are unconstitutional, has called Justice Anthony Kennedy a “judicial prostitute,” and said that environmentalists “push an agenda that has more to do with stifling productive human activity than fostering ecological balance.”
And now there’s Brett Talley, who surely takes the cake.
Talley is only the second judicial nominee since 1989 to be unanimously rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association. He has made most of his living as a political hack, including as an attack dog for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. As first reported by the Daily Beast, Talley is a former ghostbuster (sorry, “paranormal investigator”) who writes horror novels in his spare time. In fact, in the “honors and awards” section of his Senate questionnaire, Talley listed three awards for his horror fiction, none for his lawyering.
Talley also failed to disclose, on his conflict of interest filings, that his own wife works for the guy in charge of picking judges for Trump, and that she is now a key witness in Robert Mueller’s investigation of the president. Because, you know, no conflict of interest there.
And then there are the blog posts.
In January 2013, shortly after the Newtown massacre, Talley urged his readers to “Join the NRA. They stand for all of us now.” A month later, he reposted a statement that “We will have to resort to arms when our other rights — of speech, press, assembly, representative government — fail to yield the desired results” and said “I agree with this completely.”
As the 2016 campaign shifted into high gear, so did Talley.
“Hillary Clinton has committed acts that would have resulted in the prosecution of ordinary citizens,” he wrote on CNN.com. “During the Obama administration, the EPA became a lawless organ of federal power,” he has said. And his tweets, not disclosed in his Senate confirmation process, are an endless parade of Trump-esque Hillary-bashing: lock her up, “Hillary Rotten Clinton,” and so on.
These views aren’t exceptional for angry white men sitting around in their underwear. They aren’t even out of line for a strictly political nominee (Talley has been working at the Sessions Justice Department since January). But they are extremely exceptional for someone nominated to be an impartial, independent judge with life tenure and authority over all kinds of contentious and politically relevant cases.
Like most of Trump’s judicial picks, Talley, Bush, and Schiff have come up through the Leonard Leo-Federalist Society-Donald McGahn pipeline. They resemble President Comment Section, but unlike Trump, these men will still be in office decades from now.
Incidentally, Bush’s blog posts now contain disclaimers that “The postings of ‘G. Morris’, written by John K. Bush and which end in 2016, stated his views as of the dates of posting and should not be understood as current assertions of his views. The postings, which have not been altered since they came to an end, remain on this blog to preserve the historical record. In 2017, Mr. Bush took a position that precludes further public political comments or endorsements. He will no longer be contributing to this blog.”
“ They resemble President Comment Section, but unlike Trump, these men will still be in office decades from now. ”
The tide is just beginning. With the Senate having taken no action on 59 Obama-era nominees, there are record numbers of federal vacancies. To fill these spots, the Federalist-Trump pipeline has put forward Thomas Farr, the architect of North Carolina’s illegal voter suppression campaign who once ran a race-based campaign for Jesse Helms; Jeff Mateer, a man who has described transgender children as “Satan’s plan;” Amy Barrett, a former law professor who said that the point of a legal career is to “build the kingdom of God;” and many others of their ilk. The list goes on and on and on.
There are some signs that Talley may be a breaking point. The blog posts, the undisclosed conflict of interest, his wife’s importance in the Russia investigation – already, Talley’s nomination has attracted more media attention than, say, John Bush’s. It wouldn’t take much: just a handful of Republican Senators willing to buck their party’s leadership. Could it happen?
That will depend on the public’s ability to retain focus on a single issue while the Trump administration, true to the strategy of Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn, bamboozles us with new outrages for each hourly news cycle. Consider a longer view: these wingnuts will be deciding cases thirty years from now. That’s a lot of blog posts.
UPDATE: After this piece was published, it was revealed that Brett Talley appears to have posted, under a pseudonym, a defense of a KKK leader from the 1860s, stating that "the first KKK, which was entirely different than the KKK of the early 19th [sic] Century." In fact, historians state that the KKK in the 1860s was a quasi-terrorist organization dedicated to white supremacy, intimidating African Americans with "night rides" and administering beatings and lynchings of both African Americans and suspected Northern sympathizers. Talley has not commented on these posts.Hitchbot, the yellow glove- and Wellies-wearing robot, has started bumming rides across Canada, and by the looks of it, its hosts are having a blast ferrying it to its next drop-off point. The machine with a perpetual LED smile began its journey in Halifax, and it'll travel 4,000 miles until it reaches Victoria, British Columbia. People who pick up Hitchbot are pointed to a website where they can find instructions on how to handle it and where to drop it off. On the way, Hitchbot chats with its host, thanks to its speech recognition capability, or chatters away on its own in case its tablet-and-Arduino brain can't parse what its companion's saying. It also takes pictures every 30 minutes or so to send back to headquarters and upload to its social media accounts.You must enter the characters with black color that stand out from the other characters
Message: * A friend wanted you to see this item from WRAL.com: http://wr.al/owDB
— Durham County prosecutors on Friday dismissed a first-degree murder charge against one of two men accused of killing a Duke University graduate student more than five years ago.
Stephen Lavance Oates, 24, had been charged in the Jan. 18, 2008, shooting death of Abhijit Mahato.
Durham police arrested Oates five days after Mahato was found dead inside his apartment near Duke, and prosecutors had said that ballistics evidence linked him to the crime.
The 9mm gun used to kill Mahato matched one used in two robberies where victims were shot in the legs. One of the victims identified Oates as the gunman.
Prosecutors said Friday that witnesses have since changed their stories, leaving them with insufficient evidence tying Oates to Mahato's death.
The dismissal means that Laurence Alvin Lovette Jr. is the only person charged in Mahato's death.
Lovette, 22, is already serving time for the March 5, 2008, shooting death of Eve Carson, a former student body president of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Oates has always maintained his innocence in Mahato's death, and prosecutors previously have acknowledged that Lovette told a witness he killed Mahato with someone named Phillip.
"He and some of his buddies were robbing people with BB guns, not a real gun," said Oates' defense attorney, Mark Edwards. "I think what happened was, it was just a bad (identification) for the Hispanic guy that got shot, and whatever happened, Steve somehow got implicated in it, and police felt it was the same gun and charged him with Mahato.
"There's really nothing to tie him to it," Edwards said.
Oates has been out of jail since last May, and his attorney said he is working and staying out of trouble.
He is expected back in court in March to face four counts of assault with deadly weapon with intent to kill and one count each of robbery and obtaining property by false pretense in connection with the robberies.An enormous outpouring of architecture buffs and neighborhood activists come out to hear architect Santiago Calatrava and developer Garrett Kelleher present what may finally be approaching as the final design of their proposed Chicago Spire.
[March 26. 2007] It's official. Chicago is in the throes of Spire-mania. Over 500 people packed two separate meetings on Tuesday to see and hear developer Garrett Kelleher and architect Santiago Calatrava present the proposed 2,000-foot-high Chicago Spire, to be built on a derelict peninsula of land defined by the Chicago River to the south, the Ogden slip to the north, and Lake Michigan to the east. Cutting through the peninsula is Lake Shore Drive, a limited access highway. The Spire would rise to the west of the drive, linking under the drive to the long-unrealized DuSable Park to the east. While the Grant Park Advisory Council/Grant Park Conservancy, managed to upstage a previously announced session sponsored by the community group SOAR (Streeterville Organization of Active Residents), with their own lunchtime session, scheduled just last week, in the Grainger Ballroom of Symphony Center, in the last analysis the presentation there turned out to be something of a dress rehearsal for SOAR's event, where both Kelleher and Calatrava came alive to a level they hadn't earlier. Kelleher began with an arresting account of his journey from Ireland, to Chicago, where he eventually helped pioneer the conversion of the city's old loft buildings to residential developments, and then took his profits back to Ireland just in time for explosive growth in that country's economy beginning in the late 1990's, only to find himself moving back to Chicago again for a project of a lifetime. (We'll publish more of his talk later.) Then Calatrava sat down next to an overhead projector, explaining that the best way to explain the evolution of the Spire was "Just working as I work in my office, bringing you into my office, and sitting you across from me and showing you how I would approach a thing like that, such an important thing, (through) a balance of very simple gestures." And then Calatrava began to make watercolor drawings. "You can think that the beginning was the lake," he said creating a single blue line at the bottom of the page, and he proceeded until all the elements of project were laid in a few simple, elegant and colorful strokes. Calatrava then layered several objects over each other - from the cross section of a shell to a bunch of flowers. "All these things," said Calatrava, can be put into a design because finally what you want from all beautiful objects is just an instrument of inspiration, in order to deliver the very best for this particular case, to conceptualize the building to create a relative story around the building to deliver the building not only for functional reasons, which are very important, and for aesthetical reasons, which are very important, but to deliver to the building a soul, a soul who can be understood because there is like a message. " "It’s like writing, or a poem, something like that. People understand things, with a magic that even if you close a book that you left in a library, 300 years later someone opens it and gets the book, because this language is understandable. More universal than the words, themselves, because language may change, but the monument remains there. And when you go and visit a piece of architecture you see there is a lot of the soul of the people that had been living a thousand years ago, and they are still there. They are telling you... to believe in your time, because the buildings are still there." "If you go to the Church of Pantheon in Rome," continued Calatrava, "2,000 years are facing you, and still you can enter there, and you get moved by this very beautiful place. This is exactly the message that these people wanted to deliver. They wanted to move us 2,000 years later." We're still transcribing Tuesday's talks. There'll be a lot more - and a lot more pictures - in the next few days, especially a much fuller discussion of the plans for DuSable Park, as well as of some of the many still unanswered questions about the project. For the moment, here are just a few of images to come. Calatrava presented a series of Matisse-inspired watercolors of the lifestyle to be found inside one of the Spire's apartments. Calatrava's presentation ended with a spectacular aerial animation of the Spire, its plaza, DuSable Park, and a proposed pedestrian bridge across the Chicago River, from close-up to an extreme wide angle showing the Spire taking its place in the Chicago skyline. The animation was accompanied, appropriately enough, by Dvorak's 9th Symphony, From the New World, "played by the Chicago Symphony orchestra,” a smiling Calatrava added. Spire developer releases latest drawings - Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune, January 21
A new twist - Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire - Flash presentation, Chicago Tribune, January 21Americans are still shaken by the surprising news that President Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey, who was in the middle of investigating the Trump’s campaign on possible collusion with Russia. But Jimmy Kimmel found humor in the news.
“One reason they gave, and this is really something, for firing Comey is because he mishandled the Hillary Clinton email situation, which would be hilarious because that would mean Trump fired James Comey for making him president,” Kimmel laughed to his audience on Tuesday. “He really does hate doing this job.”
The host equated Trump’s decision to “O.J. firing Judge Ito halfway through the trial.”
“This is the kind of thing dictators do,” he added. “This is the kind of thing reality TV hosts do, they fire someone every week. Maybe that’s what happened, he thinks he’s still on the Celebrity Apprentice. It was between James Comey and Meatloaf and, well, the loaf won again.”
Because Kimmel isn’t the kind of guy to sit on his hands, as he says, when things get outrageous, he made special “Comey Is My Homey” t-shirts. “If you are one of the millions of Americans shameful and disgraceful move, send me $29.99 and I will use some of that money to send a very nasty letter directly to the Oval Office — also available in women’s and baby tees,” he joked.
Watch Kimmel’s bit on Comey’s firing in the video above.The company hoping to bring NHL hockey back to Quebec City has formally applied for an expansion franchise |
29-28, 29-28, 30-27)
Flyweight Scott Jorgensen def. Danny Martinez Decision (unanimous) (29-28, 29-28, 30-27)
Lightweight Jon Tuck def. Jake Lindsey Submission (heel kick to the body) Rd 3, 2:47
Preliminary card (UFC Fight Pass)
Light Heavyweight Patrick Cummins def. Roger Narvaez TKO (punches) Rd 2, 2:28
Bonus awards:
The following fighters were awarded $50,000 bonuses:
Fight of the Night: Scott Jorgensen vs. Danny Martinez
Performance of the Night: Benson Henderson and Piotr HallmannAudiences at the TED conference are used to hearing future-facing ideas, but Tuesday the privileged conference crowd got a preview of itself in 2023 and a new Ridley Scott film at the same time.
As a promo for Prometheus, Scott’s hotly anticipated sort-of-prequel to Alien, the film’s creators presented a video “Ted Talk” from 2023, delivered by Prometheus star, the always excellent Guy Pearce.
Director Ridley Scott had hinted previously about Pearce’s small role in the film as entrepreneur Peter Weyland, head of the Prometheus’ corporate menace, The Weyland Corp. In his TED Talk, Pearce speaks of the film’s titular myth and hints at a near future in which “cybernetic individuals” will be indistinguishable from people and concludes “we are the Gods now.”
The promo was created by Ridley Scott and the film’s writer Damon Lindelof and directed by Luke Scott (Ridley’s son).
Lindelof worked with TED’s directors to orchestrate the stunt and he told the organization, “In really, really good science fiction the line between the science and the fiction is blurry. When I started attending TED, that line got even blurrier–I started hearing about ideas that were, in my own imagination, more far out than some of the science fiction I was seeing.”
Prometheus, which also stars Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba, and Charlize Theron, is scheduled for release in June. See the real teaser trailer below.A young prisoner sat blindfolded, facing a wall in Tehran's Evin prison. It was April 2010, nearly a year after the disputed presidential victory of Mahmud Ahmedinejad sparked massive street protests and thousands of arrests. The room was silent, but suddenly he heard a voice, closer than he would have expected."What's your name?""Hooman Musavi."The prisoner felt a powerful blow to the back of his head. The man standing over him opened a briefcase and took out a pile of papers. "Sign them," he said. He struck the prisoner again, this time in the face."The session took 18 hours," says Musavi, 26, who recently fled Iran and shared his account of the experience with RFE/RL's Radio Farda. "The entire time, the interrogator threatened me and insisted I sign everything -- documents describing whom I had been in contact with, which demonstrations I had participated in, what reports and footage I had prepared, and to whom I had sent them."Musavi, who had been arrested for participating in and documenting the Green Movement protests, cried throughout the incident. "I felt so much pressure," he says. Finally, the interrogation ended and guards took him back to his cell in the prison's infamous Section 209, the solitary confinement ward where he was to spend the next seven months.Any relief at the interrogation ending was short-lived. Within minutes, two men had entered Musavi's cell and handcuffed his hands to a radiator affixed to the prison wall, so high that Musavi, already exhausted, could not sit down. As the hours passed, he watched as his hands turned purple from the pressure of the handcuffs and lack of blood."I was so weak, and the guard would open the cell door, put some food on the floor and close the door. I couldn't move a muscle, let alone reach for the food," he says. "I lost consciousness for some time, and when I came to, I panicked when I looked at my hands. They had turned black and purple by then. It was a very strange condition. My shoulders were numb; I couldn't move them."A day later, guards entered his room and removed the handcuffs. Musavi fell to the ground, drained of all strength, as he felt the blood begin to flow back into his hands. The guards dragged him back to the interrogation room. The pile of papers had quadrupled. Musavi, desperate, said he was ready to sign whatever they put before him, but his hands were still too numb to hold a pen. So the guard brought an ink pad, and one by one, Musavi marked each piece of paper with a single fingerprint.Day after day the interrogations continued, much as they had since security agents had stormed his Tehran apartment on April 1, posing as gas repairmen. They kicked him in the stomach, handcuffed him from behind, and combed every inch of his home -- even the meat in his refrigerator -- before taking his computer, camera, and mobile phone to look for evidence of Musavi's participation in the postelection protests.But it wasn't just Musavi's role in the Green Movement that had made him a target of the authorities. His family history had contributed as well. It was something his interrogator liked to remind him of, every day, as he returned him to his cell. "We're going to execute you," the man would say, in a voice that would make Musavi shiver. "Just like your mother and father."Hooman Musavi was born in prison, on Yalda, the night of the winter solstice, in 1986.A month earlier, his father had been arrested on charges of cooperating with the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), which had participated in a series of antiregime attacks in the 1970s and '80s and had fought alongside Saddam Hussein's forces in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.Musavi's father, a textile manufacturer in the city of Shiraz, had sold head scarves to female MKO members. He and an in-law were taken to the city's Adelabad prison and were executed within weeks. By then, Musavi's aunt and mother had been arrested as well. Musavi's mother, Haiedeh, gave birth in Adelabad, and Hooman spent the first two years of his life inside the prison."My aunt used to tell me how I was always sick during those two years; I cried the whole time," he says. "I had sores and often caught bad colds. Even when I got older those symptoms stayed with me because of the stress I had endured early on. My aunt said my mother stopped producing milk and she couldn't feed me. So some of the female inmates would give their food rations to women who were lactating and could still breastfeed children. I used to be fed by five or six different women there in order to keep me alive."In 1988, Musavi's mother was executed as part of a five-month wave of mass executions of political prisoners. "My mother was a very simple woman. She didn't even know what the ideals of organizations like the MKO were," he says. "She never gave up under interrogation; she remained faithful to my father until the last moment. She was executed for this very reason."For the rest of his life, the shadow of his parents' executions hung over him. Two decades later, struggling to survive in Evin, Musavi began to share his interrogator's conviction that he would share his parents' fate."I was thinking they might come back and take me to the gallows at any moment," he says. "It had already happened to my family. I was raised with the understanding that innocent people can be captured and executed."Musavi was raised by his aunt after she was released from prison. An older brother and sister had been divided between other relatives and lived far away, in Mahshahr and Tehran. His upbringing was difficult, marked by poverty and neglect. There was no fatherly hand on his shoulder, no motherly affection.For years the young Musavi harbored a secret dream: "I wished that they would throw a birthday party for me and that someone would buy me a gift," he said. "But it never happened."When attention came, it was unwelcome. Musavi was 12 when he received his first summons to the Shiraz division of the Intelligence Ministry. He had done nothing wrong to attract the gaze of the security services. In his words, he had simply reached the age when authorities saw fit to remind him of his family's history and urge him, firmly, to mind his manners."They questioned me and told me more about my family," he says. "When I entered high school, the interrogations became more frequent and they would always tell me not to follow politics. 'Fool around with girls, drink, use drugs -- do whatever you want, but don't get involved in politics. If you have the slightest political inclination we'll arrest you.'"The warnings proved ineffective. After entering university in Qazvin to study industrial engineering, Musavi was called before the school's disciplinary committee numerous times for participating in student protests. "They would ask whether I prayed or why I was absent from visits to religious sites like Qom and Jamkaran. Questions that had nothing to do with the university and were meant to hurt me." Half a year before he was due to graduate -- and just a few days after the 2009 presidential election -- he was suspended.Many claims of irregularities were made in the 2009 vote, which officially handed the incumbent Ahmadinejad a 62 percent win, with his reformist rival, Mir-Hossein Musavi, trailing with 34 percent. Outraged, hundreds of thousands of people flooded onto the streets of Iran to support Musavi and a second candidate, Mehdi Karrubi.Hooman Musavi (no relation to the presidential candidate) was among the protesters, using his camera to shoot photographs and videos of the demonstrations in Iran. When the government responded with a forceful crackdown, dozens of protesters were killed and thousands, like Musavi, were arrested in the weeks and months that followed.Looking back at the events, Musavi insists his activism had nothing to do with the remorse he still feels for his parents. His aim, he says, was purely rational. "We didn't want much," he says of himself and his fellow protesters. "We just wanted someone to answer our question -- what happened to the votes we had put in the ballot boxes?"After a few months in his tiny isolation cell, Musavi says he no longer feared his interrogators' threats of execution. To the contrary, he longed for it. "I would cry for hours in my cell, and ask God for them just to take me and execute me," he says. "Just to put an end to the situation."After seven months Musavi got a reprieve of sorts, when he was moved out of solitary confinement and into Section 350, the ward reserved for political prisoners. Living conditions remained grim. But Musavi says after months of isolation he was happy to be with other prisoners -- especially former protesters like himself."They were dissidents of the regime or members of the Green Movement or prisoners of conscience, and there was so much sympathy," he says. "They gave me a jacket and a knit cap, and my morale began to improve. I really felt like I had no regrets about having gone onto the street to film the demonstrators, to help make sure the world heard their voices. It was a good feeling."Section 350 held some of Iran's most famous political prisoners, including Hoda Saber, a well-known journalist and activist who had been serving jail time off and on since 2000.In June 2011, the 52-year-old Saber began a hunger strike to protest the death of a fellow activist. His health quickly failed, and he died just eight days later of a heart attack. Witnesses at Evin complained that prison authorities ignored Saber for hours after his chest pains began, even as he begged for help."Mr. Saber was losing weight every day and his situation deteriorated," Musavi recalls. "During the final days he was left in his bed and he could no longer see. He didn't recognize his fellow prisoners; his condition was very bad. No one attended to him; when he would lose consciousness we would take him to the prison clinic. But they wouldn't take him and he'd be returned after five minutes."The last time we took him to the clinic we didn't hear until the next day that he'd become a martyr at the hospital. When the news reached us, the 200 inmates in the ward, there wasn't a single person who wasn't crying. It was one of the worst days of our lives."Nearly a year after Musavi's arrest, officials had still not scheduled his court hearing; each month, a prison authority renewed his arrest warrant in order to keep him in detention. Finally, in March 2011, he was taken to court for a closed-door session. His lawyer was barred from attending and the Revolutionary Court judge was preoccupied throughout by workmen who had been brought in to repair the air conditioning.The trial was over in 20 minutes. The judge, delivering the verdict, referred to Musavi as the son of antirevolutionaries and pronounced him guilty of acting against national security by participating in illegal gatherings and establishing contact with opposition satellite channels. His sentence: three years in prison, prohibition from all state universities, fines, and 74 lashes.Another 16 months passed before Musavi was taken to be lashed. A total of 14 political prisoners were lashed that day: Musavi was the first. He had taken care to put on several layers of clothing, in the hope of dulling the pain. But a judge observing the proceedings ordered Musavi to strip down to a T-shirt."I was the first person to be lashed and I had the feeling that the soldier didn't know how to do his job," he says. "The lash consisted of three strands of leather woven together with a knot at the end, to make the tip very heavy and painful. When the soldier was lashing me, it hit me in the chest. My chest was purple, covered with bruises. My entire torso was swollen. I was doing my best not to moan or beg for mercy, but I asked: 'Why are you lashing my chest? You should hit me on the back.'"The last prisoner in the group was a dentist who had been sentenced to nine years and 160 lashes for his satirical writing about religion. The remaining prisoners, already reeling from their own lashings, were forced to watch. The strokes of the lashes were so harsh that they peeled away his skin. Blood gushed from his wounds, and the man screamed in pain. Finally, it ended."He was quite resilient, but when we took him from the room it was like carrying a corpse," Musavi says. "His condition was critical. None of the others bled from the lashings. Their skin wasn't cut, only bruised. But this man's body was bleeding in several different parts, and his skin was slashed open. We were all crying for him."The 14 prisoners returned to the ward. No medical care was provided. The other prisoners brought bowls of water and strips of cotton to make compresses for their injuries. "It was if all the prisoners had been lashed," Musavi says. "Everyone felt crushed."In August 2012, Hooman Musavi was released after 2 1/2 years in prison.But even once outside he continued to feel trapped by the thoughts of his fellow prisoners still held in Evin. He visited their relatives and went to see the graves of activists who had lost their lives in the Green Movement protests, including Neda Agha-Soltan, the student whose shooting death was captured on video and became a graphic symbol of the brutality of the government crackdown.But even these quiet activities drew the attention of the security forces. Musavi's interrogator summoned him with a warning, reminding him of his months in solitary confinement and promising he would not escape the gallows again if he returned to prison a second time.Left with no other option, Musavi fled the country, carrying only a small pack of possessions. (For his protection, his location has been left unstated.) He is uncertain what the future holds, but hopes that he will finally escape the destiny of the child, born and orphaned in prison, who could never outrun the Iranian regime.When the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced its call for 18 Presidential Innovation Fellows last summer, US Chief Technology Officer Todd Park also asked folks across the country to support these Fellows with great ideas and valuable feedback.
Over the past few months, through video chats, conference calls, and in-person meetings, thousands of Americans have connected with us to learn and share ideas about our work—and this Administration’s commitment—to unleash data from the vaults of the government as fuel for innovation. Time and again, we were asked why more people weren’t aware of these “Open Data” efforts, their numerous benefits for Americans, and how to get engaged.
After hearing this feedback, we had an idea: create an online showcase, highlighting the very best Open Data resources and how they are already being used by private-sector entrepreneurs and innovators to create new products and services that benefit people in all kinds of ways—from empowering patients to find the best healthcare right when they need it; to helping consumers detect credit card fraud; to keeping kids safe by notifying parents when products in their home are recalled.
Screenshot from the new alpha.data.gov experimental website, created by the 2012 Presidential Innovation Fellows.
On scrap paper, we sketched out a simple one-page website that would tell the story of Open Data: Alpha.Data.gov. As the name suggests, this is an experimental release. Over time, it will grow and evolve to help catalyze future improvements to the design, content, and infrastructure of Data.gov.
In the meantime, think of Alpha.Data.gov as a first draft. To make it better, we need your help. We’ve seen firsthand that your feedback, ideas, and stories can spur new Open Data innovations. So please send your feedback to @ProjectOpenData on Twitter. And if you’re a front-end designer or front-end developer, we’d love to get your feedback directly on GitHub, so that we can design this collaboratively.
2013 promises to be a busy year for Open Data efforts at The White House and across government. But this story isn’t just about us. It’s about what we can all do together to spur game-changing innovation through the application of Open Data.
To learn more about the Presidential Innovation Fellows, please visit: WhiteHouse.gov/InnovationFellows
To learn more about Open Data resources currently available, please visit: Alpha.Data.gov and Data.gov
Danny Chapman is a Presidential Innovation Fellow working on MyGov at the General Services Administration.
Ryan Panchadsaram is a Presidential Innovation Fellow working on Blue Button for America at the Department of Health and Human Services.
John Paul Farmer is a Senior Advisor at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy.As the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Virginia, Ed Gillespie has vowed to make health care more affordable and accessible, pledging at a recent debate to “incentivize greater competition in the insurance marketplace.”
But as a private consultant, Gillespie advised Anthem, the nation’s second-largest insurance company, as it pursued a merger last year with Cigna, the No. 3 insurer. Virginia insurance regulators said the merger would raise costs and reduce competition, and a federal judge cited the same concerns when she later blocked the deal.
Anthem is among four companies with extensive interests in Virginia that paid Gillespie between $50,000 and $250,000 last year for consulting services. Anthem, AT&T, Bank of America and Microsoft contract directly with the state government, do millions of dollars of business in Virginia, and lobby to influence state laws and policies. All but Anthem have hired Gillespie on and off for more than a decade, dating to his time as co-founder of one of the most successful lobbying firms in Washington.
If he is elected governor, Gillespie would face decisions in which the public’s interests may conflict with the interests of companies that have paid his firms millions of dollars collectively for lobbying and consulting services — and that could hire him again.
“That’s an issue for him to overcome, and it’s a nonpartisan concern for both liberals and conservatives,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative government watchdog group. “The concern is that politicians are more concerned about the payout on K Street that they may get when they leave office as opposed to the public’s interest when they are in office.”
Gillespie’s opponent in the race, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, also has financial ties to several companies active in the state, through his stock portfolio. Virginia’s conflict-of-interest laws generally allow lawmakers and state officials to act on bills affecting companies in which they own stock.
[Northam owns stocks in Dominion, other companies with extensive interests in Virginia]
Gillespie, who declined an interview with The Washington Post, closed his consulting firm, Ed Gillespie Strategies, shortly before launching his campaign in January. The Republican nominee has no current financial interests in the companies, such as stock holdings, and he and his wife would put their personal investments in a blind trust if elected, campaign spokesman David Abrams said.
“As governor, Ed will be an honest, ethical, principled, hard-working, faithful servant-leader worthy of Virginia,” Abrams said, repeating a phrase that Gillespie and his staff have used repeatedly throughout the campaign.
Abrams noted that Gillespie voluntarily released the names of the clients he advised last year. Virginia’s financial disclosure form requires only that candidates list the types of businesses and the range of compensation. “Ed went above and beyond,” Abrams said.
One year after President Trump won election, in part by railing against influence peddlers and vowing to upend the status quo, Gillespie is trying to ride the anti-establishment tide as well as a former Republican National Committee chairman can. His campaign biography omits his lobbying work and tells the up-from-the-bootstraps story of the son of an Irish immigrant grocery store owner who rose to become a top adviser to President George W. Bush.
When Gillespie was tapped to serve in the White House in 2007, his lobbying firm, Quinn Gillespie & Associates, represented more than 100 clients, including some of the nation’s biggest companies and trade groups, according to a financial disclosure form. The firm reported $17.2 million in revenue from federal lobbying in 2016, according to public records.
It was paid more than $3.2 million from 2001 to 2007 by three of the companies he consulted for last year — AT&T, Bank of America and Microsoft — according to public records. Gillespie also consulted for those companies before his 2014 Senate campaign, according to his federal candidate disclosure form.
A gubernatorial bid by a former lobbyist is not without precedent. Virginia’s current governor, Terry McAuliffe (D), was previously the managing partner of a law firm with a lobbying practice, although he did not personally lobby. Haley Barbour, a Republican who founded a major lobbying firm that employed Gillespie early in his lobbying career, served as governor of Mississippi from 2004 to 2012.
Gillespie, whose reputation as a Washington insider could be a liability in this election cycle, has proposed an ethics and campaign finance platform that includes provisions opposed by lawmakers in his own party. His plan would ban personal use of campaign funds, slow the “revolving door” by prohibiting former state employees from lobbying their prior agencies for two years, and require more frequent disclosures of conflicts of interest.
Critics, however, pointed to Gillespie’s own experience with the revolving door — he worked for then-Rep. Dick Armey (R-Tex.) from 1985 to 1996 and did three stints in the Bush administration, and advised private clients as a lobbyist or consultant in between those jobs and after leaving the White House. Part of his firm’s pitch was that he could leverage his relationships with those in power.
In 2002, Quinn Gillespie posted notable press clippings on its website, including one that said Gillespie “advises the White House, which puts him in a perfect position to help his clients.” Also cited was this quote from a Washington Post story: “Ed Gillespie has emerged as a one-stop power broker. He advises top White House officials, works for GOP campaigns, lobbies for major corporations and opines on political talk shows.”
Here’s how Virginia gubernatorial candidates make their money.
Gillespie’s private-sector work has fueled frequent Democratic attacks since early 2014, when he first sought to make the leap from political operative to elected official. Gillespie came close to unseating Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) that year.
“I served eight years in the U.S. Army, I showed up for this country,” Northam said at a debate Oct. 10. “You’ve been a K Street lobbyist in Washington. The only time you show up is when you get paid.”
Gillespie didn’t flinch. “I did show up for my clients, and I was effective,” he said.
In a reprise of a Warner attack ad, Northam dubs Gillespie “Enron Ed” in a television spot that tries to yoke him to the energy company that went bankrupt in 2001 amid a massive accounting fraud. Gillespie was among four lobbyists registered to represent the company that year, and he cut ties before the bankruptcy filing. He has said he had no knowledge of Enron’s accounting tactics.
Northam has stock holdings of between $5,001 and $50,000 each in AT&T, Bank of America and Dominion Energy, all of which do business in the state, according to his candidate financial disclosure form. Environmentalists have accused Northam of putting Domion’s interests ahead of those of his constituents. Northam has denied the claim and has pledged to put his investments in a blind trust if he is elected.
Gillespie also has faced criticism from a government watchdog group for declining to elaborate on the consulting work he did in 2016 with two conglomerates, DCI Group and Brunswick Group. Brunswick works in 14 countries and employs “experts in every industry,” according to its website, while DCI claims to be “widely acknowledged as the deepest and most sophisticated political network in the public affairs industry.” State law does not require Gillespie to disclose clients unless they do business in Virginia.
“What Gillespie has disclosed only takes you part of the way, even though it satisfies the law,” said Dale Eisman, a senior writer for the government watchdog group Common Cause who lives in Springfield, Va. “We still don’t know everyone whom he might be beholden to and what their connections are to Virginia.”
In voluntarily disclosing his clients from last year, Gillespie said he advised Anthem and AT&T on proposed mergers and helped Microsoft and Bank of America with “reputation management and communications strategy.”
All four companies or their top executives have contributed to the Gillespie campaign or to a committee he controls, according to the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP), and they have ongoing interests in the state. The governor can directly affect those vast interests when making policy, signing legislation and recruiting businesses to the state.
The proposed $54 billion merger last year of Anthem, the state’s largest insurer, and Cigna would have created the nation’s largest insurance company. Virginia insurance regulators opposed the merger, citing “the potential of harm to policyholders as well as the general public.”
Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blocked the deal in February, saying that “it is likely to result in higher prices and that it will have other anticompetitive effects.”
In August, Anthem announced it would pull out of the Affordable Care Act’s exchange in Virginia amid uncertainty over the future of such marketplaces and pronouncements by President Trump that they were about to fail.
McAuliffe was involved in an effort to persuade Anthem to stay. When the company reversed its decision, he tweeted: “Just got a call from @AnthemInc. They are staying in Virginia!” Anthem said its decision to remain in parts of the state preserved insurance for up to 70,000 Virginians.
AT&T lobbied on six 2016 bills in Virginia — legislation related to cellular use while driving, telecommunications towers, taxes and workplace safety, according to VPAP. In July, Virginia became the first state to announce participation in a nationwide public safety broadband network, created by AT&T with partners, to allow public safety officials to communicate more reliably in a crisis.
Last month, McAuliffe attended an event celebrating an underwater data cable built in part by Microsoft that stretches from Virginia to Spain. Microsoft also operates a data center in Mecklenburg County that employs more than 250 people. The data center’s latest expansion received a $500,000 grant from a state business incentive program, McAuliffe announced.
Microsoft lobbied on Virginia bills related to tax breaks and high school graduation requirements last year, according to VPAP.
Bank of America also has a large presence in Virginia, with about 133 branches. It bills in Richmond last year that dealt with mortgage applications and credit unions, records show. Bank of America was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the government bailout that Gillespie helped push when he was in the White House after previously working as a lobbyist for the bank.
Given the myriad ways a governor can affect the fortunes of large companies doing business in the state, voters should consider Gillespie’s ties with his former clients, said Eisman of Common Cause.
“The candidate knows who helped him get there and helped him make his fortune,” he said. “Voters need to ask what steps the candidate would take to ensure his decisions in public office are based on the merits and not those past relationships.”
This is the second of two stories examining how Virginia’s gubernatorial candidates could face challenges leading the state because of their financial dealings with companies that have extensive interests there. Yesterday: Ralph Northam’s stock holdings.
Andrew Ba Tran and Alice Crites contributed to this report.
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Virginia race for governor looks like a squeakerPNG election: Chaos and colour as Papua New Guinea votes
Updated
Sorry, this video has expired Video: Papua New Guineans head to polls (ABC News)
The start of Papua New Guinea's national elections has been marred by violence after fighting broke out amongst voters in the volatile highlands region.
Armed soldiers and police have been sent to parts of Hela province to try to maintain order at polling stations, where thousands of people have gathered to cast their vote in the two-week-long election.
In Purani village, a remote part of Hela province, dozens of people crowded around a polling booth until a PNG Defence Force soldier grabbed a stick and whacked them out of the way.
With order restored, voters formed a semblance of a queue and voted in the hope of electing leaders who will provide much-needed services.
This was supposed to be a secret ballot, but voting papers at many booths were being filled out in full view of scrutineers and supporters.
At one booth in Tani village, also in Hela province, polling turned to chaos when rival clans started fighting and the ballot box was stolen.
Police and soldiers were called and the box was recovered, but police sergeant Bill Kari said the votes would no longer count.
"They tampered and destroyed both boxes so we cannot do anything, we cannot accept them, by law," he said.
The voting in Hela Province coincided with scheduled voting in Port Moresby.
Polling there was aborted, however, after election workers went on strike and police arrested the Port Moresby election manager after they found $75,000 in cash in his car.
Police also arrested two officials for trying to smuggle ballot boxes out of election headquarters.
The incidents have led some candidates to call for the resignation of the Electoral Commissioner and for an independent authority to take over the remainder of the election.
Topics: world-politics, government-and-politics, papua-new-guinea, pacific
First postedUS Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry both met informally with Zionist Camp co-leader Isaac Herzog — head of the Labor Party and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief rival in the Israeli elections — on the sidelines of a security conference in Munich, Germany on Saturday.
Their discussions reportedly revolved around security matters and the Zionist Camp’s defense strategy.
The meetings were not formally scheduled, and no photographs were immediately issued.
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Herzog also met with the EU’s Foreign Affairs Chief Federica Mogherini and German FM Frank-Walter Steinmeier on the sidelines of the conference.
The Biden-Kerry meetings with Herzog came a day after Biden’s office said the vice president would be abroad and would not attend a contentious speech on Iran Netanyahu is set to deliver to Congress on March 3. Netanyahu’s planned address has infuriated the Obama administration, which accused the Israeli leader of breaching protocol as the visit was not coordinated with the White House. Both Kerry and President Barack Obama said last month that they would not meet with Netanyahu during the visit, citing its proximity to the March 17 elections.
Speaking to Israel’s Channel 10 after his Munich talks, Herzog underlined the scope of the crisis in ties between Netanyahu and the Obama Administration. Netanyahu “won’t get to meet with a single American official on this visit — not from the National Security Agency, not from the White House, not from the State Department,” Herzog said. “It’s a complete boycott [of Netanyahu by the Obama administration]. Even if that’s not stated, that’s the story.”
As president of the Senate, Biden would typically attend the joint meeting, putting the White House in a bind because of its irritation with Netanyahu. Biden’s overseas trip allows the White House to avoid the awkwardness of having the vice president sit behind Netanyahu during the address. It’s unclear where the vice president plans to travel, though his office said the unspecified trip was in the works before the prime minister’s trip was announced.
Netanyahu has been under increased pressure to cancel the speech, in Israel and in the United States.
Herzog said earlier Saturday that the premier must cancel his trip to the US due to the antagonism his address — which was coordinated with House Majority Leader John Boehner — has caused in Washington.
“The time has come when Bibi (Netanyahu) must announce the cancellation of his visit to Congress,” Herzog said in a speech at the conference in Munich. “In conversations I’ve held with many European and US leaders, it is clear there is great anger over Netanyahu diverting the discussion on Iran’s nuclear program for political gain, and turning it into a confrontation with the president of the United States.”
“This speech that was born in sin, as an electioneering ‘production,’ endangers the security of Israel’s citizens and the special relationship between Israel and the US,” Herzog charged.
Many Democrats also object to Netanyahu’s speech, for three reasons: The invitation is an implied rebuke for Obama; the speech, scheduled two weeks before Israel’s elections, might be designed to boost Netanyahu’s re-election hopes; and Netanyahu backs new sanctions on Iran that the administration and Western powers argue could scuttle sensitive negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
Rep. G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina called Boehner’s actions unprecedented, and said Netanyahu has “politicized” his US visit.
On Friday, an Israel Channel 10 TV report said that some 40 Democratic legislators were expected to stay away from the address, and that Netanyahu was anxious to avoid that spreading to a wider “second wave” of legislators. By Saturday, it said 60 legislators might stay away.
The Friday report also said that Netanyahu has conveyed messages to the Americans to the effect that “he didn’t know” the invitation extended to him to speak before the US Congress was anything but genuinely bi-partisan.
Netanyahu remains determined to go ahead with the address, to highlight the dangers of a deal that would leave Iran as a nuclear threshold state, but is making an effort “to soften” the Obama administration’s anger, and that of many Democrats, over the March 3 speech, the TV report said.Ukrainian soldiers patrol near the frontline in the eastern Ukrainian city of Debaltseve, Donetsk region, on December 24, 2014 (AFP Photo/Sergei Supinsky)
Donetsk (Ukraine) (AFP) - Eleven Ukrainian civilians were killed and nearly 20 injured on Tuesday when a long-range Grad rocket apparently fired by pro-Russian insurgents hit an intercity bus in the separatist east.
Local police said the rocket appeared to have gone astray after being aimed by the gunmen at a checkpoint set up by government soldiers on the main highway connecting the rebel stronghold of Donetsk with Ukraine's southeastern coast on the Sea of Azov.
The incident, which was condemned by the UN Security Council, was the deadliest attack on civilians since the rival sides signed a much-maligned September 5 ceasefire that only partially stemmed the fighting and did little to resolve the insurgents' independence claims.
Tuesday's strike also damaged Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's efforts to set up a peace summit where his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin could personally sign a truce to try to end the ex-Soviet republic's nine-month war.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel -- the West's main mediator in Europe's deadliest conflict since the Balkan wars of the 1990s -- argues that such a meeting would be premature with violence still raging daily across Ukraine's Russian-speaking rust belt.
Diplomatic talks in Berlin on Monday confirmed that no summit would be held on the crisis in the short term.
Both Ukrainian military and regional police told AFP that the death toll from Tuesday's incident included seven women and four men.
The local administration said 17 others had been hospitalised near the town of Volnovakha, where the bus was hit, 35 kilometres (22 miles) southwest of Donetsk.
- Gone astray -
Donetsk regional interior ministry department chief Vyacheslav Abroskin said the rocket appeared to have gone astray after being fired at a Ukrainian military checkpoint.
"It was a direct hit on an intercity bus," Abroskin told AFP by telephone.
Ukrainian General Bogdan Bondar told parliament that the rebels had staged "a provocation" by launching their strike from a residential area in the hope of drawing retaliatory fire from state soldiers that would kill scores of civilians.
Both separatist leaders and military commanders rejected responsibility.
"I very much doubt that we could have hit anything as far away as Volnovakha from our positions," Donetsk separatist co-leader Andrei Purgin told AFP by telephone.
"You can see on the map that it is very far away from our nearest roadblock."
Donetsk deputy separatist forces' commander Eduard Basurin also denied rebel involvement.
"No one |
TUNIS (Reuters) - Tunisian authorities said on Wednesday a suicide bomber wearing a vest packed with plastic explosive blew up a presidential guard bus a day earlier, killing at least 12 troops in an attack claimed by Islamic State militants.
Tuesday’s explosion on a main boulevard in the capital drove home the vulnerability of Tunisia to Islamist militancy, following assaults on a seaside tourist hotel in June and the Bardo Museum in Tunis in March also claimed by Islamic State.
One of the Arab world’s most secular nations, Tunisia has increasingly become a target for militants after being hailed as a beacon of democratic change in the region since its 2011 uprising ousted autocrat Zine Abidine Ben Ali.
“This attack is an evolution in the behavior of the terrorists, this time they attacked a symbol of the state and in the heart of the capital,” Prime Minister Habib Essid told reporters after an emergency security meeting.
It was the first suicide bombing in the capital. In October 2013 a bomber blew himself up on a beach in Sousse, and previously an al Qaeda suicide bomber attacked the synagogue in Djerba, killing 21 people.
Islamic State, whose insurgents control large parts of Iraq and Syria and are also active in Libya to Tunisia’s east, claimed responsibility on Wednesday for the Tunis attack, according to an official statement.
It included a photograph of a man, wearing a headscarf, a white robe and bomb vest, who it said was the bomber and named him as Abu Abdyllah Tounsi. The name suggests he was Tunisian himself.
“The Tyrants of Tunisia must know there is no safety for them. We will not stop until the laws of Allah are applied to Tunisia,” the statement said.
SEMTEX FROM LIBYA
An Interior Ministry statement said 12 guards died in the blast of Semtex explosive located in a belt the bomber was wearing. The explosives had been traced to Libya, it said. Another body at the scene was probably that of the bomber.
Security officials said the bomber detonated his blast just as presidential guards were boarding a bus on Mohamed V Avenue to travel to the presidential palace for duty.
“The attacker was wearing a bag on his back. He had on a coat and was wearing headphones. He blew himself up just getting into the door of the bus with military explosives,” Hichem Gharbi, a presidential security official, told local radio.
Tunisian forensics police inspect the scene of a suicide bomb attack in Tunis, Tunisia November 25, 2015. REUTERS/Zoubeir Souissi
The government has declared a state of emergency for a month giving the executive and armed forces more flexibility and authority, but also temporarily curbing some rights.
Tunisia will also close its border with Libya for 15 days, hire 6,000 more recruits for security forces and act to protect itself against Tunisians returning from conflict zones like Syria, the president’s office said.
Around Tunis on Wednesday, troops and armed police patrolled city streets and set up checkpoints searching vehicles and pedestrians. At Tunis international airport, security forces were allowing in only people with booked flights.
Tunisia has enjoyed relative stability since its uprising compared with neighbors Libya and Egypt. It has a new constitution, held free elections and established compromise politics between secular and Islamist parties that has allowed some progress.
But Islamist militants now pose a serious challenge for a country heavily reliant on tourism for its revenues.
In the early chaotic days after its revolution, ultra-conservative Islamists gained ground, recruiting among young Tunisians and taking over mosques.
More than 3,000 Tunisians are now fighting for Islamic State or other militant groups in Iraq, Syria and neighboring Libya. Some have threatened to return to stage attacks in Tunisia.
Slideshow (7 Images)
The gunmen in the Sousse hotel and Bardo Museum attacks were all trained in jihadist camps in Libya.
The Tunis government has cracked down on hardline preachers and taken back mosques. It is also building a security wall along the border with lawless Libya to try to stop militants crossing over into its territory.
Another group of militants is also holed up in the remote mountains bordering Algeria, and they have carried out hit-and-run attacks on Tunisian military patrols and police checkpoints.We love when our favorite apps get updated. Head into the Windows Phone Store and you’ll see a new version of OneDrive waiting for you. OneDrive, as you know, is Microsoft’s cloud-storage solution that allows you to store documents, photos, videos and more in the cloud. It also powers all the syncing between your devices. We’re looking at a fairly big update for OneDrive with a ton of new changes. Let’s check it out.
The last update for the app came out in mid-February when the app was renamed from SkyDrive to OneDrive. That renaming also introduced new features like a new thumbnail view, improved view of shared files, the ability to share multiple items at once and more! That was version 3.5 of the app, today we’re looking at version 4.1 with the following features:
Now looks great on large screen phones
Upload multiple photos, videos and files at once
New immersive view for viewing and managing photos
Open files from OneDrive in other apps
Share files to OneDrive from other apps
Sort files and folders
Bug fixes and performance improvements
The new OneDrive now looks amazing on large screen phones like our Nokia Lumia 1520. There’s a much higher level of information density on the display to put that extra screen real estate to use. The ability to upload multiple photos, videos and files at once will be welcomed by users.
Head into a folder with photos and you’ll notice a new immersive view when viewing a photo. It makes it feel more like the new photo viewing experience found in Windows Phone 8.1.
Opening files from OneDrive into other apps and sharing files to OneDrive from other apps are two features that are very, very welcomed by us. Plus you can now sort files and folders by things like name, newest, oldest, largest and smallest. Again, very cool stuff we’re excited to see in OneDrive.
Download and update to the new version of OneDrive and let us know what you think!
Grab OneDrive from the Windows Phone Store.
Thanks for the tip everyone!A copy of the fake penalty notice. Credit:FireEye The only truth in the matter is that once on the fake site, users are prompted to download a zip file, which contains a PDF – supposedly the fine – and clicking on it triggers the installation of a variant of the Cryptolocker trojan known for encrypting user files and demanding a ransom to unlock them. Researchers at security firm FireEye began receiving calls from companies in Australia on Thursday morning to check on the scam. The real NSW Office of State Revenue has since posted a notice on its website alerting people to it. "SDRO does not issue penalty notices or penalty reminder notices by email. We are aware of an email scam demanding payment of a fake penalty notice. If you receive such an email do not pay anything," the notice says. FireEye technical director Australia and New Zealand, Rich Costanzo, said the malware was similar to that used in previous scams involving fake Australia Post and Energy Australia emails, but unlike them also appeared to encrypt earlier versions of files in the hard drive.
It goes after "shared documents" on network servers. Cryptolocker last hit a large number of Australian computers in September when an estimated 20,000 users were affected. Mr Costanzo said although only an initial analysis of the malware had been done so far, it indicated the ramsomware dials back to Russia, the same source of previous variants. But he said it was not related to findings the company released this week on Russia-led cyber espionage. "They have a very specific aim – this is about money," he said. The scammers are demanding $A600 to unlock the files and appear to have specifically targeted Australians.
Security expert Phil Kernick, of CQR, said this is because "we're easy. We're not a paranoid society – the immediate view is not that people are trying to steal from me." However, Mr Kernick said Cryptolocker was a big deal, people should doubt such emails and there was little they could do if they were tricked. "We say don't pay, go back to yesterday's back up and restore everything." But he said some private users seldom keep up to date back-ups. "When people pay, in my experience, they will give you the key to unlock you files, but soon after that they'll get you again and again," he said.
Mr Costanzo said in cases where files have been locked, to disconnect the computer from all networks to avoid encrypting other drives. Has your computer been infected? How did you recover your files?Prime minister Narendra Modi’s critics have chided him for uncharacteristic silence during his first hundred days in power. But on Twitter, Asia’s most followed leader has been anything but quiet. He is in fact now tweeting in multiple languages.
Since taking office, the prime minister’s personal Twitter account—@narendramodi—has acquired over six million followers, making him the second most-followed politician in the world, after US president Barack Obama.
And the official handle of the prime minister’s office—@PMOIndia—has also grown by 40% in that time, according to Twitter.
In all, Modi now has a Twitter audience of 8.5 million followers, and growing. That is more followers than the readership of India’s most read English language newspaper, the Times of India. According to the Indian Readership Survey of 2013, the daily newspaper had an average issue readership of 7.25 million.
Twitter
The online conversation around Modi hasn’t been restricted to India either. Geo-tagged tweets from the last hundred days about @NarendraModi outside of India are concentrated around major NRI hubs in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
There are occasional callouts in South America (where he attended the BRICS summit), Africa, and a steady string of mentions in Australia, too.
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But it was his latest visit to Japan, which perhaps revealed the full range of Modi’s ‘twiplomacy’, as it were. The Indian prime minister began tweeting in Japanese, sparking talk of a ‘bromance’ with his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe. Here’s the latest example.
And it’s not that Modi is alone. Over 40 ministers and ministries, according to Twitter, have set-up accounts and begun posting 140 character updates.
Despite all the newcomers, it is Modi’s victory proclamation that remains that most retweeted tweet of all times in India.
Right now, at least on Twitter, Modi is clearly winning.TET family proteins grabbed a bit of fame back in 2009 for their role in the demethylation pathway that generates one of our favorite base modifcations 5hmC. Since then, researchers have sought out ways to harness TET’s tremendous potential as a mechanism for active regulation of DNA methylation…if only Miley had followed in its’ footsteps. Controlling the expression of your gene of interest with a targeted epigenetic modifier has long been a dream of many. So a cunning team lead by Dr. Marianne Rots (University Medical Center Groningen, The Netherlands) used fusions of designer DNA binding domains and the TET family (1, 2, 3) to target epigenetically silenced genes (ICAM-1, EpCAM).
The EpiGenie team reached out to Dr. Rots for some additional insights on the latest breakthroughs. She shared that while “Aberrant DNA methylation profiles are associated with various diseases…”, therapeutic re-expression of genes can be achieved by epigenetic drugs, although such approaches suffer from “non-chromatin and genome-wide effects”. So in order to fully exploit the reversibility of epigenetic mutations (while limiting off-target effects), Epigenetic Editing has emerged as a powerful new way to modulate gene expression. In Epigenetic Editing, which Rots has been a long-standing advocate for, designer DNA binding domains are fused to epigenetic writers (or erasers) to overwrite the current epigenetic signature.
Here’s what the team found:
Their construct was found to induce demethylation of targeted CpG sites in gene promoters using a TET2 based construct (which also worked to a lesser extent for TET1, but intriguingly not for TET3).
This demethylation was followed by re-activation of transcription in the target gene of interest (ICAM-1),which the Tet fusion was engineered for.
Ultimately, it appears that we now have a novel way to actively target DNA demethylation to a gene of interest and subsequently reactivate expression of the desired target gene.
Epigenetic Editing is an emerging new tool to investigate functions of epigenetic writers and erasers while also teaching us a thing or two about the consequences of epigenetic marks. Rots concludes that, “As conventional approaches to induce DNA demethylation have genome-wide effects, the approach of Epigenetic Editing provides new avenues to specifically re-express endogenous silenced genes. Providing that the issue of specificity is addressed sufficiently, Epigenetic Editing will allow the full exploitation of the druggable genome concept.”
Induce your epigenome over at Nucleic Acids Research, November 2013Dan Carcillo has a tryout contract with the Pittsburgh Penguins, which gives him the rare opportunity to complete the Eastern Conference Triangle of Hate: Playing for the Philadelphia Flyers, the Pittsburgh Penguins and the New York Rangers.*
From the Penguins, on the signing of CarBomb:
Carcillo, 29, originally broke into the professional ranks with the Penguins organization after being drafted by Pittsburgh in the third round (73rd overall) of the 2003 NHL Draft. He played two seasons with the Penguins’ American Hockey League affiliate, Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, from 2005-07, tallying 54 points (32G-22A) and 494 penalty minutes in 103 regular-season games.
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The 6-foot, 200-pound Carcillo has played nine NHL seasons, beginning with the Arizona Coyotes in in 2006-07. Since then, he has gone on to suit up for the Philadelphia Flyers, Chicago Blackhawks, Los Angeles Kings and New York Rangers.
Carcillo split the 2013-14 campaign between the Kings and Rangers, scoring four goals and five points with 100 penalty minutes in 57 combined regular-season contests, then adding two goals in eight playoff games, helping the Rangers advance to the Stanley Cup Final, where they fell to the Kings in five games.
As mentioned here, Carcillo was actually drafted by the Penguins in 2003 at No. 73 overall, right ahead of Clarke MacArthur. There’s only 176 points separating them now!
Carcillo played 31 games for the Rangers last season, scoring three goals and earning 43 PIMs; before that, he had one goal in 26 games for the Los Angeles Kings with 57 PIMs. He’s been a negative CorsiRel player in the last two seasons, including with the 2013 Cup champion Blackhawks.
So what is this? A favor?
Story continues
The Penguins’ bottom six still needed some addressing, especially on the left side, but doesn’t Steve Downie sorta do what Carcillo does, but lightyears more effectively?
Well, at the very least, he’s familiar with Wilkes-Barre if things don’t work out. Wonder what Craig Adams thinks of all this?
* I consider this the Triangle of Hate with the full acknowledgement that at various times the Devils or Bruins or even the Capitals could create at least a Trapezoid of Hate.David Moyes has long been an admirer of German football — he once declared he would like to coach in the country — so it is no surprise that he is turning to the Bundesliga in his quest to overhaul his failing Manchester United squad.
He will be given the funds to compete and his scouting missions this month have been about putting in the ground-work with clubs and agents for a summer rebuild. United are acutely aware that they need to spend, and spend significantly, to challenge again even if they drop out of the Champions League places this season.
The club attempted to buy Gareth Bale for £100 million last summer, they were interested in Cesc Fabregas, bid for Ander Herrera and Leighton Baines and were offered Mesut Özil and Fabio Coentrao. Money is available, even after the £37 million club-record purchase of Juan Mata and the £27.5 million committed to Marouane Fellaini.
Moyes is fishing. He is sounding out the possibility of signing Toni Kroos from Bayern Munich or Marco Reus from Borussia Dortmund, in the knowledge that both players have buy-out clauses and contracts that are running down, and is interested in Dortmund’s Ilkay Gundogan. He does not expect to get all three.
On Friday he attended Borussia Mönchengladbach against Bayern Munich. There is interest in midfielder Patrick Herrmann while he also assessed striker Max Kruse and is aware that Bayern defender Dante is unsettled.
It was an unusually high-profile approach for such a high-profile manager, but Moyes has taken the decision that by travelling in person he will be able to, as one source put it, “do the sales job” of persuading his targets to come to United.
Having finally been told by Real Madrid that Coentrao will not be loaned this month United have considered a move for Southampton’s Luke Shaw, who they greatly admire, but that is an offer that also might have to wait until the summer when the incomings will also be balanced out by departures.
Patrice Evra, Nemanja Vidic, Nani and Javier Hernández are among the senior players expected to leave with Moyes also determined to lower the average age of the United squad as he makes them more competitive and more his own team.
That process was unsatisfactory in the summer, but the capture of Mata has changed the dynamics. It was a highly unusual transfer and not just because it was a club-record deal for United. It was a deal brokered largely through intermediaries because it was reasoned the move would have immediately collapsed with a direct approach.
United had to ascertain at what price Chelsea would be prepared to sell Mata but were fearful that if they made a formal inquiry it would have been rebuffed – not least because of the hard-line stance they took last summer over Wayne Rooney. Delicate talks have been ongoing for several weeks, with Mata’s Chelsea future having been in serious doubt since October, as the player had grown frustrated at his lack of first-team opportunities.
At that stage the frontrunners for his signature were Paris St-Germain and tentative talks took place, with indications that the Qatari-owned club would make a bid in January.
That did not transpire. Instead, United’s interest grew as their season began to unravel and it became evident that the unthinkable was possible: Chelsea might be willing to sell to them if the right bid was made. After discussions through those intermediaries a figure of €45 million (£37 million) was regarded as acceptable, especially as Chelsea had ruled out loaning the player to Atlético Madrid.
United had just one problem: if their bid was rejected, and subsequently made public, it would not only be embarrassing but another example of them being unable to land a target under Moyes and Ed Woodward, the executive vice-chairman.
For Jose Mourinho, the bid was at the level which ultimately placed Mata’s future in the hands of the board. Mourinho, and the Chelsea hierarchy, are acutely aware of the demands of Financial Fair Play and selling Mata – not a central figure in the club’s plans – and signing a cheaper replacement would help bolster his funds to overhaul his strike-force come the summer.
Mourinho’s only stipulation – if a bid was made and accepted – was that it was made in time for him to sign a replacement. An informal deadline was placed of last Tuesday, giving Mourinho 10 days to secure a young, quick winger as Mata’s replacement. The manager’s reasoning was that he would otherwise be left with just Andre Schurrle as an under-study to his first choices of Eden Hazard, Oscar and Willian.
Chelsea expected the offer last Monday evening but it did not formally arrive until Wednesday. United had met the asking price, there would be no need for haggling or negotiation, and Chelsea decided to pull Mata out of training. The 25-year-old was then sent home with the expectation that he would not return to Chelsea.
Contingency plans had been made. Mourinho’s claim that he was first told that Mata might be leaving on Tuesday morning is disingenuous; as was his further claim that only then did he consider a move for Basle’s Mohammmed Salah.
The London club were already aware of the Egyptian’s availability, not least during their Champions League matches against the Swiss side this season, which partly explains why the winger’s proposed move to Liverpool dragged on. Basle knew there were other suitors.
Chelsea will believe they have done better from the Mata deal but United are cash-rich, talent-poor and needed a marquee signing. Time will tell who has gained the most.House Republicans Have Forgotten How A Bill Becomes A Law
House Republicans engaged in a publicity stunt on Friday that displayed a profound misunderstanding of how government actually works in the United States.
Doug Mataconis · · 15 comments
Yesterday, on a nearly party line vote, the House Of Representatives passed a bizarre piece of legislation that purports to say that if the Senate fails to act on passing a FY2011 budget resolution, then the version passed by the House will have the full effect of law:
The House narrowly passed legislation on Friday that calls for a House-passed FY 2011 spending bill to become law should the Senate fail to approve a spending bill by April 6. It would also prevent members of Congress from being paid during a government shutdown. The bill, H.R. 1255, was approved over bitter Democratic opposition in a 221-202 vote in which no Democrats supported it, and 15 Republicans opposed it. Several Democrats argued that the measure is unconstitutional, charging that it would “deem” that the 2011 spending bill, H.R. 1, has the force of law if the Senate fails to act. Some Democrats seized on the floor comments from Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), who broke with his party and said on the floor that this aspect of the bill “violates my conscious and the Constitution, and I cannot vote for it.” Republicans voting “no” were Reps. Justin Amash (Mich.), Michael Burgess (Texas), Jason Chaffetz (Utah), Jeff Fortenberry (Neb.), Louie Gohmert (Texas), Richard Hanna (NY), Walter Jones (NC), Dan Lungren (Calif.), Tom McClintock (Calif.), Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.), Ron Paul (Texas), Ted Poe (Texas), Reid Ribble (Wis.), Dana Rohrabacher (Calif.), and James Sensenbrenner (Wis.). Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) was the only member of the House to vote “present.”
The opponents of H.R 1255 are, of course, absolutely correct. One chamber of Congress cannot declare a piece of legislation to be law without the consent of the Senate and the President. In fact, as Ed Morrissey notes, the answer to this question can be found in the very Constitution that House Republicans have proclaimed is so important to them:
Section 7 – Revenue Bills, Legislative Process, Presidential Veto All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills. Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the Objections at large on their Journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If after such Reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a Law. But in all such Cases the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by Yeas and Nays, and the Names of the Persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively. If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law. Every Order, Resolution, or Vote to which the Concurrence of the Senate and House of Representatives may be necessary (except on a question of Adjournment) shall be presented to the President of the United States; and before the Same shall take Effect, shall be approved by him, or being disapproved by him, shall be repassed by two thirds of the Senate and House of Representatives, according to the Rules and Limitations prescribed in the Case of a Bill.
Or, if that’s too hard for Boehner, Cantor and the others to understand, they can just watch this video:
You’ll remember, of course, that the GOP started off the 112th Congress with a reading of the Constitution, including Article 1 Section 7 noted above, and also said the following in their Pledge To America:
We pledge to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers and honor the original intent of those precepts that have been consistently ignored – particularly the Tenth Amendment, which grants that all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
This is unequivocally one of the silliest pieces of legislation I’ve seen in quite some time, and it’s ironic that the party that campaigned in 2010 on adherence to the Constitution would attempt to violate it in such a stupid manner.On Sunday, T-Mobile will begin slowing down cellular data for some of its customers who violate the company's terms and conditions.
Under the new policy, unlimited data users who use their phones to upload "continuous" Web cam videos or engage in peer-to-peer filesharing will be throttled after a series of warnings.
"A very small number of our customers are misusing their Simple Choice Unlimited data service in violation of their rate plan and terms and conditions by bypassing the default tethering feature or engaging in peer-to-peer filesharing," the company told the Post. "In order to protect all T-Mobile customers, we will be reaching out to these people to educate them on our terms and conditions of service, but if the misuse continues, they could have their data speeds reduced for the remainder of their billing cycle."
A leaked internal memo obtained by Tmo News explains that users who violate the rule will have a notice appended to their account, and will receive warnings before being penalized for their behavior.
Streaming video and file sharing can quickly eat up a great deal of bandwidth, constraining the network for other users. For similar reasons, Verizon recently announced a plan to throttle the most voracious LTE users on unlimited plans on its network. The move has drawn scrutiny from federal regulators who believe the reason for targeting unlimited data users — as opposed to customers on metered plans — is motivated by a desire to increase revenues.
In response, Verizon has pointed to the fact that all wireless carriers engage in some form of data throttling as part of their "reasonable network management." The Federal Communications Commission has rejected that argument, saying that just because "all the kids do it" is not an excuse to discriminate among different types of customers.
T-Mobile's reported policy diverges from Verizon's in one key respect: The throttling would be triggered only when customers have violated the company's terms and conditions. That's a much more legalistic argument than the one Verizon appears to be making, which is that it simply wants to maintain a smooth network experience for everybody -- a type of moral/ethical argument.
Whether T-Mobile's approach will run afoul of the FCC is unclear; the agency declined to comment.University of Virginia Greek students will be partying a little less hard when spring semester begins Monday. Under proposed rules, kegs of beer and premixed punch will be banned at fraternity parties, as will hard liquor at larger events, unless served by hired licensed bartenders. On Tuesday, UVa President Teresa A. Sullivan ended the suspension on fraternity social activities, on the condition that each fraternity and sorority signs off on the new rules, which were developed by the Inter-Fraternity Council. “I believe the new safety measures recommended by the student leaders in the Greek community will help provide a safer environment for their members and guests,” she said in a statement.
The status of popular drinking games like beer pong and flip cup are unclear under the new rules. Beer must be served "unopened, in its original can." But the measures don't explicitly prohibit the beer being later poured into cups. Laura Bittner/Flickr A UVa fraternity member, who asked to be anonymous because of the controversy of these issues on campus following a disputed Rolling Stone article, said he and his brothers largely considered the measures reasonable. But he added that there was a lot of frustration among fraternity members that the university made them such a target, especially after the account of an alleged gang rape at a fraternity house, which sparked the most outrage, was found to be riddled with inconsistencies. "We're not going to lose sleep over it. We're happy to make changes as any group should be," he said. "But [the Rolling Stone article] shouldn't have been the catalyst for our change. The efforts were misguided and uninformed. The first changes should have been about police involvement and the university's reporting of sexual assaults." Also under the new rules, at least three fraternity members at every party must be "sober and lucid" and designated with a visual marker. A sober brother must be charged with monitoring the stairs and have key access to every room in the house. Food and bottled water must be provided. And under the section "Eliminating Discomfort and Chaos," the agreement requires fraternities to keep a guest list and hire a security agent for bigger events. Under the policy, fraternity party traditions like potent "jungle juice" and the keg stand will be things of the past. At large parties, if there's no third-party bartender, the only permissible drinks are cans of beer and wine served by a sober brother.
We're not going to lose sleep over it. But I think the need for the changes is misguided. Anonymous UVa fraternity member
In the preface to the new rules, the Intra-Fraternity Council stated: "We seek to achieve a safe environment at fraternity events by addressing high-risk drinking, sexual misconduct and unhealthy power structures. These changes are not comprehensive – nor do they claim to be. Instead, we submit these reforms as the next step in the IFC’s commitment to guaranteeing a baseline of safety for fraternity members and our guests." The Inter-Fraternity Council Judiciary Committee, a student-run board, will be responsible for disciplining any infractions, the anonymous fraternity brother told America Tonight. But it's unclear who will monitor the parties for possible violations since UVa fraternity houses are privately owned. "The biggest consideration in the fraternity regulations was to make them something the students would actually do," said Ryan Duffin, a UVa fraternity member who helped draft the new rules. "People are happy with the immediate response, but the biggest thing people may have a problem with is relying on self-regulation of new fraternity rules."
[UVA put the focus] on a very easy target: white males, mostly wealthy, who can probably take the heat. UVA saw that as an acceptable risk. Anonymous UVA fraternity member
UVa suspended all its fraternities in November, and that was the just the start of the backlash. The Phi Kappi Psi house, the site of the alleged rape in the Rolling Stone article, was vandalized with the words "SUSPEND US" and "UVa Center for Rape Studies." The anonymous fraternity student, who is not in Phi Kapp Psi, said he heard the house also received death threats, and its members slept on friends' couches during finals. "[The suspension of fraternities] shifted focus from an actual problem with UVA… A problem with the university's reporting of sexual assault cases," said the anonymous fraternity member. "They put it on a very easy target: white males, mostly wealthy, who can probably take the heat. UVA saw that as an acceptable risk. They saw that as an acceptable risk to refuse the rights of assembly of a whole group." Under fire, the members of UVa's Greek community have remained largely mum. The president of the Intra-Fraternity Council, Thomas Reid, has been the primarily spokesman for the community, and he's struck a conciliatory stance, publicly stating: "Sexual assault is a serious cultural problem in fraternities." "I think it was a calculated statement that the UVa administration was happy to hear," said the anonymous fraternity member. "…That line is not only patently false, I think it's offensive to a group of people that I know in the fraternity system, who are some of the most upstanding members of the community that I know."Alan Crowhurst/Getty Images for Ascot Racecourse Income and wealth inequality in the US has gotten steadily worse over the past decade.
As the country's richest get even richer and the share of people below the poverty line increases, America's middle class has been gradually disappearing. A recent analysis from economists Thomas Picketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman cited by the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business found that the bottom 50% of Americans saw zero income growth over the past 35 years.
One way to understand that change is to analyze what annual salary a person currently needs to be in the top 1% of earners their age.
Business Insider used recent US census data to determine that breakdown. At 25, you'd have to be earning at least $116,000 a year to be in the top 1% of earners. By 64, that number rises to $473,000.
Here's the full spread:
Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from Minnesota Population Center IPUMS
Business Insider analyzed data from the 2015 American Community Survey, an annual survey by the US Census Bureau that aims to interview about 1% of all US households about various economic, demographic, social, and housing characteristics.
Specifically, we used individual-level data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, a project of the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota, which allowed us to estimate the cutoffs for being in the top 1% of earners among full-time, year-round workers for each age in 2015.
It's worth noting that this approach has its limits — surveys like the ACS have been found to have difficulty characterizing people with extremely high incomes, and some researchers prefer to use alternate forms of data, such as tax records, when studying those at the top of the income and wealth distributions.
Being in the top 1% of incomes also doesn't necessarily mean someone is in the top 1% of total wealth, since wealth takes into account a variety of sources. Still, the large sample size of the ACS gives us a good idea of what it takes to reach the top 1% — and shows just how rich "rich" really is.As Cuba opens its doors to the U.S., a Cuban-American considers her own shifting relationship with the island nation.
In December, I watched President Obama announce he was reestablishing diplomatic relations with Cuba, saying the same words I’ve heard so often: “No es facíl.” I shot off an email to my dad with the subject line “Holy shit.” (He responded almost immediately, joking that people in Miami were already making plans to open McDonalds’ in Cuba.) I wasn’t sure this would happen in our lifetimes.
I thought about my cousins in Sagua la Grande, a small town about 170 miles east of La Habana. I finally responded to their emails, which had been piling up in my inbox for the last month. I didn’t ask about the change specifically; I figured they would volunteer their thoughts. I expected quick replies full of jubilance, reports from the frontlines of hope. I wanted, and still want, to believe that this will be different from the more symbolic freedoms Raúl Castro has granted over the last five years, which dangled economic mobility dangerously close to the hands of Cubans who were emboldened by the newfound right to open businesses, then quickly deflated by the lack of funds and proprietary control to do so. I want my America-obsessed cousins to finally reap the economic benefits of their devotion.
My cousins replied with their usual punctuation-less string of niceties. Cousin how are you I hope you are well and work is going well the family is good say hello to your dad and aunt I hope you can come we miss you I am living with my sister in Santa Clara take care kisses here is a photo. None of them mentioned the news. I couldn’t tell if this was because they feared the state was monitoring their emails, as they’ve expressed in the past, or if they just didn’t think renewed diplomacy had anything to do with them. Since I’d met my cousins for the first time four years ago they’d sent me regular updates on their lives, sometimes with requests to fill out paperwork for a visa lottery or to create a profile for them on “feilbul” (Facebook) so they could find Americans to marry. At first, their emails arrived from the accounts of paid third parties with addresses I didn’t recognize, the subject lines filled with my cousins’ names in all caps. Over the last few months, they’ve established their own email accounts and are using the smartphones my family sent over from Miami.
All photos by Tanya Rey
My first trip to Cuba was in 2010, after Obama eased Cuban travel restrictions back to their pre-Bush era status. Having grown up in a Cuban community in Miami, I was determined to finally see the forbidden place just 110 miles away that I’d heard so much about. My dad, however, was less than enthusiastic. “You don’t understand. It’s dangerous,” he told me. “If tomorrow Castro decides that pink shirts are illegal, and you’re caught in a pink shirt, that |
in recent years thanks to these tools. Developer tools Prettier and ESLint give us freedom to write how we like and still output clean code. Frameworks like React and Vue provide indispensable models for creating interactive experiences. Build tools like Webpack and Babel allow us to use the latest and greatest language features and patterns without sacrificing speed and efficiency.
Much of the focus in JavaScript these days seems to be on front-end tools, but it does not mean there is no love to be found on the back-end. This same pattern of automation and abstraction is available on the server side, too, primarily in the form of what we call "Backend as a Service" (BaaS). This model provides a way for front end developers to link their web or mobile apps to backend services without the need to write server code.
Many of these services have been around for awhile, but no real winner has come forth. Parse, an early player in the space, was gobbled up by Facebook in 2013 and subsequently shut down. Firebase was acquired by Google and is slowly making headway in developing market share. Then only a few weeks ago, MongoDB announced their own BaaS, Stitch, with hopes of capitalizing on the market penetration of their DB.
BaaS Advantages
There are an overwhelming number of BaaS options, however, they all have the same primary advantages at their core.
Streamlined development : The obvious advantage of having no custom server is that it removes the need to develop one! This means your development team will perform less context switching and ultimately have more time to focus on core logic. No server language knowledge required!
: The obvious advantage of having no custom server is that it removes the need to develop one! This means your development team will perform less context switching and ultimately have more time to focus on core logic. No server language knowledge required! No boilerplate servers: Many servers end up existing for the sole purpose of connecting a client with relevant data. This often results in massive amounts of web framework and DAL boilerplate code. The BaaS model removes the need for this repetitive code.
These are just the main advantages of BaaS. Hoodie provides these and many more unique capabilities that we will walk through in the next section.
Try on your Hoodie
To demonstrate some of the out-of-the-box functionality provided by Hoodie, I am going to walk you through a few pieces of a simple Markdown note taking web application. It is going to handle user authentication, full CRUD of users' notes, and the ability to keep working even when a connection to the internet is lost.
You can follow along with the code by cloning the hoodie-notes GitHub repository to your local machine and running it using the directions in the README.
This walkthrough is meant to focus on the implementation of the hoodie-client and thus, assumes prior knowledge of React, Redux, and ES6. Knowledge of these, although helpful, is not necessary to understand the scope of what we will discuss here.
The Basics
There are really only three things you have to do to get started with Hoodie.
Place your static files in a folder called /public at the root of your project. We place our index.html and all transpiled JS and image files here so they can be exposed to clients. Initialize the Hoodie client in your front end code: const hoodie = new Hoodie({ url: window.location.origin, PouchDB: require('pouchdb-browser') }) Start your hoodie server by running hoodie in the terminal
Of course, there is more to creating the app, but that is all you really need to get started!
User Auth
Hoodie makes user and session management incredibly simple. The Account API can be used to create users, manage their login sessions, and update their accounts. All code handling these API calls is stored in the user reducer.
When our app starts up, we see a login screen with the option to create a user or log in.
When either of these buttons are pressed, the corresponding Redux thunk is dispatched to handle the authentication. We use the signUp and signIn functions to handle these events. To create a new account, we make the following call:
hoodie.account.signUp({ username: 'guest', password: '1234' }).then(account => { // successful creation }).catch(err => { // account creation failure })
Once we have an account in the system, we can login in the future with:
hoodie.account.signIn({ username: 'guest', password: '1234' }).then(account => { // successful login }).catch(err => { // login failure })
We now have user authentication, authorization, and session management without writing a single line of server code. To add a cherry on top, Hoodie manages sessions in local storage, meaning that you can refresh the page without the need to log back in. To leverage this, we can execute the following logic the initial rendering of our app:
hoodie.account.get().then({ session, username }=> { if (session) console.log(`${username} is already logged in!`) }).catch(err => { // session check failure })
And to logout we only need to call hoodie.account.signOut(). Cool!
CRUD Notes
Perhaps the nicest thing about user management in Hoodie is that all documents created while logged in are only accessible by that authenticated user. Authorization is entirely abstracted from us, allowing us to focus on the simple logic of creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting documents using the Store API. All code handling these API calls is stored in the notes reducer.
Let's start off with creating a new note:
hoodie.store.add({ title: '', text: '' }).then(note => console.log(note)).catch(err => console.error(err))
We can pass any object we would like to the add function, but here we create an empty note with a title and text field. In return, we are given a new object in the Hoodie datastore with its corresponding unique ID and the properties we gave it.
When we want to update that document, it is as simple as passing that same note back in with the updated (or even new) properties:
hoodie.store.update(note).then(note => console.log(note)).catch(err => console.error(err))
Hoodie handles all the diffing and associated logic that it takes to update the store. All we need to do is pass in the note to the update function. Then, when the user elects to delete that note, we pass its ID to the remove function:
hoodie.store.remove(note._id).then(()=> console.log(`Removed note ${note._id}`)).catch(err => console.error(err))
The last thing we need to do is retrieve our notes when the user logs back in. Since we are only storing notes in the datastore, we can go ahead and retrieve all of the user's documents with the findAll function:
hoodie.store.findAll().then(notes => console.log(notes)).catch(err => console.error(err))
If we wanted, we could use the find function to look up individual documents as well.
Putting all of these calls together, we've essentially replaced a /notes REST API endpoint that otherwise would have required a fair amount of boilerplate request handling and DAL code. You might say this is lazy, but I'd say we are working smart!
Monitoring the connection status
Hoodie was built with an offline-first mentality, meaning that it assumes that clients will be offline for extended periods of time during their session. This attitude prioritizes the handling of these events such that it does not produce errors, but instead allows users to keep working as usual without fear of data loss. This functionality is enabled under the hood by PouchDB and a clever syncing strategy, however, the developer using the hoodie-client does not need to be privy to this as it is all handled behind the scenes.
We'll see how this improves our user experience in a bit, but first let's see how we can monitor this connection using the Connection Status API. When the app first renders, we can establish listeners for our connection status on the root component like so:
componentDidMount() { hoodie.connectionStatus.startChecking({interval: 3000}) hoodie.connectionStatus.on('disconnect', () => this.props.updateStatus(false)) hoodie.connectionStatus.on('reconnect', () => this.props.updateStatus(true)) }
In this case, we tell Hoodie to periodically check our connection status and then attach two listeners to handle changes in connections. When either of these events fire, we update the corresponding value in our Redux store and adjust the connection indicator in the UI accordingly. This is all the code we need to alert the user that they have lost a connection to our server.
To test this, open up the app in a browser. You'll see the connection indicator in the top left of the app. If you stop the server while the page is still open, you will see the status change to "Disconnected" on the next interval.
While you are disconnected, you can continue to add, edit, and remove notes as you would otherwise. Changes are stored locally and Hoodie keeps track of the changes that are made while you are offline.
Once you're ready, turn the server back on and the indicator will once again change back to "Connected" status. Hoodie then syncs with the server in the background and the user is none the wiser about the lapse of connectivity (outside of our indicator, of course).
If you don't believe it's that easy, go ahead and refresh your page. You'll see that the data you created while offline is all there, as if you never lost the connection. Pretty incredible stuff considering we did nothing to make it happen!
Why I Like Hoodie
Hoodie is not the only BaaS offering by any means, but I consider it a great option for several reasons
Simple API: In this walkthrough, we were able to cover 3 out of 4 of the Hoodie APIs. They are incredibly simple, without much superfluous functionality. I am a big fan of simplicity over complexity until the latter cannot be avoided and Hoodie definitely fits that bill. Free and self-hosted: Putting Hoodie into production yourself can seem like a drag, but I believe such a service gives you long-term assurance. Paid, hosted services require a bet on that service's reliability and longevity (see: Parse). This, along with vendor lock-in, keep me on the side of self-hosting when it makes sense. Open Source: No explanation needed here...support the OSS community! Offline-first: Hoodie provides a seamless solution to the relevant problem of intermittent connectivity and removes the burden of implementation from developers. Plugins: Hoodie supports 3rd party plugins to provide support for additional server-side functionality outside the scope of the API. It allows for some clever solutions when you begin to miss the flexibility of having your own server. Philosophy: The developers who built and support Hoodie have clearly thought hard about what the service represents and why they built it. Their promotion of openness, empowerment, and decentralization (among other things) is great to see at the core of an open source project. I love everything about this!
Considerations
Before you make the call to cut ties with your server in favor of a BaaS like Hoodie, there are some things you should consider.
Do you favor increased development speed or future flexibility? If the former is your priority, then go with a BaaS! If you really care about performance and scale, you're probably better off spinning up your own server(s). This points toward using a BaaS for an MVP or light-weight app and creating a custom server for well-defined, complex applications.
Does your app require integration with any 3rd party services? If so, it is likely you will need the flexibility of your own server for implementing your own custom implementation logic rather than constrain yourself to a Hoodie plugin.
Lastly, the documentation for Hoodie is severely lacking. It will help you get started, but many API definitions are missing from the docs and you will have to fill in some of the blanks yourself. This is mitigated by the fact that the interface is extremely well thought out. Nonetheless, it makes for a frustrating experience if you are used to complete documentation.
Conclusion
For front end developers, using a BaaS is a great prospect when considering your options for creating a web application. It avoids the need for writing server logic and implementing what essentially amounts to a boilerplate REST API. Hoodie delivers this possibility, with the added bonus of a clean interface, simple user management, and offline-first capabilities.
If all you need is a simple CRUD application, consider using Hoodie for your next app!
Additional ResourcesThe Bronsons, one family featured in the premiere of The Briefcase. Photo: CSB
In the 2014 fiscal year, Les Moonves, president and CEO of CBS Corp, earned over $54 million. That’s down from his 2013 compensation of $66.9 million, but it’s still a lot of money. Enough, in fact, that in one day, he makes more than double the annual median household income in the United States. Maybe he’s worth it! Charge what the market will bear, etc.; CBS isn’t just paying him to do his job, they’re paying him not to do it for anyone else, either. But there’s something really perverse about Les Moonves earning money based on the emotional and financial anguish of poor people, by making a game-theory spectacle of human suffering that he could end, himself, personally, if he wanted to. The people on The Briefcase are agonizing over $101,000 — a shitload of money to most of us. But not to Les Moonves. That’s less than 0.2 percent of his income: $101,000 is to Les Moonves what $97 is to a person earning $52,000 per year.
The Briefcase, premiering on CBS at 8 p.m. Wednesday, features “American families experiencing financial setbacks,” to use the network’s terminology. The family is given a briefcase with $101,000 in it, and then they’re shown another family who’s “experiencing financial setbacks.” They have to decide how much money to keep and how much to give the other people, or whether they want to keep it all for themselves; neither family knows both families have in fact received a briefcase, and that their counterparts are also deliberating over if and how to share the money. In the two episodes CBS made available for review, the decision weighs incredibly heavily on all participants. One woman is so overcome that she vomits. Everyone talks about health insurance. Several people claim this is the hardest decision they’ve ever made. Many, many tears are shed. And perhaps unsurprisingly, people demonstrate impressive generosity. That’s the point of the show, right? To show how generous people truly are? Surely these people were screened not just for emotive telegenics but also for proclivity toward magnanimity.
“We at least have health insurance,” says an injured veteran whose family debt is larger than his annual family income; his wife is the sole breadwinner and works as a night-shift nurse, and the two are struggling to afford to move into a house outfitted for his disabilities. (It’ll be more urgent when their second child is born in a few weeks.) We at least have health insurance. Part of me is moved by his kindness. And part of me wants to start throwing furniture in the street so we can get a new Les Miz going or something because oh my God, fuck everything. How much struggle are we expecting everyone to endure? And how much are we exploiting that struggle by turning it into entertainment?
A lot. We’re exploiting it a lot. The Briefcase does it in a clear and methodical way, but we live in a culture that habitually depicts poor people or poverty as inherently other. In fact, The Briefcase avoids using the word poor at all: Participants are repeatedly described as “hardworking, middle-class families.” But overwhelmingly the families are in extremely dire financial circumstances. If you’re utterly financially unstable, is that really middle class? If you cry every day knowing that you will be unable to provide for your children in meaningful ways, is that middle class? If, in your 40s, you become certain that you will still be in debt when you die, are you middle class? Can homeowners still be considered “poor”? How old must a car be before driving it invalidates a person as “poor”?
The Briefcase plays into this class anxiety by setting up the classic American pastime of figuring out in what ways these people are being poor wrong. The families visit each other’s homes and look through each other’s bills: For the participants, this is presumably meant to engender sympathy and greater commonality, but for viewers, this plays as, “let’s examine what they eat, what they wear, how they get to work, where they live in the first place, and ignorantly identify those things we perceive to be not poor enough, not sufficiently humble.”
America perceives poverty as a moral failure, which is why the participants on The Briefcase have to perform generosity to such an extreme degree. These people have to “prove” themselves as virtuous — to themselves, to one another, but in particular to a viewing audience at home — to show how unlike other poor people they are. We’re not really poor, we just had a string of really bad luck, unlike those other people who are poor on purpose. I’m not suggesting the families on the show aren’t actually nice. In fact, many of them seem incredibly loving and wonderful, people any of us would be lucky to know. But even assholes are entitled not to live a life of abject suffering. Why does the burden of helping “struggling” people fall on other struggling people? Is Les Moonves pulling his car over to throw up because he’s so paralyzed by trying to do the right thing? If he is, make a show about that. If he’s not, make a show about why not.
The Briefcase’s altruism pornography lets us think that shows like this “help.” I mean, those families could have gotten nothing, right? At least this way they have $202,000 between them! Except that’s not what anyone actually cares about, because if it were, this wouldn’t be a TV show: It would be a charity. I’d settle for it being a rallying point, something we could all look to and say, “Wow, we need more and better social safety nets, a more compassionate society, and a more humanity-based approach to understanding, preventing, and alleviating poverty.” And maybe that will happen. But I doubt it.Folks, I often get questions about how Orthodoxy views sola fide. Orthodoxy believes that we are justified through faith in Christ, but it denies the Protestant insistence that justification is by faith alone. My assessment is that Martini’s article shows how the Orthodox understanding of justification is much more faithful to Scripture than Luther’s. Let’s read it and have and have a discussion on this important issue. Robert
Saint Paul and the “Works of the Law”
A great emphasis in the protestant reformation was the doctrinal formulation of “justification by faith alone,” which many asserted to be “the doctrine upon which the Church stands or falls” (Martin Luther: “articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae”).
While this was in and of itself a complete novelty (and devoid of Patristic warrant or justification) — supposedly based upon the Scriptures alone — it is quite easy to demonstrate that not only is this concept foreign to the Scriptures but also foreign to the first century Judean mindset (not to mention the Christian mindset). To be plain, Luther and other reformers were reading their contemporary disagreements with the mainstream Latin church into the words of St Paul.
From an Orthodox perspective, there is no conflict between faith and works, and indeed the “faith vs. works” arguments never found any foothold in the Christian east. Concepts like “legalism” are a complete non sequitor for the Orthodox, as “merit” has no place in our Theology (but this is a much longer, and more intricate discussion beyond the scope of this post). Perhaps the best summary of the Orthodox viewpoint on this topic is found in Saint Mark the Ascetic (Philokalia): “Some without fulfilling the commandments think that they possess true faith. Others fulfill the commandments and then expect the Kingdom as a reward due to them. Both are mistaken.”
As Christians, we are most certainly “justified by faith” (Rom. 5:1) as the apostle clearly intimates, but this is not the same thing as being justified “by faith alone.” The only time we read “by faith alone” in the Scriptures is when the Brother of God writes: “You see, then, that one is justified by works, and not by faith alone” (St James 2:24). The person who has faith is seen as on par with the demons, but nothing more (according to St James). Our faith must be shown forth and proven by good works — by hope, love, charity, fasting, worship, etc — by coming together as the Body of Christ and offering ourselves, along with Christ, as a sacrifice for the Life of the World.
But the main issue with the novel readings of the reformers (Luther, especially) is that they imported the discussions around “faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6) into St Paul’s completely separate discussions on the “works of the law” (εργων νομου), or what could properly be translated “works of the Torah,” given the Alexandrian (Septuagint) usage of νομος.
Interestingly enough, this phrase “works of the law” is found in only three places in all of Second Temple and early Christian (apostolic) literature. Two of those references are the apostle Paul himself, in his epistles to both the Romans and the Galatians:
“… by works of the law, no flesh will be justified in his sight” (Rom. 3:20)
“Therefore, we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law. Or is God the God of the Jews only? Is he not the God of the Gentiles as well?” (Rom. 3:28-29)
“… no one is justified by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ […] that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law.” (Gal. 2:16)
“I just want to hear this from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law or by believing what you heard? Are you that senseless that having begun in the Spirit, you now end in the flesh?” (Gal. 3:2-3)
“… those who depend on the works of the law are under a curse …” (Gal. 3:10)
Try to imagine how someone 2,000 years from now — and completely removed from our culture by time — would understand a phrase like “Honest Abe.” Without knowing the cultural significance behind a phrase like this, one would be left scratching their head. Similarly, we must listen to the Mind of the Church and the understanding of those living in Paul’s day in order to see what he’s “getting at” in both of these epistles.
I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention here the important notion that Paul’s epistles were not doctrinal treatises “out of the blue,” but were all written to address problems in the Church. These letters are not exclusively (or even primarily) for the sake of posterity and for the establishment of “dogma,” but are rather mostly for the purpose of correcting errors in both thought and behavior in the new and burgeoning pioneer faith of the Christians.
That said, let’s take a closer look at the apostle’s statements above regarding the “works of the law.”
In the first quote from Romans (3:20), St Paul says that “no flesh” will be justified in God’s sight. He then continues to speak of the fact that “there is no distinction” (v. 22) of persons before God, speaking to the difference (or lack thereof) between Jews and Gentiles. The conclusion of the apostle’s present discussion is that the Lord is “God of the Gentiles as well” and therefore “a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law” (Rom. 3:28-29). In other words, we are not purified before God because of “Jewishness” or cultic purity (as the Pharisees and other anti-temple cults of Second Temple Judaism argued, e.g. the Essenes/Qumran community), but because of the faith of Abraham — because of faith in Jesus Christ. It is Christ that makes us pure through our union with Him (and as a result, the entire world is both purified and sanctified by the Church and Her sacrificial service).
The issue that the apostle is addressing here is not one of “faith vs. works” or even “legalism” vs. “faith alone” — the question is, does one need to “become a Jew” first in order to be a true and justified Christian? The answer is (of course) no, for Christianity is the true Judaism. There is not even a hint of the Medieval and protestant notion of “meritorious works” here, and to read such a discussion into Paul is simply anachronistic.
In the Galatian epistle, St Paul makes the same argument in relation to εργων νομου, but with even more force — even challenging the apostle Peter on this very issue in front of a large gathering of Christians (although Chrysostom seems to indicate that they planned this public outburst in advance, in order to teach a lesson).
The apostle emphasizes that he and other Hebrew Christians are “Jews by nature and not Gentile sinners” (Gal. 2:15). This statement immediately characterizes the following ones in the context of “Jews vs. Gentiles,” not “faith vs. works” as later protestant commentators would erroneously assert. The apostle then helps me not feel so bad for being redundant at times (i.e. v. 16) and reinforces that one is justified through “faith in Jesus Christ” and “not by the works of the law.” For Christians, our “cultic purity” as people of the true Temple is found through our union with Jesus Christ, not through the “traditions of men” (St Mark 7:8) that would have us continually purify ourselves by other means (more on that in a bit).
Shifting the focus to that of “receiving the Spirit” of God, the apostle asks the Galatians if this was accomplished through εργων νομου or through belief — the answer is obvious: throughbelief, and then continued through faithfulness to the Lord Jesus Christ. Furthermore, if we have “begun in the Spirit,” why would we nullify the Grace of God with the εργων νομου and purification of “the flesh?” This, again, is not a reference to “meritorious works” or “works of supererogation,” but to that of cultic purity and the excesses certain groups propagated in the later period of the Second Temple.
When we consider the old covenant Scriptures with regards to the Temple and ritual purity, we can see how the “flesh” (σάρξ or sarx) was a pivotal theme — but one that had nothing to do with “merit.” For example, in Leuitikon (Leviticus), chapters 13-14, there are various instructions on how to deal with people that contract the flesh-disease of leprousy. The fact that these people are anointed with oil is no insignificant notion, as the correspondance to Chrismation reminds us that through union with Christ (and by receiving the Holy Spirit), we are united to the true Temple (Jesus Christ) and are therefore made ritually pure in the flesh. Beyond this, we see that even buildings can contract leprousy, being defiled by the Gentiles (the foreigners) that dwelled in the land before the Hebrews:
“When you come into the land of the Chananites, which I will give you in possession, and I shall give a leprous disease in the houses in the land acquired by you […] And he[the priest] shall look at the attack in the walls of the house, hollow, greenish or reddish […] and they shall take out the stones in which is the attack and throw them into an unclean place outside the city. And they shall scrape off the inside of the house round about and pour out the soil in an unclean place outside the city.”
Leuitikon (Leviticus), 14:34,37,40-41 (LXX)
This same concern for a ritual purity “of the flesh” was paramount in the notions of both the Pharisees and the other anti-Temple/anti-Jerusalem movements of the first century — not “faith vs. works.”
Due to the fact that “the promised land” had been under constant occupation by “the Gentiles” (the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Babylonians, etc.) — along with the continual defilement of the Temple by these impure foreigners — the feeling of ritual impurity had to have been at an all time high for those living in the first century (AD). In the minds of the Pharisees and Essenes, the entire land was defiled in the flesh with leprousy. The only hope for the Judeans, then, was the purification of their land and of their Temple (or even an abandonment of the Temple altogether, until it was under the control of “pure” hands). Without the Temple as a locus of cultic purity — in the midst of a purified land, set apart for God’s people — there was no hope for the salvation and restoration of Israel (the eschatological hope for the new covenant, the anointed one, or Messiah, etc.).
Salvation must be seen (in one sense) as a return to the Paradise of Eden, in true union and communion with God — but this can only be possible if we are cleansed of our impurities and able to dwell in the midst of a holy God (or rather to have a holy God dwell in the midst of us). The concern of the Pharisees and Essenes (for example) was certainly valid, therefore, but they were ultimately “missing the boat.”
The third place where this phrase ”works of the Torah/law” is found is in one of the documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls (from Cave Four). This scroll is self-titled Miqsat Ma‘ase ha-Torah, or “Selections of the Works of the Torah” (it is also known as 4QMMT/4Q394-399 in scholarly references or as “A Sectarian Manifesto”).
The scroll opens with a statement of purpose: “These are some of our pronouncements concerning the Law of God; specifically, some of the pronouncements concerning works of the law, which we have determined... and all of them concern defiling mixtures and the purity of the sanctuary” (4Q394 Frags. 3-7, Cols. 1-2; with 4Q395 Frag. 1). As stated here, the very purpose of these εργων νομου are to keep the sanctuary pure and free of defilement — they are not about “meriting” salvation through “good works.”
Some of the “works of the law” that are then enumerated fall under topics such as: a ban on offerings using Gentile grain, a ban on sin offerings boiled in Gentile/copper vessels, a ban on sacrifices by Gentiles, rulings on the purity of those who prepare the red heifer, a ban on bringing the skins of cattle/sheep into the Temple, a ban on Temple entrance after contact with skins of a carcass, a ruling on who is fit to eat of the holy gifts, a ban on the inclusion of the “unfit” into the people of Israel, a ban on the entrance of the blind/deaf into the Temple, a ruling on the cleansing of lepers, a ruling on unlawful sexual unions and marriage, and so on (cf. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, ed. Wise, Abegg & Cook, pp. 454-462). As you can tell, the predominant concerns of these “works of the law” is that of cultic/ritual purity (as related to the Temple and to the people/congregation of Israel).
But beyond this, what is the ultimate concern? As alluded to above, it is that of salvation — and not just for individuals but for the whole of Israel (the longing for its restoration and salvation in the new covenant, even).
The “people of the desert” in Qumran are warned that to ignore these rituals of purity is to invite the judgment of God: “... because of […] the fornication, some places have been destroyed. Indeed, it is written in the book of Moses that ‘You shall not bring an abomination into your house,’ for an abomination is hated (by God).”
You can almost hear the paranoia in these words, as the Judeans looked around and were completely surrounded and “infested” throughout the land (and the Temple) by Gentiles. It is no wonder that a variety of anti-Temple movements arose in the first century (of which the Forerunner, John the Baptist, was likely a part), and one can’t help but mention the zeal shown by Christ in the cleansing of the Temple. In fact, the necessity of “separation” from the impure is next mentioned in this scroll: “We have separated from the majority of the people and from all their uncleanness and from being party to these matters or going along with them in these things. And you know that no unfaithfulness, deception, or evil are found in our hands, for we give some thought to these issues” (4Q398, Frags. 14-17, Col. 1).
The connection of this apparent apostasy and compromise in Israel is connected with an eschatology of “the Last Days,” as well: “In the book of Moses it is written […] that you ‘will turn from the path and evil will befall you.’ And it is written ‘that when all these things happen to you in the Last Days, the blessing and the curse, that you call them to mind and return to Him with all your heart and with all your soul.’... at the end of the age, then you shall live...“ Even with some damage and incompleteness to these fragments, we can see the overall direction the author of the scroll is taking — if the defilement and cultic impurity of Jerusalem/the Temple continues, God will completely abandon Israel. The time for returning to God “with all your heart and with all your soul” has come (and arguably, this is what we see in the new covenant and in the Person of Jesus Christ and His Church).
Continuing with the eschatological theme, the Qumran community (according to this scroll) expected the restoration of Israel (the return to God) to occur in “the Last Days”: “… when those of Israel shall return to the Law of Moses with all their heart and will never turn away again.” I believe this refers not only to the new covenant but explicitly to the ultimate anti-Temple sect: “the Way” of Jesus Christ and His blessed apostles.
The rather important conclusion to this scroll (“Selections of the Works of the Torah”) is as follows:
“Now, we have written to you some of the works of the Law, those which we determined would be beneficial for you and your people, because we have seen that you possess insight and knowledge of the Law. Understand all these things and beseech Him to set your counsel straight and so keep you away from evil thoughts and the counsel of Belial. Then you shall rejoice at the end time when you find the essence of our words to be true. And it will be reckoned to you as righteousness, in that you have done what is right and good before Him, to your own benefit and to that of Israel.”
Of note, we see that the ultimate purpose of these “works of the law” is for the sake of Israel and her salvation. For the Judeans of Qumran, this had come to mean purifying the land and the Temple from the defilement — the leprousy — of the Gentiles, and this is certainly why they found themselves in the recesses of the wilderness as a protest against the impure and compromised priests of Jerusalem.
It seems to be the case as well that the Pharisees had ultimately the same goal, leading them to push for cultic purity even outside the context and walls of the Temple (an extra-Scriptural notion), as we must keep in mind that the Pharisees were not priests, nor were they directly connected to the (Second) Temple. Rather, they were attempting a “lay” reform of the priesthood and of the people of Israel, pushing their agenda by any means necessary (as an aside, this made the “new Rabbi on the block” — Jesus — to be quite a direct affront and competitor against their efforts, and thus their attempts to discredit him and his ministry).
I also need to mention the use of the phrase “reckoned to you as righteousness” in this scroll. In the Qumran/Essene/Pharisee mindset, the ultimate personification of this being “reckoned” as righteousness is not in Abraham, but in Phinehas (and this is very clear in theDSS elsewhere). Phinehas is famous for his zeal in the book of Numbers:
“And Israel stayed in Sattim, and the people were profaned by whoring after the daughters of Moab. And they invited them to the sacrifices of their idols, and the people ate of their sacrifices and did obeisance to their idols […] And behold, a man of the sons of Israel came and brought his brother to the Medianite woman before Moyses [Moses] and before all the congregation of Israel’s sons […] And when Phinees[Phinehas] son of Eleazar son of Aaron the priest saw it, he arose from the midst of the congregation. And he took a barbed lance in his hand, and he went in after the Israelite man into the alcove and pierced both of them, both the Israelite man and the woman through her womb. And the plague stopped from Israel’s sons. And those that died in the plague were twenty-four thousand.”
Numbers 25:1-2; 6-9 (LXX)
The zeal shown here by Phinehas was that of keeping the congregation of Israel pure, and helping to stave off further spread of a plague (judgment for their “whoring” as the LXX nicely puts it). In the same way, both the Pharisees and Essenes (and presumably the community at Qumran) were zealous for the absolute purity of Israel. As a result, they associated their actions with those of Phinehas the priest. And indeed, the approval of this zeal is seen in the Psalmist’s words: “And Phinees stood and made atonement, and the breach abated |
mistakes.
" 'Hey, I know it's the weekend, but don't email when you're drunk,' " he recalls her saying. He was, of course, perfectly sober — just dyslexic. Now, he can spend hours scouring emails he's drafted, looking for typos. "It's very time-consuming and very exhausting."
Consuming. Exhausting. There's an emotional dimension, too. Gohrband recalls that when he was a child he would fantasize about not "being broken." He would avoid telling people about it: "If they know that you're dyslexic, they'll think you're dumb."
Yet, he says, there came a turning point when the shame faded. For him, it was when he found videography. There he discovered a "language" that came easily, and suddenly his talents were visible to others.
"I felt so much more confident," he says.
And with time, Gohrband says, he has found benefits hidden inside his struggles. He thinks that being pushed outside his comfort zone by dyslexia has made him more creative and less judgmental.
I've felt that myself, and as I've talked with many others, I heard one thing again and again: When things don't come easy, you learn to try new things and work hard at them.Hey, Taylor Swift, you have a lot to be proud of. Talent. Awards. Loving fans. Did you know you also helped a boy walk?
Luke Hogan Laurenson, 12, was born with cerebral palsy and although he's been inspired by your songs for years, your "Shake It Off" got him up from his wheelchair and dancing to your beat.
SHAKE IT OFF FOR LUKE Please l Support l Donate l Share @ https://www.youcaring.com/lukehoganlaurenson-757279 #ShakeItOffForLuke #AshlandOregon #AshlandFire Posted by Gabriel Al-Rifai on Wednesday, June 7, 2017
Incredible, right? Don't believe me. Ask the Ashland firefighters who saw it happen. Or just watch the video.
Doctors told Luke's mom that walking for him was not possible, let along dancing. He shook it off.
Your song became his personal anthem. He first started swaying to it while sitting on the floor. Then he found the strength to bounce a little on his knees. In December, the brave boy born with dystonic quadriplegia cerebral palsy walked a few steps.
And this year, he danced for the very first time all by himself.
Having the independence to do these things on his own has improved his self esteem, says his mom, Jane Hogan. If he's having a bad day or a setback, she says, he reminds himself to shake it off.
Taylor, your image is everywhere in Luke's home: Posters, calendars, birthday gift DVDs.
When the family drove five hours to attend your Red Tour in Portland's Moda Center four years ago, Luke wore a T-shirt his big sister, Julia Hogan Laurenson, made for him. It read: "The best day of my life," a message inspired by your "Best Day" song and how he was feeling that day.
You see, you've been a big comfort to him. When he was really little and pain shot through his weak limbs, his mom would play your music. Sometimes, when Luke was restless and couldn't sleep, she would crack him up by pretending to talk to you over the phone.
On Friday inside their Ashland home, Jane Hogan demonstrated.
She held her hand like a phone up to her ear, and said, "Taylor, it's been a while," and Luke laughed and wiggled his feet. His speech disability, dysarthria, makes it difficult for most people to understand him, but his mom and sister get the message loud and clear.
Jane Hogan said Luke had been deprived of oxygen before or during his birth. His damaged nervous system can't produce the relaxation neurotransmitter GABA. Your music helps him manage his stress.
But you won't see any unhappiness when meeting Luke. He smiles often, his hazel-colored eyes connecting to yours.
"He wakes up happy and spends the day that way," says his mom.
Classmates at Bellview Elementary School in Ashland made him feel like a rock star. Luke now attends Ashland Middle School and looks forward to the new year starting in August.
He works hard in the classroom, but a device that's supposed to let him communicate to teachers and friends is holding him back. The Talk Buddy he has is old. It's not wired for the internet and it's heavy for him to pick up.
Still, he painstakingly types with one thumb: "I'm feeling happy" or some other positive message.
The video of Luke miraculously dancing was posted on the fundraising site You Caring to raise money to pay for a new Talk Buddy -- his health insurance won't cover a replacement for three more years -- and more medical treatments that are making him become more mobile.
Luke's mom wrote on the You Caring campaign page: "Truthfully, I would rather do almost anything in the world other than ask for help. But I have an amazing 12-year-old son who has shown that his brain can heal."
So far, the campaign has raised a third of its $34,000 goal.
Social experts estimate that each time his video is shared, it could raise $37 for his treatments.
Taylor Nation, can you help?
Since its release five weeks ago, over 50,000 people have watched the video through Facebook and YouTube. Family friend and real estate agent Gabriel Al-Rifai volunteered to shoot the short, inspiring film. In it, a dozen Ashland firefighters strut with Luke on top of a firetruck to Swift singing:
I never miss a beat, I'm lightning on my feet
I'm dancing on my own, I make the moves up as I go
It's like I got this music in my mind
Saying it's gonna be alright
Maybe Taylor Swift will never call Luke's home. But that's OK. He has work to do.
For now, the old Talk Buddy device is doing its job, helping Luke spread his message: "I came here to teach people about love and open people's hearts."
— Janet Eastman
jeastman@oregonian.com
503-799-8739
@janeteastmanNintendo's approach to indie games is changing, albeit slowly and methodically as is the company's way. Major titles like Don't Starve: Giant Edition (what Nintendo and the game's maker Klei are calling the "Definitive Edition") and Octodad: Dadliest Catch will soon be available for download on the eShop. Whether or not that's due to Sony's influence on the genre, Baker wouldn't say. But he maintains an indie push was always part of the strategy for the Wii U. The trouble was getting it done right -- the Nintendo way.
"I think what has changed is the learning process over time on what features and functionality that consumers gravitate towards; what are the things that the developers need to be successful on Nintendo platforms? And I think that's been a learning process because we certainly didn't have all the answers from the very beginning," Baker says.
Don't Starve: Giant Edition for Wii U is considered by developer Klei to be the 'definitive edition.'
He's not incorrect. During the Wii U's initial launch window, Little Inferno, the cute, quirky and critically acclaimed indie title, was present on the eShop. It was also an arguably better effort than Nintendo's own first-party titles available at the time as it made skillful use of the touchscreen GamePad. But because of how the eShop was programmed, not many players knew of its existence or merit. That's no longer the case, though. Baker says his team is now proactive in reaching out to select indie developers (or "Nindies," as the company calls them) so that Nintendo can work with them "hand in hand to create these effective marketing and messaging strategies so all of that quality rises to the top."
"Honestly, we don't hand out money. It's very rare that anything like that happens."
"One thing we do is we hold hands with the developers and a lot of this key content that is coming out to give them examples of best practices and simple things: how to create a fact sheet; how to create a trailer; how to create an optimum demo experience; how to write a press release," says Baker.
Nintendo's sudden public embrace of indie games could also help reverse an image problem that's long plagued the company: its purportedly poor relationship with third-party developers. Baker dismisses this notoriety as a misperception and insists that the situation is quite the opposite. "We actually have better relationships with our publishers and developers than we've ever had before," he says. "I mean, the people that work with us love working with us.... I think it's more of an assumption that we don't have the strongest relationships with our third-party partners."
Never Alone, a puzzle platformer created in collaboration with Alaska Natives the Iñupiat
Perhaps surprisingly, Nintendo does not mandate exclusivity -- even timed exclusives -- for indie developers that seek to publish on its platforms. "Honestly, we don't hand out money. It's very rare that anything like that happens," says Baker. What Nintendo does instead is start the conversation with developers early on and, depending on whatever release window is specified, offers advice as to what additional content or features could be added to the Wii U or 3DS versions to make it worth the investment.
"I think the angle that we take is, if we're not able to get a game for an exclusive window, than at least we would love to see exclusive features and functionality that you can only see on Wii U or Nintendo 3DS," says Baker.
Much of this, as far as the Wii U is concerned, comes in the form of second-screen enhancements. Don't Starve: Giant Edition is a great example of this, as the game now places the map on the GamePad's screen, as well as other unspecified enhancements. Baker says this is a direct result of Nintendo's mentorship. Once the company discovered that the patch to add a map was one of the most downloaded on Steam and PC, it strongly suggested Klei implement it as a GamePad function.
"We actually have better relationships with our publishers and developers than we've ever had before."
There's another key element to Nintendo's renewed indie focus: It helps plug the holes in Nintendo's first-party release schedule. "It is critical for Nintendo business to make sure that we are maintaining momentum in between all of those AAA releases," Baker says. "And the indie developers have found ways of leveraging that either through people coming in, in anticipation of a huge AAA release or coming in afterwards, after they've purchased it and they're seeing all of the other great content that's available."
Affordable Space Adventures, a side scroller that uses the GamePad as a 'Heads Down Display'
It may seem counterintuitive, but Baker says it actually makes sense for indie developers to release their games at or near the same time as a major Nintendo title. He chalks the success of this strategy up to discovery: When people flood the eShop in search of a recently released Nintendo first-party title, they're more likely to browse and make an impulsive second purchase. It's a behavior that has apparently helped boost sales of indie titles.
Not every Nindie is treated equally, however. Though Baker says that essentially any indie developer that works with Nintendo automatically assumes a licensed status, it's not an automatic seal of quality. The company is still very picky when it comes to eShop promotion. "Honestly, we have an open-door policy in terms of content," says Baker. "But if it's a lower-quality title, people are going to have to search for that. It's not something we are going to promote front and center in our eShop or through our channels."
Don't miss out on all the latest from GDC 2015! Follow along at our events page right here.The pair of former F1 drivers will race for the newly-formed 'Racing Team Nederland' squad, in what will be the Brazilian's first appearance at La Sarthe, together with team owner Fritz van Eerd.
Barrichello, however, is no stranger to endurance racing, having contested the Daytona 24 Hours three times and finishing runner-up in this year's race in a Wayne Taylor Racing-run Corvette DP.
For 1988 Le Mans winner Lammers, it will be his first appearance in the race since 2011, when he shared a LMP1 class Hope Racing Oreca-Zytek with Steve Zacchia and Caspar Elgaard.
"It’s a tremendous opportunity to do this with Rubens, really special," Lammers told Motorsport.com.
"We were looking at who would be available and who would be interested. I've known Rubens since I was 16, when he came to Europe. I contacted him and this is the result."
Testing for the new project has already begun at the Magny-Cours circuit in France ahead of an expected race debut at the ELMS curtain-raiser at Silverstone in April.
"We are regularly testing at Magny-Cours, and we have driven a lot with the LMP3 [Ligier raced in the Road to Le Mans race]," added Lammers.
"But that was more informal and we took part in pro-am races. Now we will be competing in the ELMS and the competition is from a higher level."
Jos Verstappen, father of Red Bull F1 driver Max, had planned to race alongside Lammers and van Eerd at Le Mans this year, but was unable to do so as the race clashed with the European Grand Prix at Baku.
Additional reporting by Tim BiesbrouckBre Payton at the Federalist has an excellent compilation of biased media reports about fired Google engineer James Damore’s viral memo, and the blatant dishonesty is enough to shock even those of us who have spent decades fighting liberal bias in journalism. Repeatedly, headlines mischaracterize Damore’s views as “anti-diversity” (despite his clearly stated support for diversity) and news articles falsely assert that Damore argued women were “genetically unsuited” (Washington Post) or “biologically unfit” (CNN) to work in high tech.
Are these journalists simply illiterate? Do they lack the reading comprehension skills necessary to understand what James Damore wrote? Or is it rather the case, as I believe, that feminist gender theory has attained the status of an official religion within academia and journalism, so that skeptics are excluded from employment in these fields? If all your professors are committed to Third Wave feminist ideology — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — and all your college-educated peers went through the same indoctrination program, wouldn’t you just assume that these beliefs were scientific truth? And this is the situation within the elite media establishment, which is effectively off-limits to anyone who suspects that there are natural differences between men and women.
This ideological echo-chamber effect is the result of deliberate discrimination against conservatives in academia and media. We have witnessed how the American higher education system has ceded control to those who act as Stalinist commissars in enforcing political conformity. In 2005, then-Harvard President Larry Summers suggested that “innate differences” between men and women might explain the relative scarcity of women among science and engineering faculty. Summers, a liberal economist who had served in the Clinton administration, merely offered “innate differences” as one possible explanation of this disparity, but this was enough to summon a firestorm of rage from campus feminists. Within a year, Summers was forced to resign, sacrificed to the Feminist Cult of Androgyny as a warning to anyone within academia who might ever dare to imply that men and women are different.
Harvard feminist mob protesting against Larry Summers in 2005.
Totalitarian regimes do not tolerate dissent, and feminist hegemony in higher education has had the effect of disseminating this totalitarian attitude throughout those fields where college education is a prerequisite to employment, including tech companies like Google.
What happened to James Damore is a repetition not only of what happened to Larry Summers, but also what happened to Charles Murray after the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994. Murray (and his co-author, Harvard psychology professor Richard Herrnstein, who unfortunately died of cancer just as the book went to press) were smeared as proponents of eugenics and neo-Nazi pseudo-science. Why? Because in documenting the socio-economic effects of differences in IQ, they highlighted the persistence of a ~15-point average difference in black/white IQ scores. Note the emphasis on the word “average.”
As a matter of public policy, liberals have no problem classifying people as members of groups (race, sex, nationality, religion, etc.) and calling attention to differences in socio-economic conditions between these groups. Liberals are constantly talking about these subjects, e.g., the “gender gap” in wages, or problems of poverty and crime in the black community, and proposing taxpayer-funded government “solutions” to statistical disparities between groups. What Murray and Herrnstein did in The Bell Curve was to examine the influence of intelligence in socio-economic “class structure.” Because of the widespread use of standardized testing since World War II, and the availability of financial aid to help low-income students attend college, Murray and Herrnstein showed, there has been a process of “cognitive partitioning” at work in American society for more than half a century.
To me, this was the most important revelation of The Bell Curve, and directly relevant to my personal experience. As a “gifted” student who rebelled against the public school regime and became a teenage dopehead, I had evaded the screening mechanisms that channel bright kids toward elite universities. Barely scraping through to get my high-school diploma, I never took the SAT, and enrolled at Jacksonville (Ala.) State University which at that time had an open-admissions policy. When I later took the ACT (required to enter JSU’s teacher-training program, which I considered as a career “fallback”) my junior year, I went to pick up my results at the registrar’s office and the staffer said: “Wow! With this score, you would have qualified for an honors scholarship.”
Getting “off-track” as a teenage dopehead had long-term consequences in my life, and in the lives of some of my hoodlum buddies who were likewise “gifted” underachievers. Those of my nerdy friends who managed to avoid the hoodlum lifestyle (or who, at least, didn’t go as far into teenage rebellion as I did) went off to Emory University or Berry College, and I even had one classmate who went to MIT. Meanwhile, I scrambled from job to job after college, and played in rock-and-roll bands, before finally getting into a journalism career at age 26. This experience gave me a sort of outsider perspective on “elite” culture that never really came into focus until I read The Bell Curve, where the first four chapters (pp. 29-115) are about “The Emergence of a Cognitive Elite” — and this has nothing to do with racial differences at all!
Take it from an ex-“gifted” student: Public education is the problem.
The system is fundamentally corrupt, a fact I recognized by age 12, but didn’t fully understand until I read The Bell Curve in my mid-30s.
Well, if you ever want to hear an hour-long sermon on what’s wrong with American public schools (namely everything), just ask me sometime. What is relevant to the subject of James Damore’s Google manifesto, however, is the way the smears against Damore replicate the way the media smeared Charles Murray more than 20 years ago. In addressing racial disparities in IQ — the so-called “test score gap” — Murray and Herrnstein repeatedly emphasize that this is about average group differences, and that the kind of statistics under discussion have no predictive value for any individual, no matter what his or her race.
Average group differences don’t tell us anything about whether a particular Chinese or Jewish or Mexican kid might become an engineer or an economist. However, these differences do matter when — as liberals habitually do — people start discussing socio-economic disparities as a problem in need of government policy solutions at taxpayer expense. America has erected a vast bureaucratic and legal establishment to enforce “equal opportunity” and “civil rights” that, in practice, involves a quota mentality in which statistical differences are interpreted as evidence of discrimination. This legal regime in turn provides lucrative opportunities for “diversity” consultants and creates phony jobs for people whose primary institutional role is to serve as representative tokens, e.g., Native American “woman of color” Elizabeth Warren.
BURN THIS MOTHERFUCKING SYSTEM TO THE GROUND!
Excuse my strong language, but that’s the dopehead hoodlum “smart take” on James Damore’s Google manifesto. Just once, when a Black Lives Matter protest turns into a race riot, I wish that instead of burning and looting private businesses, the urban mob would turn its anarchist fury against the local Board of Education or the teachers union.
Public schools are a scam run by the mediocre, for the mediocre. If you want to understand how thoroughly corrupt the system is, just research the percentage of public school teachers who send their own children to private schools. The perpetrators of the dishonest swindle that is American public education know damned well that the system is broken, and one of the ways they conceal this truth from the taxpaying public is by the make-believe charade of Equality and Diversity.
Repeatedly, there have been scandals of public school administrators faking standardized test results to maintain the fiction of Equality, as if every graduate of every high school in America was capable of doing college-level academic work. Because this myth of Equality is so vital to keep taxpayer money pumping into the corrupt education system, and because the Democrat Party is strongly allied with the teachers unions, every liberal in America is required to help promote the Equality myth which, at the collegiate level, takes the form of the Diversity myth. The alleged value of Diversity has been turned into an excuse for discrimination in admissions at elite universities, and has called into existence an enormous administrative bureaucracy to help maintain a Potemkin village illusion that the Gender Studies major at Harvard (or Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, etc.) is getting an education as demanding and as valuable as the student majoring in engineering or economics. Equality and Diversity are the slogans of a racket, a hustle, a three-card monte game that plays parents and taxpayers for chumps.
Oh, you can learn a few things as a teenage dopehead hoodlum that they don’t teach at Harvard, and one of them is how to spot a scam. Somehow, despite his Harvard education, James Damore managed to learn a few facts about biological differences between men and women, and also became aware of how the poisonous myth of Equality and Diversity has taken root in high-tech companies like Google, to the detriment of everyone except the kind of quota hustlers and ideological commissars who are employed to enforce conformity to this mythology.
The price Google pays for hiring extremely smart, well-read people: Some of them cut through the bullshit. https://t.co/B75YGNnMvZ — Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) August 5, 2017
When it is necessary to describe natural differences between men and women, as James Damore did in his instantly legendary memo, it is important to remember that we are talking about average group differences — the same point Murray and Herrnstein emphasized in The Bell Curve. The range of variation is such that to say, for instance, that “males have greater mathematical ability than females” (on average) doesn’t mean that every boy is destined to become a math whiz, or that women are doomed to fail in careers where mathematical aptitude is crucial. What average group differences do mean, however, is that when liberals start whining about a “gender gap” in STEM fields (as they have been doing for the past 15 years or so), they are describing a problem that is not necessarily a problem, and for which we are unlikely to find a solution, no matter how much legislation is enacted or how many lawsuits are filed. It is especially foolish to expect “solutions” to such (alleged) problems from the public school system, except in the form of indoctrination in the make-believe Potemkin village games by which the education establishment conceals its own failures.
The journalistic establishment has, as a result of the cognitive partitioning described in The Bell Curve, become hostage to the prejudices of the educational establishment. If the Best and Brightest students are all channeled into a comparative handful of elite universities, and if major media organizations look to these universities when hiring journalists, it is no surprise that most people in the news industry share the biases of elite university faculty. (A recent study of faculty voter registration found that, in departments of journalism and communications at 40 leading universities, Democrat professors outnumber Republicans 20-to-1.) So when journalists falsely smear James Damore, in the same way Charles Murray has been smeared for more than 20 years, we can see the very deep problem of bias produced by the symbiotic relationship between academia and media.
BURN THIS MOTHERFUCKING SYSTEM TO THE GROUND!
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CommentsArcheologists in Germany have an unlikely new hero: former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. They have nothing but praise for the cigar-smoking veteran Social Democratic politician.
Why? Because it was Schröder who, together with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, pushed through a plan to pump Russian natural gas to Western Europe. For that purpose, an embankment 440 kilometers (275 miles) long and up to 30 meters (100 feet) wide had to be created from Lubmin, a coastal resort town in northeastern Germany, to Rehden in Lower Saxony near the northwestern city of Bremen.
The result has been a veritable cornucopia of ancient discoveries. The most beautiful find was made in the Gessel district of Lower Saxony, where 117 pieces of gold were found stacked tightly together in a rotten linen cloth. The hidden treasure is about 3,300 years old.
The 1.8 kilograms (4 pounds) of gold, which was found in a field, consists of some jewelry, but primarily spirals of gold wire, which are tied together in chains consisting of 10 spirals each. This isn't jewelry, but an ancient form of gold bullion.
Traveling the Continent
When Johanna Wanka, the Lower Saxony science minister, unveiled the treasure to the press in February, the story became even more surprising. She explained that testing done at the University of Hanover had revealed that the gold had come from a mine in Central Asia.
"Using a mass spectrometer, we examined more than 20 trace elements, allowing us to determine the fingerprint of the metal," explains chemist Robert Lehmann. "The gold vein must have been created deep in the mountains of Kazakhstan, Afghanistan or Uzbekistan over a period of millions of years."
Lower Saxony can now consider itself the owner of what Wanka calls the "find of the century." Merchants trading in luxury goods used to travel across the entire continent, says state archeologist Henning Hassmann. "Trips of 10,000 kilometers were nothing to them."
He suspects that the gold found in Gessel was initially brought in caravans from the mountains to the nearby Indus Valley, where a giant riparian culture flourished until about 1,800 B.C. From there, says Hassmann, the merchandise was sent by ship to Mesopotamia and, after that, somehow reached the northern flatlands.
'Pretty Bold'
But is that really the right explanation? Not everyone has faith in Lehmann's analysis of the gold. Some say that, despite the advanced testing equipment at his disposal, Lehmann is "inexperienced." Ernst Pernicka, an archeologist who studies ancient metallurgical processes in the southwestern city of Tübingen -- known for his groundbreaking metal studies on the famous Nebra sky disk -- calls Lehmann's conclusions "highly speculative."
Because almost nothing is known about ancient mining in Central Asia, Lehmann could only compare the Gessel find with a few Scythian gold coins. To arrive at such ambitious theories on the basis of such scant facts is "pretty bold," says Gregor Borg, an expert on gold deposits at the University of Halle in eastern Germany.
Despite the criticism, Lehmann remains undeterred, noting his use of first-class equipment. With these devices, he says, he can also perform confocal white-light microscopy and laser ablation ICP mass spectrometry. "We're counting individual atoms here," he says.
Who is right?
The Asia Connection
As audacious as the Asia connection seems, it could be true. There is plenty of evidence that human greed led to globalized trade more than 3,000 years ago. The ancient Egyptians' folding-chair designs reached Sweden, and magnificent Spondylus shells from the Mediterranean have been found as far away as Bavaria.
Valuable metals such as tin, copper, gold and silver were a favorite among long-distance traders, who dragged them across the continent in rucksacks or on oxcarts. Ötzi the Iceman, a natural mummy found in the Ötztal Alps, probably traded in gold and flint, and was murdered in the process.
But did the merchants' extensive trading networks reach as far as the remote mines in Central Asia as long ago as the 2nd century B.C.? It certainly would have been worthwhile. A massive gold-and-tin belt extends from the Altai Mountains to the Aral Sea. A prehistoric gold mine, the largest in the central Caucasus region, was also recently discovered in Armenia.
This could explain the origins of the myth of the Argonauts, who in the story sail through the Black Sea to steal the Golden Fleece.
Whether the treasure found inland from the North Sea coast truly originated in the faraway steppes remains disputable for now. Lehmann has invited his critics to attend a presentation in Hanover on July 13, when he intends to elucidate the details of his research. "It will be a closed meeting," he says.
Apparently Lehmann doesn't want anyone to lose face in the dispute over the prehistoric gold.Mee was adjudged to have fouled in the box when he found the net with a header
Promotion contenders Burnley and Ipswich failed to capitalise on defeat for second-placed Derby as they played out a goalless draw at Turf Moor.
The Rams, who lost to Championship leaders Middlesbrough, remain six points clear of Sean Dyche's side and seven clear of Town.
The Clarets thought they had taken the lead just before half-time but Ben Mee's header was ruled out for a foul.
Andre Gray also went close with a couple of shots for the hosts.
Ryan Fraser and Freddie Sears both had decent chances for Mick McCarthy's Ipswich side in a game lacking excitement.
Fraser's chance came early in the game, when he fired just wide with a ferocious shot after a driving run.
Gray then went close at the other end when he fired just wide after being found in the box by Michael Kightly.
Five minutes before the break the Clarets thought they had gone ahead when Mee headed into the net but the goal was disallowed as he was adjudged to have fouled his marker.
Gray had another good opportunity to open the scoring immediately after the restart when he latched on to Sam Vokes' flick-on but he fired straight at Dean Gerken from a tight angle.
Kightly also went close when he fired just over following a teasing run before Freddie Sears broke into the box at the other end but his shot was blocked by Michael Keane.
Burnley manager Sean Dyche:
"It was a tight game. We've had the best chance, and then a couple of maybe better chances, but it was a tight affair against a side who've just won five on the trot away from home.
"We did well with all the first balls, second contact, the ugly side of the game. But coming off two 4-0 wins and getting another clean sheet - that side of the game is pleasing.
"I didn't think it was a foul for Ben Mee's goal, and it doesn't look like it on the monitor afterwards."
Ipswich boss Mick McCarthy:
"I think it was a great game, it was a tough game. The marker was made on the very first challenge and it continued until the 90th minute.
"It was two teams who were really competitive, neither were going to give an inch.
"There weren't a lot of chances, two or three shots Tom Heaton's had to save, but they've gone straight down his neck. I'd take a 0-0 draw, I think it is probably fair."Photographer Nicolas Bruno spends his days like the rest of us, but his nights are very different. And terrifying. 22 year-old Nicolas has been suffering from sleep paralysis for 7 years now, which means that he experiences his nightmares more vividly than regular sleepers.
Sleep paralysis is a condition that happens when we are about to enter rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. In it, our bodies paralyze themselves to stop us from acting out our dreams, but Bruno’s mind is awake and experiencing horrific hallucinations. This forced him into insomnia and depression: “I thought I was possessed by demons,” he said.
Everything changed when one high school teacher suggested he should document these terrors. He has been battling his fears with photography ever since. “This project has gifted me a sense of who I am,” he said. “It gave me the strength to persevere in life, to create art and speak to people. It gifted me art, and I don’t know where I would be without it.”
More info: nicolasbrunophotography.com | Facebook | Instagram (h/t: cnn, lostateminor)
Watch the video belowREVENUE seized more cannabis in the first eight months of 2017 than coke, heroin, and ecstasy combined over the past three years.
Dope worth €49million was nabbed from January to August at our ports, airports and postal depots.
Alamy 2 Ireland’s marijuana trade is booming and pushers struggle to keep up with the demand for the green stuff
Ireland’s marijuana trade is booming, with more shipments intercepted this year than in 2015 and 2016 combined.
Revenue grabbed €12.4m worth of cannabis in 2015 and €15.4m in 2016, taking the total for the past three years to €77m — more than three times the amount of cocaine and heroin confiscated.
Officials have nabbed €19.9m of coke and smack across the past three years and €8.9m worth of amphetamines, ecstasy and other tablets.
This year’s multi-million-euro bump in cannabusiness at Ireland’s borders shows Revenue are hitting crims where it hurts as pushers struggle to keep up with the demand for the green stuff.
Getty - Contributor 2 Cannabis is the most seized drug by revenue in Ireland
Fianna Fail believes the spike in interceptions highlights the need to address “Ireland’s crippling drug problems”.
Spokesman Jack Chambers TD said: “Gardai, Revenue and the other agencies deserve credit for these huge seizures. However, the figures also suggest gangs are attempting to smuggle more drugs into the country than ever before and for every successful seizure, drugs worth millions of euro are making their way onto the streets and destroying lives.
“The key to addressing Ireland’s crippling drugs problems is to develop the necessary supports and properly resourced treatment services to tackle addiction and deprivation.”My friend lives mostly on his own, so can't have a cheese party, and does not want the neighbors finding out about this cheese anyway so cannot invite them. He can't eat it all in this time for health reasons (18 pounds). There are no food banks nearby he can donate to, and moving the cheese is problematic anyway (though not impossible). He can cook, though not to a great extent. It would be a shame for this cheese to just be disposed of; what else could he do with it? Are there recipes that can use up 18 pounds of cheese and transform it into (preferably) foodstuff that are not cheese-centric?
For complicated / irrelevant reasons a friend has suddenly acquired 18 pounds of Red Leicester cheese. It is good quality. However (again, complicated reasons) the cheese must be moved, used or transformed into something else within the next 72 hours or so.Sometimes even if you like who you are, you wonder what it would be like to be someone or something else. In this new page, Granville and Caitlin reflect on what might have been if they were born into another social class or another color.
There will be more new fan art later this month and it is GREAT!
As most of you know, I will be re-launching my crowdfunding campaign to fund a printing of issue 3 with a stretch goal to print issue 4. The debate right now is whether to use Kickstarter or Indiegogo as the platform. Many of you might not be aware of the phenomena called “Kicktrolling” where a backer bids at a high level then withdraws their money right before the end of the campaign or disputes the charge during the two week time period Amazon processes the money. Which means the creator is still responsible for paying fees for money they did not receive. You can read more about it at THE BEAT.
Have a good week!The main difference between the two is that the Vancouver cops said they borrowed their device from Canada's equivalent to the FBI, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Edmonton's police service, however, actually owns a Stingray, which could cost anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit.
As Micheal Vonn, the policy director of BC Civil Liberties Association, told Motherboard: "We have to assume, having made this investment, that they've used it more than once." Vonn's non-profit org thought only the RCMP owns Stingrays in the country, which they then loan to local law enforcement. That's clearly not the case.
Stingrays mimic cell towers to force all phones in an area to connect to it. The device can then obtain identifying information from phones and SIM cards, as well as people's locations and carriers. Newer models can even intercept and record voice calls and texts. Stingray has many critics, because you can't program it to target only persons of interest or suspects -- it gathers info from everyone in an area, even those who have nothing to do with the case under investigation.Isabelle D'Antonio was home for the summer when she read the obituary of the Central Florida Future.
After 48 years, the UCF student newspaper was shutting down, a business decision made by its owner Gannett, a news media company.
"I was really upset," said D'Antonio, a 20-year-old journalism student |
engaged.”
New York launched its strategy in four districts in 2011, and has now expanded to 27. In the 2014-15 cycle, councillors earmarked $1-2 million from their discretionary funds for participatory budgeting, for a total of $32 million across the city. Over 51,000 New Yorkers cast ballots for initiatives like new parks, sidewalk repair and a mobile food pantry.
Paris, in turn, has embraced the practice so enthusiastically that city council passed a by-law that requires the municipality to allocation a portion of its annual expenditures for participatory budgeting. This year, Paris council allotted €75 million, up substantially from the €20 million in 2014 when the city funded €1m for “learning gardens” in primary schools and €1.5m to use abandoned areas around the city’s ring road for exhibitions. In 2015, Paris will direct half of its participatory budgeting allotment to “city projects” and divide the other half between the 20 city districts, with poorer areas like Belleville-Menilmontant (part of the 20th arrondisement) and Pigalle (on the border of the 9th and the 18th arrondissement) awarded more funding.
The Toronto experiment
In Toronto, the City Manager’s Office moved to pilot this approach using existing staff resources after City Council approved the plan last February. Throughout the summer, city staff hosted dozens of meetings to inform residents about the cost implications of each project, and the potential benefits for their neighbourhood. A list of resident-selected projects is now available on the city’s website. Anyone 14 years or over and who lives in the pilot areas may apply through the city website to vote on participatory budgeting projects.
In the past two weeks, Oakridge neighbours decided to fund lighting, water fountains, and bench improvements in two of its parks. Over 400 residents voted in Ward 33 for a Don Valley Fitness Park, bike lockers near Don Mills Subway Station, and the Brian Village Gateway Project. Councillor Frank Di Giorgio’s office, meanwhile, considered the Rustic pilot “a great success,” with more people coming out to vote than showed up to for the consultations. A third-party consultant is studying all three PB pilots and will report to City Council when it revisits the experiment in November.
Toronto has looked at variations of participatory budgeting before. In 2004, then-Mayor David Miller introduced “Listening to Toronto,” public consultations to inform residents about the budgeting process and hear their views. But the initiative lasted just two years and did not enable participants to actually make budget decisions. Yet Toronto Community Housing has a long track record with this kind of decision-making, offering tenants the opportunity to vote on improvement projects since 2001. This year, TCHC allotted a whopping $8 million for tenants to decide on improvements to public safety, laundry facilities and playgrounds.
A few individual councillors have also pursued their own projects. Last year, Councillor Shelley Carroll (Don Valley East) used a variation of participatory budgeting to help allocate community development funds in her ward. She believes that this idea is a panacea for Toronto’s “age of disgruntlement.” Mayor John Tory agrees, saying the pilot is a thoughtful and direct way for residents to tell City Hall what matters to them. In a quote submitted by email, Mayor Tory advised Spacing that participatory budgeting “will lead to residents getting more involved in their community and working together to create a better Toronto.”
Besides such high-minded goals, participatory budgeting may help re-elect politicians who adopt the practice, according to Paolo Spada, Democracy Fellow for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at University of British Columbia. But, he cautions, there are no commonly accepted metrics for evaluating how well participatory budgeting works. He says it is initially difficult to measure whether this technique is merely “window dressing” or meaningfully transforms the process by which budget decisions are made. Spada believes that genuine participatory budgeting is very successful at engaging residents to discuss and decide matters of local importance, but that people generally won’t turn up if their participation doesn’t lead to anything.
A real change to local participation in Toronto?
Oakridge and Rustic are both Neighbourhood Improvement Areas, meaning their “equity score” — a number based on indicators such as health, economics, political participation and education — is low. Selecting them to be part of the PB pilot suggests the city is making a genuine effort to move beyond the existing project-brokering process between councillors, local groups and city staff to listen to voices that generally aren’t heard. As Lerner says of New York’s approach, “Equity is baked into the history of it. Participatory budgeting has tended to engage low-income and marginalized communities the most, when governments partner with community organizations and prioritize outreach and organizing.”
Lerner, who informally advised Toronto officials, says the city should invest more in order to generate meaningful response. Indeed, short-changing Toronto’s experiment could hobble it from the start. Carroll says that few people in her ward seem to even know that the PB pilot is taking place even though staff are working hard to promote it. She thinks that interest will increase as more power is given over to the community to become “champions” of particular ideas. According to Councillor Frank DiGiorgio’s staff, citizens in Rustic are not highly engaged; in this neighbourhood, the pilot’s measure of success will be leveraging more participation overall. Carroll believes the pilot will have worked if community members ask that it be repeated.
Voting results in September may well determine the future of PB in Toronto. Spada says that Toronto’s pilot is more akin to a small grant program given the negligible amount dedicated to projects, but believes it could be a promising start: “PB might lead to a serious increase in engagement similar to what has happened in NYC. Many will look at Toronto to see how it develops over time given it is one of the first pilots in Canada.”
Residents will ultimately need to be convinced that this idea isn’t just business as usual when it comes to the city soliciting public input. They’ll need to see that they are new actors in a previously closed policy-making space, making decisions with teeth.
Alexandra Flynn is an urban law and policy guru. She is currently an Osgoode Hall PhD candidate and adjunct professor. You can follow Alexandra on Twitter: @alexandraeflynn
photo by KMR PhotosThe Second Circuit has released its long-awaited opinion in Capitol Records v. Vimeo, fully vindicating Vimeo’s positions. EFF along with a coalition of advocacy groups, submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, supporting Vimeo.
The Second Circuit considered three important issues. First, whether a service provider could rely on the DMCA safe harbor when it came to pre-1972 sound recordings. Second, whether evidence of Vimeo employees watching certain well-known songs was enough to create “red flag” knowledge that the videos were infringing. And third, whether Vimeo was “willfully blind” to infringement occurring on its service.
For each of these issues, the Second Circuit ruled for Vimeo.
The DMCA Safe Harbor Applies to Pre-1972 Sound Recordings
In an important decision, the court held that the DMCA safe harbors apply to pre-1972 sounds recordings.
Pre-1972 sound recordings, “for reasons not easily understood,” are not subject to federal copyright laws, but instead are governed by a patchwork of state laws that provide varying degrees of protections and rights. Because these recordings fall under state law, the labels, relying on a supporting opinion from the Copyright Office, argued that the DMCA also did not apply.
The Second Circuit rejected the labels’ and the Copyright Office’s argument. It based its decision on the statutory text of the DMCA, which was supported by the policy goals the DMCA was intended to achieve. Specifically:
To construe § 512(c) as leaving service providers subject to liability under state copyright laws for postings by users of infringements of which the service providers were unaware would defeat the very purpose Congress sought to achieve in passing the statute. Service providers would be compelled either to incur heavy costs of monitoring every posting to be sure it did not contain infringing pre-1972 recordings, or incurring potentially crushing liabilities under state copyright laws. It is not as if pre-1972 sound recordings were sufficiently outdated as to render the potential liabilities insignificant.
Some Employees Watching “Recognizable” Videos Isn’t Enough to Create Red Flag Knowledge
In reaffirming Viacom v. YouTube, the Second Circuit clarified that the “reasonable person” standard incorporated into the red flag knowledge standard was an ordinary person, not someone with specialized knowledge of copyright law or music. The Second Circuit also clarified that the burden of showing red flag knowledge is on copyright holder, not on the service provider claiming the protections of the DMCA. That is:
[A] showing by plaintiffs of no more than that some employee of Vimeo had some contact with a user-posted video that played all, or nearly all, of a recognizable song is not sufficient to satisfy plaintiffs’ burden of proof that Vimeo forfeited the safe harbor by reason of red flag knowledge with respect to that video.
The Second Circuit sent this part of the case back to the district court to determine whether the plaintiffs could “point to evidence sufficient to carry [plaintiffs’] burden of proving that Vimeo personnel either knew the video was infringing or knew facts making that conclusion obvious to an ordinary person who had no specialized knowledge of music or the laws of copyright.” If the plaintiffs can’t show that, Vimeo can’t be said to have “red flag” knowledge of infringement.
Vimeo Was Not Willfully Blind
Finally, the Second Circuit upheld the lower court’s finding that Vimeo was not willfully blind to infringement on its platform, so as to remove DMCA safe harbor protections. The rightsholders had argued that Vimeo was willfully blind to infringement based on three facts: Vimeo monitored videos for infringement of video content (but not audio content); Vimeo had a duty to investigate further once it learned facts that made would make it suspicious of infringement; and Vimeo itself encouraged infringement, thus couldn’t “close its eyes” to resulting infringement.
Each of these arguments was rejected by the Second Circuit. The Court held that (1) there was no duty to monitor for infringement, (2) that suspicion of infringement wasn’t enough unless infringement was obvious, and (3) a few sporadic videos out of millions where Vimeo employees “inappropriately” encouraged users to post infringing videos was insufficient to remove the DMCA safe harbor protections, especially where the videos did not relate to the videos at issue in the lawsuit.
The Second Circuit's finding that Vimeo didn't have a duty to investigate is important and essential to an open Internet that includes user-generated content. A duty to investigate would place a significant burden on small companies and non-commercial hosts, making it less likely that a new company could compete with those already entrenched in the market, or a non-commercial host can survive. More broadly, however, we're concerned about how often companies get hauled into court to challenge their safe harbors or worse. This ruling protects Vimeo, but it is disappointing that it took several years, and surely several million dollars, to get there.Colgate freshman Nathan Harries has been denied a year of eligibility for playing in an unsanctioned church league, but the school is appealing because the case is a little more complicated than it would initially appear.
Harries, who averaged 17.6 points as a senior at Atlanta's Centennial High School, spent the past two years on a Mormon mission in Raleigh, N.C.
Last summer, upon his return home, he played three games in a league at Dunwoody Baptist Church. That would violate an NCAA rule that stipulates that athletes who do not enroll immediately after graduating from high school will be penalized one year of eligibility for every academic year they participate in organized competition (which includes an official score and referees).
Colgate asked for a waiver, which was denied, and is now appealing the decision. The subcommittee handling the appeal was expected to meet this week.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first reported the story.
At issue are the amount of games Harries participated in -- just three as a fill-in -- and the legitimacy of the league, made up mostly of older men trying to stay in shape.
"It's like an old man's league," Michael Harries told the Journal-Constitution. "I could play in it."
Colgate coach Matt Langel refused comment, citing the pending appeal.
There is precedent for winning the appeal. Earlier this year, Middle Tennessee State football player Steven Rhodes was initially denied eligibility as a freshman because he participated in several recreational games while serving in the Marines. Middle Tennessee argued that the league was a glorified intramural league and hardly qualified as an organized league.
The NCAA ultimately reversed its decision.Here Liam Whitton writes about his admiration for writer-director Joss Whedon
There are few bigger names in entertainment today than Joss Whedon, who steered Marvel’s The Avengers to box office record-breaking success in 2012.
For his fans, this day was inevitable. Many of us had watched — or in my case, grown up on — Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and knew as early as then what a remarkable talent Joss Whedon was.
What was also apparent to many, although perhaps many wouldn’t know it by name, was the extraordinary humanist quality to Buffy, and which can be found throughout Whedon’s work.
An obvious theme in Whedon’s work is the empowerment of women. But Whedon’s feminism is only a constituent piece of his larger, more encompassing humanist philosophy. Buffy, crudely summarised, is about a young woman with supernatural strength and physical attributes who fights the forces of evil. What elevated the show above its television forebears and contemporaries, and which continues to make it a seminal work of TV-as-art, is the programme’s relentless focus on the inner lives of its characters. The writers on the show were told to write with one question in mind: how does Buffy feel? From this spawned a rich show of complex characters encountering philosophical problems as often as social ones, making some of the most fully realised drama in all of fiction, and spawning an entire academic sub-field known as ‘Buffy studies’.
Whedon’s other themes are capitalism and greed, as explored largely in Angel, Dollhouse, and the comic book Fray; the fundamental dignity that comes with personhood, explored through Dawn and Connor in Buffy and Angel and as the central premise of the show Dollhouse; and secular explorations of redemption, as seen in all of his shows, where characters who have done terrible things attempt to make amends for their actions, and all learn in various ways that redemption is never finished, and that simple human compassion motivates the most profound and honest sacrifices.
Andrew West has written for HumansitLife about his love of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry before, and BHA Chief Executive Andrew Copson has written admiringly of Roddenberry as well. Star Trek‘s popularity with humanists is partially rooted in its optimism for the human race, and its almost Utopian depiction of a universe where the Humanism Roddenberry so passionately felt has motivated humankind to explore, develop rational scepticism, and foster cooperation, all to great success. And I myself have written on Doctor Who‘s humanist themes, particularly in the form of its non-human main character the Doctor, a firebrand humanist with one advantage the rest of us don’t have — he knows much more than we do about the world (which is often used to justify the show’s forays into fairly fantastical heights of speculative fiction). But neither of these programmes achieve what Joss Whedon has consistently done throughout his work, which is to present Humanism and explore its implications in a world where essential human problems share the scale of epics.
Whedon’s worlds are alive with Humanism despite these worlds often not being humanistic or physical materialist in conception. In Buffy and Angel, the characters confront monsters, demons, witches, and deities, and accept that these things exist. They have a good reason to believe these things exist which we do not: in Buffy and Angel they really do. The ‘soul’ is a major plot device in both those shows as well, as it accounts in a nebulous and nonspecific way for the presence of morality. An early Angel episode, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin,’ even suggests that the absence of a ‘soul’ explains true human psychopathy. Yet as both those shows go on, Whedon becomes increasingly interested in using the supernatural framework of the show for exploring the human problems we all really face, and to advocate the evidence-based and compassion-led approach to ethics we should be using to make decisions our daily lives.
From the beginning, Buffy used the supernatural to generously provide metaphors for all manner of social issues. Often the personal struggles of a character would be reflected in those of the monster of the week, or some atrocity in a character’s past would contain meaningful wisdom the audience could apply to another person’s present-day dilemma. Good fiction has long done this: the most successful novels take a chosen theme and stretch it into every line of dialogue, every visual motif, make their pages blossom with insight into the world. With cinema and theatre, the visual and textual have long been aligned in this effort, but until Buffy, television was a odd-man-out, a place for episodic dramas about buddy cops and the like. Buffy itself quickly moved from ‘high school’ themes to more mature ones. Season one’s ‘Invisible Girl’ provides a fairly mundane example of this: high school social alienation (and the fact that Sunnydale High sits above a Hellmouth) literally makes a shy girl turn invisible. By its later seasons, Buffy was commenting on the same theme with all the deftness of a poet.
Buffy‘s most fantastical and high-concept episodes are probably season four’s ‘Hush’ and season six’s ‘Once More, With Feeling,’ a silent episode and a musical respectively. The musical television episode had been pioneered for the modern age with Xena: Warrior Princess (several times in fact) before then, but it was ‘Once More, With Feeling’ which set the bar for TV concept episodes to come. In both ‘Hush’ and ‘Once More, With Feeling,’ Whedon’s characters, who are otherwise known for their verbal dexterity and linguistic playfulness, struggle to express themselves. In ‘Hush,’ they fail to articulate and say what they truly mean, and gradually find through the silence which has enveloped Sunnydale that in fact, language can be a barrier to honest communication; a hindrance rather than a tool. When the silence ends, Buffy and her boyfriend Riley sit in awkward silence, failing to at all express what they truly feel. In ‘Once More, With Feeling,’ subtle characterisation and running plot threads in the character’s emotional lives come to the surface when the people of Sunnydale find themselves living in a musical. For all their exposed personal dilemmas, Buffy’s is the greatest, and it is the tortured character of Spike who must remind Buffy (through song) of her reason for living, despite her life-as-hell experience with severe depression:
Life’s not a song
Life isn’t bliss
Life is just this
It’s living
You’ll get along
The pain that you feel
You only can heal
By living
You have to go on living
…echoing Buffy’s own advice to her sister Dawn, in the previous season. You see, Buffy’s depressed in season six because she died, went to Heaven, and came back against her will. But her realisation in the season five finale ‘The Gift’ was that her love of her sister was a gift, and to sacrifice herself to save her sister’s life was her personal privilege. ‘Death is your gift,’ Buffy was told prophetically earlier in the season. She struggled to understand what that meant, if anything, before later arriving at a subtler understanding of life and death, and how one cannot have true meaning without the other. A humanist message in itself. ‘The hardest thing in this world is to live in it,’ Buffy counsels Dawn. Even in the supernatural world of Buffy, Whedon systematically undermines the supernatural to force the characters to explore the world as we ourselves face it.
The best example of this is in Buffy’s sister show Angel, when the beloved character Winifred ‘Fred’ Burkle dies in ‘A Hole in the World.’ The literal hole of that episode aside, which was a actual cavity running end to end through the Earth, the central ‘hole’ encountered was an emotional one for the characters as Fred died, possessed and eaten out from the inside by the ancient demon Illyria. In the ensuing episode ‘Shells,’ remembering Buffy’s aforementioned resurrection, Angel travels the world looking for a quick fix to the problem, before learning that Fred’s ‘soul’ was ‘consumed in the fires of Illyria’s resurrection.’ The hole in their world then becomes that much deeper, and I remember being 14 at the time it aired and really being hit powerfully for the first time by the reality and permanence of death. It made Buffy’s sacrifice (which for her, was to an unknown end) carry the same weight in subsequent rewatchings, and deepened my admiration for non-religious people who risk their lives for the good of others. It also reminds me of the Greek proverb: ‘A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.’
Another example of the undermining of religious supernaturalism in Buffy is that ‘Heaven’ is probably just another alternate dimension (called ‘hell dimensions’) of the infinite number which exist in the the show’s multiverse: merely an especially benign type of the world, among many more of infinite horror, and several others such as the World Without Shrimp and the World With Nothing But Shrimp. When the character Cordelia goes to one such heavenly dimension in Angel, she finds it is simply inconsolably boring, and later the characters learn that the heavenly beings behind Cordelia’s ascension are really just as nasty as the demons they typically encounter down on Earth — except relentlessly mean-spirited in their pursuit of a bigger-picture, consequentialist ‘good’, providing a healthy rejoinder to that Christian maxim that ‘God works in mysterious ways.’ In Angel, gods work in mysterious ways because they’re dicks. Or rather, because sometimes people are. Angel‘s deities are just another set or kind of fallible people, and in Whedon’s world, the bigger and tougher of us always face greater propensity to be bullies.
For all she’s seen, Buffy remains an agnostic atheist: unconvinced that the supernaturalism of her world means anything. Not that it’s mentioned much; it’s sort of inconsequential to her life of kicking butt and stopping evil. ‘The jury’s out,’ she says, when asked if there’s a (Judeo-Christian conception of) ‘God’ early on in season two.
Whedon’s later series Dollhouse is very much rooted within a materialist universe like the one we really live in, and is as much as anything else about human corruptibility, and mankind’s negative traits, including (through a science fiction lens) the world of prostitution, sex trafficking, organised crime, and how badly we treat the mentally ill, the disabled, and the less fortunate. Unlike Buffy and Angel, there is no ‘soul,’ no secret sauce to the human experience outside of our material bodies. We can be uploaded, downloaded, altered all through changes to the electrochemical states of our brains, as new hardware allows brains to be treated like hard drives for minds. And yet even so, as main character Echo goes on, she cobbles together a personhood formed from fragmentary fictional and borrowed identities which is just as valuable and ‘real’ as any of the ‘real’ people with real personalities she encounters. When humankind is given greater power and propensity to abuse, humankind abuses it (which is perhaps the show’s sole environmentalist message), but even so, it is only people — in all their diversities — who can champion and stand up for all that is good in the world, too.
They do so in spite of impossible odds. In Angel season four, the character of Gunn is told that by a shady character that higher powers manipulate their lives to such a degree that their active choices carry little weight; he presents a free will problem we’ve probably all thought of before. We’re all shaped by forces outside of ourselves. Some big, some small. Can free will exist in a deterministic universe? Gunn makes, as best he can, a passionate plea that our choices still matter. Like Sam Harris would say, even in a world without free will, we can still find meaning in our lives, and make our decisions count.
Similarly, in season two’s ‘Epiphany,’ Angel, who spends much of his long life on one crusade or another, always reaching for the grand gesture which will redeem him in his own eyes and in the eyes of others, reflects on finding meaning in a universe with no ‘cosmic plan’, and no certainty. He concludes, in his titular epiphany, which is presented as a milestone for the character’s development:
If there’s no great glorious end to all this, [and] if nothing we do matters… then all that matters is what we do.
It’s really no surprise that Angel’s ‘mission statement’, and the character’s last words (which closed out Angel‘s five-year run) are ‘Let’s go to work.’ Whedon symbolically had Buffy repeat the line in the concluding issue of Buffy‘s first canonical comic book season five years later, reflecting the fact that these two heroes are united by the same basic purpose. They separately arrive at the conclusion that your good work is never finished. Good work is their shared duty simply because it needs doing; no more, no less. Whedon’s characters are unlikely ever to arrive at the paradisiacal future of Star Trek, or the easy happy endings which characterise Doctor Who, but still they continue, hoping to plant oak trees for future generations.
Unlike Roddenberry’s vision, in which humankind has on the whole shown its best possible face, the characters in Dollhouse face the fullest extremes of human deplorability and summon up the strength to fight it with the only weapon they have: their humanity. (That and advanced fighting skills.) In Whedon’s shows, religion is not the enemy of Humanism, but nor is it really on the agenda (or of any interest) to any of its crypto-humanists. Instead, they are tackling the world in all its complexity and all its difficulties, across dimensions of class, creed, (species,) gender, and health. Whedon depicts the world at its worst and people at their best. And when they’re at the best, they’re grappling with the world as it really is, in all its difficulty and strangeness, and still finding the strength and motivation to go on in their Humanism.There are times when I sit in amazement as the Federal Government grows and grows in size and scope. And just when I think there has to be some pause in the growth of this beast, yet another entitlement program is proposed.
Yesterday, it was announced that the Federal Government was increasing the number of IRS agents to investigate you and I.
Obama is hiring 800 more IRS agents.
[link edited for length]
President Obama anounced today that he is going to “fundamentally change our approach to unemployment in this country”.
Now we have the Department of Education combining efforts with the Department of Labor to make it easier for the unemployed (nearly 9% and rising despite the continued hiring by the Federal Government) to receive Pell Grants up to $5350 for training and education. Pell Grants are not paid back, as student loans are. Pell Grants will become yet another way to redistrubute wealth from those that have produced it.
http://www.breitbart.com/
In addition, the Obama Administration is pressuring states to rewrite their unemployment laws so that instead of searching for a job to continue receiving benefits, you can go to school and continue receiving the benefits. If this plan makes it to fruition, we will have seen established the entitlement to be paid by the government while going to school.Obama calls the rules that do not allow you to collect unemployment while going to school and not looking for a job “senseless”.
I ask you when will you have seen enough? When will you begin to believe that the only objective is a socialized America?
Do we sit back and allow the Federal Government to create such disarray in the private sector, then “rescue” people from that disarray by more and more government intervention? Are we unable to see that this path only has one destination: Socialism.
Today's employment numbers speak volumes about where we are headed. Government hired the most people in April. The rest of the economy continues to shrink as the business environment continues to deteriorate. Those left in business will be forced to pay more to support more as they earn less.
Then we are told that things are going to be better soon. Once again, I ask what is happening in the economy that is making the business environment more likely to improve? More regulation, more taxes, and higher labor costs are on the way. Do you really believe that by increasing the burden on the private sector economy that we are going to improve the economic conditions here? I do not think so.
Quarterly corporate earnings are down. Way down. You hear in the media that they are beating estimates. But to beat an estimate that is 1/2 of what last year's quarterly earnings is not an indicator of an improving economy. It only tells you the analysts are about as accurate as the weather man, and that neither are paid on the basis of their accuracy.
I have taken the time to go through ValueLine and compare the most recent quarterly earnings for corporations versus their earnings a year ago.
Here are the results by sectors from companies profiled recently in ValueLine:
Electrical Equipment: Up 4 Down 14
Electronics: Up 5 Down 20
Semiconductor: Up 4 Down 30
Semiconductor Equipment: Up 0 Down 15
Computer & Peripherals: Up 7 Down 19
Office Equipment & Supplies: Up1 Down 9
Food Processing: Up 19 Down 19
Grocery Stores: Up 5 Down 4
Food Wholesalers: Up 3 Down 3
Manufactured Housing: Up 0 Down 4
Entertainment Technology: Up 3 Down 13
Reinsurance: Up 2 Down 6
Machinery: Up 11 Down 40
Diversified Companies: Up 8 Down 24
(If you want more information on the analysis above, let me know. This is my own grunt work through the pages of Value Line)
The only sectors up are food and groceries. Why? We are eating at home more often.
Now we are going to sit back and watch people collect unemployment while they are not looking for work? Have you seen enough of where we are heading? Or is it too late?
What are your thoughts? Are you ready to subsidize your fellow citizens as they borrow even more funds to go to school while collecting unemployment?
Or are you asking yourself how you can join their ranks, collect unemployment, borrow some money from the government, and go back to school.
Are you ready to shrug? I am.Bush Admits U.S. 'learning as we go' in Iraq, Afghanistan
President Bush admitted during his commencement address at the Air Force Academy last week that "we're learning as we go" in the Afghanistan and Iraq rebuilding efforts. Bush also drew what many historians say is an oversimplified parallel between the current Iraq quagmire and World War II, saying that "In Germany and Japan, the work of rebuilding took place in relative quiet." Sam Brannen, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Associated Press that Bush's analogy between World War II and today is "patently false," because the stateless enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq "are not accountable to the same command-and-control structures that existed in Japan and Germany." Bush also claimed "the only way that America can lose the war on terror is if we defeat ourselves."
General Electric Claims CO2 "A Possible" Factor in Global Warming
Despite all its green advertising claims, behind the scenes General Electric remains skeptical about the role of carbon dioxide in driving climate change. A May 28th GE press release announcing a new "clean coal" initiative states only that "CO2 is a possible contributing factor to climate change."
GE's multi-million dollar "Ecomagination" ad campaign paints the company as a concerned environmental steward and GE belongs to a growing coalition of companies calling for federal action on climate change. Kevin Grandia, the managing editor of a new collaborative web effort by several environmental groups to debunk the myth of "clean coal," noticed the GE press release and pointed to the inconsistency between the skeptical line in the release and GE's widely-publicized ads and public statements on climate change. Grandia notes that "considering the major marketing effort GE has undertaken to paint itself as a leader on reducing greenhouse gas emissions...[w]hy so much investment by GE in something they only see as a possibility?"
General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt admitted to Forbes magazine in 2005 that the company's lofty "Ecomagination" campaign is little more than a sales pitch. "It's primarily that," Immelt said. "In its essence it's a way to sell more products and services."
In order to confront similar greenwashing by the coal industry, environmental groups including The DeSmog Project, Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace USA launched a new website http://www.coal-is-clean.com/ to shatter the coal industry's "clean coal" myth by mocking the lengths the coal industry will go to portray coal as clean. A companion site http://www.coal-is-dirty.com/ explains the actual impacts of coal mining and burning.
NASA Inspector General Report Confirms Political Censorship of Climate Data
A new investigation by NASA's inspector general confirms that Bush administration appointees deliberately skewed and deleted scientific findings about the serious threat of global warming from agency press releases for purely political reasons. The report also confirms that NASA public affairs appointees denied media access to NASA climate scientists and thereby "reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public." The investigation details how the political appointees in the press office rewrote the findings of NASA scientists and put out press releases which instead "suffered from inaccuracy, factual inefficiency and scientific dilution," according to the Inspector General report. This tampering with science constitutes a major breach of the long-standing trust between NASA scientists and the agency's public affairs department.
Forced by Court Order, Bush administration finally releases long-overdue climate assessment
Four years past its mandated deadline and ultimately compelled by court order, the Bush Administration finally released a climate change assessment detailing how global warming will affect the United States. A 1990 law, the Global Change Research Act, requires the government to assess the potential for domestic impacts from global warming every four years. But seven-plus years into Bush's presidency, this Administration hadn't released an update to the last report issued in 2000 by the Clinton administration. The long-overdue assessment details how global warming will likely lead to devastating droughts and stronger hurricanes in the United States, among other negative impacts.
Top Scientists Say United States Has Lost Its Stature As Science Leader
Following the seven-year assault on science carried out by the Bush Administration, the nation's top scientists say the United States has lost its edge as a leader in science education and research. An expert panel of scientists, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's top science adviser, detailed at last week's World Science Festival how the disdain for science among high-level political appointees has crippled the United States' once proud international standing as a leader in scientific research. The scientists cited specific examples of how U.S. officials downplayed and suppressed scientific evidence of climate change, derailed federal funding for stem cell research, and promoted creationism while casting doubt on the science of evolution.
Bush Administration submits Yucca Mountain nuclear waste application without required radiation exposure standard
The Bush administration submitted its formal application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to build a nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada but failed to include a critical public safety standard for radiation exposure. The application lacks a plan to safeguard the public from certain dangerous isotopes in the radioactive waste that remain dangerous for 1 million years. The EPA has yet to produce this critical standard, yet the Bush administration proceeded with its application anyway. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman told reporters the government's license application will "stand up to any challenge anywhere," despite the fact that a federal court has already ruled the EPA's public radiation exposure standard invalid until it can establish a standard that would be protective of the public for 1 million years. So far, EPA has only been able to establish a standard protective for 10,000 years, nowhere near long enough to safeguard public health and the environment from the deadly radioactive isotopes that would be stored at Yucca. Nevada officials and tribes who live closest to the proposed storage dump vow to continue their fight against the troubled facility.
Proselytizing Marine Suspended In Iraq But Others Continue Attempt to Convert Muslims to Christianity
The military suspended a single Marine in Iraq for forcibly handing out coins quoting the Gospel to Sunni Muslims passing through a checkpoint at the western entrance to Fallujah. In possible violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, U.S. Marines are acting as Christian missionaries while on patrol in Iraq, handing out bibles translated into Arabic, coins quoting the Gospel and other fundamentalist Christian literature to Sunni Muslims in Fallujah and elsewhere. Coalition forces spokesman Rear Adm. Patrick Driscoll said that "the military prohibits proselytizing any religion, faith or practices."
The Christian fundamentalist group Bible Pathway Ministries admits it has provided thousands of copies of a special military edition of its Daily Devotional Bible study book to members of the 101st Airborne Division. The book's cover includes the logos of the five branches of the armed forces, implying that the Pentagon approved its publication.
Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the nonprofit group Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) and a former Reagan administration White House counsel and former Air Force Judge Advocate General (JAG) asserts that "such fundamentalist Christian proselytizing DIRECTLY violates General Order 1A, Part 2, Section J issued by General Tommy Franks on behalf of the United States Central Command (USCENTCOM) back in December of 2000 which strictly prohibits "proselytizing of any religion, faith or practice."
Chief Warrant Officer Rene Llanos of the 101st Airborne told Mission Network News, "the soldiers who are patrolling and walking the streets are taking along this copy, and they're using it to minister to the local residents."
"Our division is also getting ready to head toward Afghanistan, so there will be copies heading out with the soldiers," Llanos said. "We need to pray for protection for our soldiers as they patrol and pray that God would continue to open doors. The soldiers are being placed in strategic places with a purpose. They |
Weiner, (a former official in Israel’s Justice Department of Justice, whose job was to rebut charges of human rights abuses by Israeli security forces) frantically trying to deny Said’s right to exist as Palestine’s foremost intellectual spokesman. Shame on Weiner, and on the foundation that backed this silly enterprise. CPImage copyright Lincolnshire Police/Facebook Image caption One comment likened the e-fit to He-Man - star of the 1980s American animated television series
An e-fit of a man wanted in connection with an attempted robbery in a park in Lincoln has been ridiculed on social media.
One response to the appeal said simply: "It's He-Man".
Another likened the image to 1990s pop star Chesney Hawkes, writing "I am the one and only".
Lincolnshire Police is yet to respond to a request for a comment but other forces have previously blamed computer errors for questionable e-fits.
Responses on BBC Radio Lincolnshire's Facebook page also included this one: "I know the Sweet had some iffy hits, but "criminal"? really? - likening the image to singer Brian Connolly (pictured below).
Image caption The image was likened to Brian Connolly - lead singer of The Sweet
Posting on the police's Facebook page, one person said the suspect looked like a computer Sims' character her five-year-old had created.
Georgina F Carter wrote: "I'm not sure this is quite the response the police were hoping for but this must surely go down in history as the biggest graphics fail of 2017!!!!
"He looks like a Muppet, it's ridiculous."
Some criticised the force for posting an e-fit which was distracting from the actual crime.
One person wrote: "I can't stop laughing at both the e-fit, and all these comments. Perhaps back to the drawing board lads?"
The appeal, which was posted earlier, asked for help to identify a man after an attempted robbery earlier this month in Hartsholme Park, in Lincoln.
The man is described as having blonde unkempt hair and wearing a grey T-shirt.
The victim sustained a minor injury to her cheek, the force said.
In 2016, Northamptonshire Police released an e-fit, which was described as looking "like he was eating a banana sideways".
Image copyright Northamptonshire Police Image caption Northamptonshire Police defended the e-fit of the suspect who "looked like he was eating a banana sideways"
Other forces have also faced a bit of a backlash over e-fits, including one from a victim in Norfolk, who said about the man in the image below (top right), although the thief had an unusual appearance he "didn't look that odd".SAN ANTONIO - The Alamo City's iconic 210 area code is getting a little competition.
Growth in the San Antonio area has created a demand for more phone numbers than the 210 area code will allow, according to the Public Utilities Commission of Texas.
To alleviate some of that strain, the new 726 area code has been added and goes into effect on Saturday.
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Current residents will get to keep their 210 number. New customers will get a 210 or 726 area code.
10-digit dialing
San Antonio residents are currently in what's called an "optional dialing period," according to Terry Hadley, PUC director of communication.
Meaning you can dial just the seven digits of a phone number or the full 10 digits.
On Saturday, mandatory 10-digit dialing goes into effect.
That means callers must dial all 10 digits of a phone number -- including 210.
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If a caller just dials the main seven numbers, they will hear a recording saying that the caller must hang up and dial again.
But what about 726?
On Oct. 23, providers can issue the new numbers that have the 726 area code. Hadley said some 210 numbers will still be available.
Copyright 2017 by KSAT - All rights reserved.During the last precious days of summer, many are busy making the most of the sunshine and stopping to appreciate the spectacular beauty of Vancouver.
On The Coast book columnist Tara Henley explores local authors who've taken inspiration from Vancouver, not just for its natural landscape but also for its character, with its dark and light sides.
"I remember when I lived in Toronto, coming home at this time of year. My friend and I were driving across the Lion's Gate, and the view was just magnificent, everything in technicolor. My friend turned to me and said: 'The city is showing off,'" said Henley.
"That's what it is this week. The city is showing off, and we're all appreciating it. It got me thinking about how authors have captured that feeling, that unique love for Vancouver and then also the other side of the coin, our dark side — in a wide range of titles."
The Conjoined by Jen Sookfong Lee
"It's a murder mystery that centres on a social worker, Jessica, whose mother dies. In the process of clearing out her mother's house, the bodies of two teenaged foster girls are discovered in the freezer.
To find out who murdered the sisters, Jessica plays detective, following the trail all the way back to the West End of the 1940s, to Chinatown in the 1980s, and back to present-day Vancouver. It's a page-turner for sure, but what really stands out here is the way that the the city is less a backdrop and more an actual character in the story."
The Lost Ones by Sheena Kamal
"The story follows Nora Watts, an alcoholic narrator who is a product of the foster care system. She gave up a daughter at birth, who is now 15 and has gone missing. Nora works as an assistant to a private investigator, and she taps these skills to try and track down her daughter.
The journey takes her from the dark corners of the Downtown Eastside to sprawling mansions in West Vancouver, and, wow, the descriptions of the city are evocative. What's most fascinating here, though, is the way that Kamal has managed not just to capture the natural beauty of the city but also to incorporate the political climate here in a way that doesn't feel artificial or forced.
Be Ready For the Lightning by Grace O'Connell
Vancouver has not just been a muse for residents but also for visitors. [The book is] about a sister and her troubled brother, set between New York City and Vancouver's West Side. And I was surprised by how bang on the descriptions of our city were, knowing that O'Connell isn't from here.
I reached out to her this week to ask her about that, and she emailed back that she had been inspired by a one-week visit in 2012. Here's what she told me: "The city captured my imagination so fully that it was the only place I considered as a Canadian setting when I sat down to write Be Ready for the Lightning. I knew it was a place I wanted to spend time mentally and emotionally."
With files form CBC Radio One's On The Coast.A Sri Lankan woman who has built her adult life in Canada over the past decade as she lived in immigration limbo, partly because officials lost her passport, says she's terrified her family will be torn apart as she faces a renewed deportation effort.
Janina Ibarra, 31, said she has spent half her life in Canada and was in the final stages of getting permanent residence status when she was picked up by border agents two weeks ago.
She said she and her Canadian husband, Eliseo Ibarra, 35, were on their regular morning commute to the Canadian Bible Society, where she has been working as a clerk for three years. She was detained at the Canada Border Services Agency's Vancouver detention facilities for two nights and three days.
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"I felt scared, terrified and humiliated. I wasn't even allowed to see anybody, including my children, until the hearing, which was two days later," Ms. Ibarra said in an interview. "I'm worried about being separated from my family. My boys have never really been away from me. I'm their primary caregiver. … [We] really feel that we are at the mercy of all these people that have so much power."
Last month, the CBSA obtained a deportation order for her, effective some time in late June or early July. She said she was told the agency had been looking for her since 2012 because her application had gone stagnant.
But Ms. Ibarra couldn't proceed with her application because her Sri Lankan passport was missing, lost somewhere between Canadian and Sri Lankan authorities.
Ms. Ibarra has a letter dated Nov. 19, 2004, from the Sri Lankan consulate in Toronto to the Vancouver enforcement office of the CBSA. The letter notes the office has issued two emergency passports – one for Ms. Ibarra and one for her mother "enabling you to facilitate their deportation."
But Ms. Ibarra said she's been told they never arrived. In a letter sent last Friday to the Sri Lankan High Commission, the agency writes: "Unfortunately, neither the CBSA nor Ms. Colombage Mendis [Ms. Ibarra's maiden name] have been able to locate her expired Sri Lankan passport."
Due to privacy laws, Citizenship and Immigration Canada could not comment on the details of the case without a privacy waiver from Ms. Ibarra. That couldn't be arranged on Monday.
Ms. Ibarra and her parents first came to Vancouver from Sri Lanka to flee civil war in 1999 and immediately applied for refugee protection. It was denied and they then applied for the chance to stay on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. They were denied that, too, and at the end of 2004, Ms. Ibarra and her mother, Lorna Mendis, received the first deportation order.
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Ms. Mendis was deported in November, 2005, but Ms. Ibarra was able to stay based on her permanent resident application. She got to the final stages: All that was left was a medical examination, a criminal record check and valid travel documents from country of origin. But the passport was missing.
Ms. Ibarra said it had been handed over to Canadian Citizenship and Immigration in 1999 with her initial refugee application. It then changed hands from government agency to government agency; Ms. Ibarra says she never physically handled the document after first touching foot on Canadian soil.
Ms. Ibarra said she regularly phoned Canadian Immigration attempting to figure out what to do, but she repeatedly got a message saying: "We are experiencing a higher than normal call volume, please try again later." She said she also got no answers from the Sri Lankan High Commission.
Over the years, she said, she worked as a clerk and an event co-ordinator, filing taxes. She married Eliseo Ibarra, an amateur musician and sawmill worker. She had two sons, who are now 7 and 10. She said she and her husband have spent $25,000 on her permanent residence application and in legal fees over the years.
Now, she's been told if the Sri Lankan High Commission accepts her passport application, she will get it within 10 weeks. Once she has the passport, Ms. Ibarra said she's been told by her Canadian removal officer that she will be deported shortly afterward.
"I feel really helpless," she said. "We always hear that family reunification is first and foremost here in Canada. If so, why not show some compassion?"Genetically modified seeds are banned in Hungary. So when government regulators found that 1,000 acres of maize had been planted with genetically modified seeds, they just plowed the suckers under. You stick it to the Monsanto, Hungary!
Leaving aside the fact that this sort of sweep-the-checkers-off-the-board move is always kind of badass, this is also some amazingly thorough government regulation. For starters, they were willing to take collateral damage — only some of the seeds on those 1,000 acres were Monsanto-born Frankenmaize, but they destroyed it all despite the fact that it was too late to plant more. Also, these checks were performed despite the fact that you aren't allowed to import GM seeds in the first place. Federal regulators DOUBLE-checking? What are these people, Communists?
The free movement of goods within the EU means that authorities will not investigate how the seeds arrived in Hungary, but they will check where the goods can be found, Bognar said. Regional public radio reported that the two biggest international seed producing companies are affected in the matter and GMO seeds could have been sown on up to the thousands of hectares in the country. Most of the local farmers have complained since they just discovered they were using GMO seeds.
This actually happened back in July, but it's making the rounds of the internet now, because everyone likes to imagine a band of angry Cossacks just fucking a field of GM corn up old-school.Justice Minister Søren Pind told news agency Ritzau that the government is prepared to implement tougher laws to punish Danish citizens who join terror groups like Isis to fight in Syria and Iraq.
Pind said he would not detail the plan until it was formally released but said the government had listened closely to recommendations from the Criminal Code Council (Straffelovrådet) to change Denmark’s current laws pertaining to treason.
“It will mean that the rules for treason will be fine-tuned so that one can be punished for working against Denmark. There is no doubt that what we are seeing is treasonous. It works against Danish interests, it radicalizes people against Denmark and contributes to them fighting for Denmark’s enemies," Pind told Ritzau.
"Denmark is one of the countries that produces the most Syrian fighters so it is something we take very seriously," he added.
Per capita, Denmark is the second largest European source after Belgium of jihadist fighters going to the Middle East.
Pind’s promise to crack down on foreign fighters comes as a new book revealed that the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) took no action against a Danish citizen who PET knew was actively recruiting fellow Danes to join the fighting in Syria and Iraq.
Pind did not comment on that particular case.BlackRock’s influence over the governance of corporations has increased as the company itself has expanded. It gained prominence during the financial crisis when Laurence D. Fink — a BlackRock co-founder and its current chief executive — became the government’s go-to guy to analyze and manage hard-to-value assets. BlackRock expanded this expertise into a separate business, advising troubled governments around the world, like Greece and Ireland. In 2009, the firm bought Barclays Global Investors in a $13.5 billion cash-and-shares deal that transformed BlackRock overnight into the world’s largest asset manager. BlackRock controls both actively managed shares, and millions more that sit in exchange-traded funds.
“BlackRock is the silent giant,” said Gerald Davis, a professor of management and organizations at the University of Michigan. He said the firm had almost no name recognition, despite managing more money than household names like Vanguard and Fidelity. “No one really knows about BlackRock but they are incredibly powerful.”
MS. EDKINS, an understated 43-year-old from New Zealand, leads BlackRock’s corporate governance effort. She got her first taste of annual reports and the corporate documents that would become her future at the University of Otago as an economics teaching assistant, where she analyzed annual reports to see which companies were disclosing their environmental impact. The experience of parsing often-dry sentences didn’t immediately turn Ms. Edkins into a corporate-governance geek. Instead, she landed a job at New Zealand’s central bank and later at the British High Commission in Wellington.
In 1997, she moved to England without a job and answered an ad in The Financial Times for a “corporate governance executive” at Hermes Pensions Management. “I had to look up what corporate governance was,” she said, laughing.
Eight years later, Ms. Edkins moved to Governance for Owners, a small shareholder advisory firm in London. In an odd twist, Governance for Owners was recently charged with voting BlackRock’s shares in the proxy contest over splitting the role of chairman and chief executive at JPMorgan Chase. United States law requires BlackRock, thanks to its ties to a bank holding company, to turn over its votes to an independent third party when ownership exceeds a certain threshold. This provision is aimed at preventing any one company from having inordinate influence over the banking industry.
Ms. Edkins ended up at BlackRock in 2009, and later moved to San Francisco to lead its governance group. The way things worked in the United States, she said, came as a bit of a shock. Countries like Britain, she said, have a longer history of shareholders engaged in governance. “There is an agreed standard that has typically been developed by some commission,” she said. “Here, there is no uniform code.”
She said shareholders typically had more rights in Europe, which encourages companies to talk to shareholder groups. “In Europe it is about engagement,” she said. “Here it was, and still often is, about voting.” This, she said, leads to a more confrontational governance system in the United States.It's great that Justin Bieber has his Instagram back, most likely after consecrating it. There are many incredible things lurking within his feed, but the greatest Stratfordite since Shakespeare has given us a rare glimpse into his creative process with a pair of videos posted last night that depict Bacardi Biebs working on some new heat in the stu' (or, as Young Thug once put it, the 'yo). While this footage is brief, it's enough to make it clear that Justin Bieber may be the heir apparent to the ambient electronica empire once ruled over by Richard D. James a.k.a. Aphex Twin.
Firstly, Bieber is running Logic Pro 9 on his Macbook. This is actually not the most up-to-date version of the DAW, that would be Logic Pro X. However, Logic X packages all audio tracks in a project into a single file, making them tough to extract for later use. Logic 9 still saves the tracks into a project folder for convenience. Using older software... very clever. Aphex Twin uses analog hardware for his own material. Great minds think alike.
Bieber has the volume mapped to an automation curve, he knows what's up.
He also has the entire setup running out of an external mixer, rather than just an audio interface directly connected to his headphones and the monitors (which, it should be mentioned, are elevated and placed a good distance apart from each other for a proper stereo field). It's this kind of extra work that may one day lead to Bieber's dancehall-pop version of "Come to Daddy."
Speaking of daddy, Biebs records shirtless. Unsure if this helps his workflow. The beats just might be too hot.
This arpeggio is genius. C, B, D. The beat is in the key of C major even though the only chords we hear are A minor and G major. D is the 9th, which provides some lovely harmony. The last electronic musician to take their compositional chops this seriously made "Avril 14th," and that got sampled by Kanye. You do the math.
We all know Bieber is a great drummer, and this hand drum part truly proves it. The syncopation, on the offbeat, creates a clave rhythm that really brings out that Latin/tropical flavour that Bieber probably wants. If only he had this drum mic'd up so that it was actually recording into the software.
Look, we're not saying that Justin Bieber is exactly Aphex Twin. He could be closer to Boards of Canada, or Autechre, or any of the other giants of ambient electronic music. All we can definitely say is that he's putting the "intelligent" back in intelligent dance music. Long live Just-IDM Bieber.
Phil wishes he had this studio. Follow or slander him on Twitter.A bipartisan initiative to create learning standards for American school kids is creating an unlikely resistance to two of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet choices: Betsy DeVos for education secretary and Rex Tillerson for state.
Notably, the right-wing news site Breitbart, which was until recently run by Trump’s top adviser Stephen Bannon, ran a story over the weekend calling out Tillerson for his past support for Common Core. Trump announced that Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, is his pick to run state in a tweet praising him as “one of the truly great business leaders of the world” Tuesday morning.
Breitbart dug up the oil magnate’s 2013 Wall Street Journal op-ed calling Common Core, an initiative launched by the National Governors Association, a “path to renewed competitiveness” for the U.S.
“Tillerson has a history of supporting policies opposite to many of the themes the president-elect highlighted during his campaign, including on Common Core education standards,” Breitbart reporter Matthew Boyle wrote.
Opposing Common Core was one of the few education issues Trump consistently touted on the campaign trail. He repeatedly promised to end Common Core if elected president. (He can’t — states that voted to adopt the standards would have to individually repeal them.) The standards set guidelines for what concepts and skills students should know in math and language by the end of each grade, allowing each state that adopts them to determine the lesson plans and curriculum to reach that goal.
The Obama administration poured funds into helping states create standardized tests aligned with Common Core; the administration also incentivized states to adopt the standards by making it easier for them to receive federal funds if they did.
Some conservatives see the standards as a federal overreach into local control over education. Many homeschool advocates in particular are vehemently opposed to the standards.
But Tillerson argued that Common Core would help the American workforce learn crucial math and technology skills they are currently lacking. He chided his home state of Texas for refusing to join the 45 states that adopted the Common Core standards in a speech in 2014. Tillerson said he was “extraordinarily disappointed” in Texas for refusing to adopt the standards.
“I don’t think the [K-12] schools realize that we’re their customer,” Tillerson said at a Business Roundtable meeting. “They need to produce students with skills that allow them to get a job. If they don’t, they are essentially producing a defective product. And in this case, the product is a human being. It’s tragic.” He also chided Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett for delaying the implementation of the program in his state in 2013.
Common Core may matter to many of Trump’s supporters, but it’s unlikely to be an issue in Tillerson’s Senate confirmation. Some Republican senators, including Sen. Marco Rubio, have expressed reservations about Tillerson’s friendship with Russian leader Vladmir Putin, signaling he may face a tough path to nomination on entirely different grounds.
President-elect Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey last month. (Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP) More
Common Core has also been a flashpoint for Betsey DeVos, a Michigan billionaire who is Trump’s Cabinet pick for education.
DeVos is an advocate for private school vouchers and charter schools, and served as a board member for Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, a nonprofit that backs Common Core standards.
After Trump announced his decision to appoint her to his Cabinet, Devos quickly disavowed any affiliation with the standards on Twitter and linked to a personal website explaining her views.
Many of you are asking about Common Core. To clarify, I am not a supporter—period. Read my full stance, here: https://t.co/qB2nAXvX0B — Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVos) November 23, 2016For a split-second Hezbollah Chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah dared show himself this week, for his first public speech in years – and immediately went back into hiding. Nasrallah's timing was not a coincidence. He too knows that the Shiite's golden era in the Middle East is nearing its end, and he had to do something – in a show of courage, so to speak.
After the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and especially after the fall of the Sunni regime in Iraq in 2003, it seemed like the Shiites were taking over. In Iran, in southern Iraq, in Syria and Lebanon, and even among the Palestinians, via Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. But historically, this was an artificial phenomenon, following near-millennia of clear Sunni hegemony, and especially considering that the Shiites make up only 15% of Islam, while the Sunnis make up the remaining 85%.
Regional Upheaval Arabs in love with anarchy Guy Bechor Op-ed: Egyptians failed to understand that Tahrir Square protests are not real democracy Arabs in love with anarchy
The growing sanctions imposed on Iran have turned it into an isolated, weakened country and the Arab revolt of the last year has all but ended the Alawi hegemony – which Syria and the Arab world consider to be a direct continuance of Shia Islam. True, the Shiites rule Iraq, but they are well aware of the limited power there, after years of internal conflict. Some of the Shiites even actively oppose any Iranian domination.
So what is satellite-Nasrallah to do when his mother ship, Iran, is financially and socially coming apart at the seams, and when the connective link – Assad's Syria – is disappearing? The "Shiite Crescent" that the Shiites so boasted about is falling apart. Without Iran and Syria, Hezbollah will shrink back to its true size – no more generous funding, no more weapons and no more political backing.
Worse: Nasrallah insists on voicing public support for Assad and his bloody regime, for which the Sunni world condemns him. Nasrallah, the "star" who only five years ago fought Israel, is now perceived as part of the old Arab world.
Even Hamas understands that and was quick to flee Assad's patrondom. But Hamas is a Sunni organization, as opposed to Shiite Hezbollah, that has now has no one to turn to other than Iran or Syria. Hezbollah's chief is now hoping that Egypt will stand up to Israel, but he undoubtedly knows what the Sunni clerics in Cairo think of him and his organization. There is no love lost there, to put it mildly.
Decreasing options
Hezbollah is transferring its vast arsenal from Syria to Lebanon and the Lebanese know it. The Lebanese debate over the disarmament of Hezbollah has renewed and Hezbollah is concerned. Yes – they can attack Israel, but in doing so they will bring about Lebanon's destruction.
Iran is trying to push its way into Lebanon and it may be finding partial success – such as in with its cooperation with the Lebanese military – but that stems from Syria's dwindling presence in the Lebanese arena. The sects there need an external element to save them from themselves.
And finally, the Lebanese prime minister, billionaire Najib Mikati, did not yield to Nasrallah's pressure and approved the transfer of funds necessary for the International Crimes Court (ICC) in The Hague to try several senior Hezbollah officials for the murder of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri.
This was another blow to Nasrallah, which reflects his weakness within Lebanese politics – even his old ally Mikati has turned his back on him. Will Nasrallah go for broke in Lebanon? That's highly unlikely.
For two decades Hezbollah built itself on its struggle against IDF forces in Lebanon. Today, when the Arab world is internally conflicted, and the artificially overblown proportions of the Israeli-Arab conflict have been revealed, Hezbollah has nothing else to hang on to. Nasrallah's latest speech was indicative of weakness and concern – not of confidence.
The IDF is ready to face the challenged posed by the northern border but Israel too understands the decrease in the options available to Hassan Nasrallah, whose world has become colder than ever.Heroes is coming back to TV. Four years after unceremoniously canceling the show, NBC revealed during its Olympic coverage that the series will return for a 13-episode miniseries run in 2015. Creator Tim Kring is already on board, but plot details are currently slim.
Even though Heroes flamed out in the seasons before its cancellation, its impact can't be denied. NBC expressed excitement about bringing the property back, even teasing appearances from the original cast. "Shows with that kind of resonance don’t come around often," said NBC Entertainment's president, Jennifer Salke, in a statement. "We thought it was time for another installment... Until we get closer to air in 2015, the show will be appropriately shrouded in secrecy, but we won’t rule out the possibility of some of the show’s original cast members popping back in." By the look of it, the series is following a similar formula as Fox's 24, which is due out this May.TORONTO - Daniel Winnik's head hit the ice and he briefly lost consciousness. Before he was taken off on a stretcher last Thursday night, he was able to tell the training staff about the entire play that led to his fall.
Winnik never felt numb and never had any pain in his neck. By the intermission, he was walking around the visiting locker-room at Pepsi Center in Denver and telling his Toronto Maple Leafs teammates he was OK.
After being held out of two games over the weekend for precautionary reasons, Winnik skated by himself Monday, took part in Tuesday's practice and could be back in the lineup Wednesday against the Boston Bruins. He considers himself lucky to have come away from the incident unscathed.
"Usually you see plays like that and someone laying on the ice and you expect like a concussion or something," Winnik said. "I was fully aware of what was going on. I remember the hit. Obviously just went out for a little bit. But I felt fine, I wasn't dizzy, didn't have a headache or anything."
The medical staff held Winnik out of the rest of the Leafs' 4-3 shootout loss to the Colorado Avalanche and then coach Randy Carlyle was told Winnik shouldn't play Saturday or Sunday.
"They provided us with a timetable in which they thought was best prescribed in this situation, so that's what you have to follow," Carlyle said. "In the world of sports, the concussion issue is talked about in a bunch of different ways, and this to us was not something that we had any other way other than what the medical staff and the doctors prescribed."
The 29-year-old forward seemed to be fitting in extremely well since signing a one-year deal with Toronto in the off-season. Winnik has a goal and six assists in his first 13 games and in the process forced his way further up the lineup than Carlyle expected.
Still, Winnik didn't object to sitting out two games just to be safe.
"I completely agreed with the training staff on that," he said. "As much as I wanted to play, I understand it. It's the best thing to do going forward. Why risk it, it's silly to say, just for two games. I know it's two important games, but down the road it'll benefit me more."
The Leafs won each game, beating the New York Rangers 5-4 and then the Ottawa Senators 5-3. Coming up Wednesday is a rematch with the rival Boston Bruins, who embarrassed the Leafs 4-1 at Air Canada Centre on Oct. 25.
"It was a lot of stupidity and guys will admit that," centre Nazem Kadri said of the team's performance that night against Boston. "Just being in the wrong place at the wrong time and just kind of having a couple brain cramps here and there that end up in the back of your net."
If Winnik plays, he's expected to be back on the second line alongside Kadri and right-winger David Clarkson. That's where he skated Tuesday, giving the indication that he should be good to face Boston.
Carlyle said doctors would make an assessment of Winnik's condition after Wednesday's morning skate and then again after pre-game warm-ups.
The possibility of Winnik returning so quickly seemed like a longshot last week.
"It's just one of those instances where you get lucky," defenceman Cody Franson said. "That was a big scare for all of us. Any time you can get a guy back like that and where he looks OK, it's a big relief for the group."
Winnik was relieved almost right away. Other than an interference penalty, he didn't think former teammate Jan Hejda had any ill intent on the play, and the Colorado defenceman later reached out to make sure Winnik was fine.
Fully aware of his surroundings, Winnik called it a rare scene for a hockey rink to be so silent. After watching the replay of himself going to the ice headfirst the next day, he could understand why.
"It's tough to see yourself laying on the ice like that," Winnik said.
Notes: Winger David Booth, who has been out six weeks with a broken foot, skated with strength and conditioning coach Anthony Belza again Tuesday. It's unclear when he might rejoin the Leafs for practice, Carlyle said.... The coach also said winger Joffrey Lupul is at least a week away from rejoining the team on the ice. Lupul recently had a cast removed from his broken right hand, but is having another smaller cast put on.
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Follow @SWhyno on Twitter.Apparently, canines aren't the only watchdogs.
Thanks to one vigilant kitty in southern France, 11 people are alive after a fire started in a farmhouse overnight Sunday, The cat saved its owner and the 10 other residents of the multi-family home by scratching on the floor of the attic, where the flames first ignited, local media report.
Alexandra Marlin, who lives beneath the attic in the converted home, awoke to Meatball's scratches and pulled open the trap door to the upstairs room to investigate. That's when she discovered thick smoke and rushed to call the local fire department and wake up the seven adults and three children living at the residence, Le Dauphiné Libéré reports.
(Story continues below)
In the chaos, Marlin become separated from Meatball. The French woman feared the worst, but, fortunately, the heroic kitty reappeared Sunday evening. The other residents of the converted home were incredibly grateful for Meatball's act and offered to buy her a year's worth of cat biscuits, a separate Le Dauphiné Libéré report notes.The short version: I’d like to pay you to not drink or jerk off for 30 days. Sign up here and get your monk on.
Sex is A-OK.
The longer version is below, which includes juicy details, more options for women, and some farewell-porn suggestions…
###
You know who you are, you filthy animals.
Secret bookmarks to Pornhub (“Discount airfare” – Ha!), secret folders labeled “Tax Returns” for when wifi fails, bookmarks for animated GIFs in case of slow connections (curtsy to Tumblr), Hotspot Shield for when you’re in countries that ban your cherished images (download it before you fly!)…
Oh, wait. Am I projecting again?
Yes, I’ve admitted it before, and I’ll admit it again: dudes watch porn on the Internet. Shocker, I know. All those guys on the magazine covers? They do it, too.
Less obvious, perhaps, is how dramatically your life can change if you quit porn and masturbation for a short period.
I did this for 30 days recently, and — oddly enough — I found it much easier and more impactful to quit booze for the same 30 days. Just a few of the benefits I experienced included…
A dramatic surge in free testosterone and sex drive. Dozens of my seemingly healthy male friends, techies in particular, have approached me over the years about chronically low testosterone. There are many potential causes, including late-night blue light, but removing booze and porn appear to open the flood gates. Research (example, example) shows that alcohol reduces testosterone levels. So…should you be dating more? Trying a little harder instead of wanking, watching Battlestar Galactica, and calling it a night? This will help motivate you.
Dozens of my seemingly healthy male friends, techies in particular, have approached me over the years about chronically low testosterone. There are many potential causes, including late-night blue light, but removing booze and porn appear to open the flood gates. Research (example, example) shows that alcohol reduces testosterone levels. So…should you be dating more? Trying a little harder instead of wanking, watching Battlestar Galactica, and calling it a night? This will help motivate you. Increased ability to focus and cognitive endurance. This goes along with increased “T” mentioned above.
This goes along with increased “T” mentioned above. Getting roughly 50-100% more done. When you aren’t nursing hangovers, chewing up 3-4 hours per night with friends, destroying your sleep with booze, or procrastinating with porn (you know who you are) — miracle of miracles — you get more done! A LOT more done. In my mind, this alone easily justifies a 30-day booze and porn fast. You’ll clear off that goddamn to-do list faster than Speedy Gonzales. And remember: sex is still allowed.
Join Me for Another 30 Days
Given how transformative this was for me, I’m inviting you to join me for another 30 days. After that, you can go back to your hedonistic ways. I enjoy porn, but I’ve concluded I can level up by taking breaks.
I’ll refer to our 30-day challenge as NOBNOM (NO Booze, NO Masturbating), as the acronym itself sounds pornographic. We gotta make this sumnabitch memorable.
Next steps are described below.
NOTE: If you don’t masturbate (a lot of women don’t but should), or if you otherwise don’t watch enough porn to care about abstaining, here’s another option: NOBNOC — No Booze, No Complaining For this version, please first read “Real Mind Control: The 21-Day No-Complaint Experiment.” Then, join the same NOBNOB challenge page to be part of the community.
Next Steps — Do It Now!
1. STEP 1 – Join the NOBNOM goal page here. This is free, and it will keep you accountable to yourself and others. This official challenge starts August 1st. That means you get to go crazy on September 1st. If you’re reading this another time, you can start whenever. I’m sure people will still be on the page.
2. STEP 2 – If you’re really serious, up the ante and put some cash on the line. As discussed at length in The 4-Hour Chef, without stakes or consequences, about 70% of you will fail. So… choose not to fail.
Below are two options, and I earn nothing from either. I’d suggest doing both of them, if possible:
A. Create a betting pool |
demolished tenement housing and any artefacts or debris would have been sealed under the asphalt of the playground, ready to be rediscovered. Smardz Frost went to the Toronto Archives to research the site and learned that the land had been owned by a Thornton Blackburn, described in the 1852 City Directory as “cabman, coloured.” She consulted with Dr. Daniel Hill, the academic, first director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and co-founder of the Ontario Black History Society, to ask if the society would support the excavation by children and volunteers of what she suspected might be an Underground Railroad site.
Smardz Frost has dedicated years of her life ever since to the history of the Blackburns. “I fell in love with them,” she says. Her book about their lives, I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad, took 20 years and a PhD to write. In 2007, Smardz Frost won the Governor General’s Award for Non Fiction for the book.
The Blackburns were escaped slaves from Kentucky who arrived in Upper Canada in 1833 via Michigan. Smardz Frost “happened to pull a book on Detroit history from the shelf” at the library, she says, and noticed that the first race riot in the city was called the “Blackburn Riot.” By chance, she’d found an important clue about the lives of Thornton and Lucie.
The riot was orchestrated to help the couple escape after they were jailed. They then fled toward Upper Canada and freedom. But when they arrived, they were detained again on the charge of attempted murder of the Detroit sheriff. Upper Canada’s lieutenant governor, Sir John Colborne, was an abolitionist and didn’t believe it was right to send the Blackburns back to a country where they would be possibly executed for their alleged role in the beating of a sheriff—especially given that they’d been behind bars at the time. He took the problem to Attorney General Robert Jameson. His decision not to extradite the couple—because the punishment they could receive in the U.S. was more than what Upper Canada would impose—set the Canadian precedent for extraditions.
The couple moved to Toronto in 1834.
“It was the Blackburn case that formally established Canada as the main terminus of the Underground Railroad,” Smardz Frost wrote in I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land.
And the Blackburns made sure the terminus was a welcoming one. In addition to their home at South Park Street, now Eastern Avenue—the one excavated from under the playground and the current site of the plaques about the couple’s story—they owned five other residences that they rented as discount rates to recently escaped slaves.
Thornton Blackburn is also credited with establishing Toronto’s first cab company. Called “The City,” his company had one horse-drawn cab, driven by Thornton, which held four passengers.
Although the couple had no idea, Smardz Frost learned that Thornton’s brother was already in Toronto when the Blackburns arrived. He was sold away from his mother when he was 11, and Thornton when he was 3, so the brothers hadn’t seen each other in a long while.
But the family reunions weren’t over. Thornton made the dangerous trek back to Kentucky in 1837 to rescue his mother from slavery. She is buried with her sons in the Toronto Necropolis cemetery.
The Blackburns now have two plaques commemorating their contribution to Canadian history. One, from Parks Canada, notes the significance of the excavation—the only one on an Underground Railroad site in Canada—and the recognition of the Blackburns as “Persons of National Historical Significance,” by the Department of Canadian Heritage in 1999.
The other plaque, from the Historic Sites and Monuments Board, at the Sackville Street site notes that their “determination to build free lives provides a window into the experiences of many refugees in the Underground Railroad era.” Smardz Frost helped write the plaque commemorating the Blackburns, and wrote one in Kentucky, from which the couple originally hailed.
Karolyn Smardz Frost will be in Toronto speaking at the North York Public Library on February 17 on “Slavery, Antislavery and Resistance in 19th Century Toronto.” February is Black History Month.We’ve got something bigly to tell you. It’s a ‘uge thing. The best thing. The most important thing you’ll hear all year. Here it is: Trump’s language—all the middle-school-level vocabulary and grammar of it—is actually serving a greater purpose. It’s helping early English learners grasp this country’s complicated language.
Though his speeches may be hard to translate into foreign languages, listening to Trump and reading his subtitles can actually be a boon for people learning English as a second language, due to his low-level vocabulary, constant word repetition, and discussion of basic concepts. And across Facebook groups sharing posts focusing on language learning and linguistics, early learners are turning to Trump-speak to learn basic vocabulary and concepts.
The trend emerged back in February, when a post in the Polyglots group—a collection of Facebookers who love language and discuss linguistics—shared a piece from Good about Japanese translators struggling to parse Trump’s speech. Commenters chimed in, noting that early language learners could benefit from the listening practice. He “uses low-level vocabulary, and he often repeats himself, and he only talks about simple ideas,” wrote Rob Mallory, an English teacher in South Korea.
Members of other language groups feel the same way. Nika Nemsitsveridze, a native Georgian speaker who’s been learning English for about three years, is a member of Silly Linguistics, a Facebook group for language-related humor that often discusses Trump and the intricacies of his language. He finds the repetition in Trump’s speech helps him master smaller words and colloquial turns of phrase, a pattern he noticed while watching Trump on television, particularly during his inauguration speech.
“It's really easy for me to imitate Trump's speech,” he says, noting some of his favorite phrases: “make America great again,” “so sad,” and “so huge.” And linguists have a pretty good idea why that's so. “What learners are finding helpful is Trump's relatively slower speech and his use of repetition,” says Derek Denis, a linguist at the University of Toronto Mississauga. “These are both beneficial for learners of English because they provide more time to parse the speech stream, helping with comprehension." Trump's relatively small vocabulary helps, too, says Denis. "The fewer unfamiliar words, the better the comprehension.”
Even the lack of clarity in Trump’s speech can be helpful to learners. Heba Daraghme, another Silly Linguistics member whose first language is Arabic, is currently taking a course on pragmatics—the branch of linguistics exploring contextual implications of language—and she finds Trump’s conversations with others helpful. “I benefit from the way he utters his words unclearly and in an ambiguous way,” she says, referring to a discussion with Netanyahu about US-Israel relations in which the meaning of Trump’s words shifted depending on context. “I’d like to see you hold back on settlements for a little bit,” Trump said at the time. Depending on who you ask, Trump did or did not make a policy statement—he could have been making a simple suggestion or outright telling Netanyahu to stop.
It's important to note that English learners further along in their studies have less to gain from listening to Trump, or reading his often confusing English subtitles. For this reason, no formal program employs Trump’s language as a learning tool. Most linguists are uncomfortable with the idea of early learners turning to Trump-speak as an aid for their studies—to the point that some refuse to be connected to him at all, and some deny what the learners tell them are his benefits.
“A more advanced English language learner, who has relatively good fluency and a good vocabulary, might not be getting the same benefit out of [Trump’s] speeches,” says Denis. “A major learning goal for advanced learners is to grow their vocabulary, so new words and phrases are welcomed”—something Trump decidedly does not introduce into his speeches, which are often unscripted.
Denis also suggests a lack of style-shifting in Trump’s language—the ability to change speech patterns depending on who we’re speaking to—might hinder more advanced learners from picking up useful lessons. (Denis uses the example of a formal job interview versus a casual time out with friends). And though early learners can find comprehension in Trump’s repetitive and simple language, advanced learners and native speakers are often confused by his rambling, tangential style, another reason linguists say Trump might not be the best learning tool.
“When speaking off the cuff, he seems to lack cohesion, jumping or circling from one topic to the next and often mistakenly assuming a shared context with his audience,” says Georgetown University Department of Linguistics linguist Luke Plonsky. “This lack of a linear progression of ideas would present a challenge for anyone, not just those individuals listening in their second language.”
Trump’s mistaken shared context means he has a tendency to assume his listeners understand what he’s saying exactly as he means it, and he then makes gestures or provides visual cues to enforce that meaning. But for learners at all stages, that can be confusing—like someone shaking their head no as they’re saying “yes.”
The limitations of Trump’s speech have a somewhat hidden benefit: They can show non-native English speakers just how little fluency they need to make it in America. Henk Wolf, member of the Facebook group Omniglot Fan Club and a native Dutch and Frisian speaker, considers that an advantage. “It helps me get used to a register of American English I do not encounter all that often,” he says. "Use and knowledge of formal language is apparently not a necessity to reach the top of the political pyramid in the New World.”Superhero actor says he is focusing on directing, with first film – 1.30 Train – in post-production, but will act in Marvel films
The star of the Captain America films, Chris Evans, has backtracked over a statement made recently that he plans to retire from acting following his stint as the patriotic superhero.
Evans, currently appearing in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, told Variety last week that he planned to move behind the camera following the completion of his contract with Disney-owned Marvel Studios. The 32-year-old actor, who recently completed work on a directorial debut, 1:30 Train, has three more films as the superhero on his slate.
But in an interview with ABC News, Evans said his earlier statement had been incorrect. "By no means am I planning on retiring," he said, calling his previous comments "kind of a silly statement". By way of caveat, he added: "I certainly am going to try and focus a bit more on directing at this point."
Evans first revealed details of 1:30 Train in August. The microbudget romance, in which the US actor also stars alongside Alice Eve, has yet to be released in cinemas.
Previously the Boston-raised actor had told Variety: "If I'm acting at all, it's going to be under Marvel contract, or I'm going to be directing. I can't see myself pursuing acting strictly outside of what I'm contractually obligated to do." His comments were widely interpreted as signalling the end of Evans's career in front of the cameras only two years after he appeared as Captain America in the third-highest-grossing film of all time, 2012's The Avengers.
• Interview: Chris EvansPhoto: Don HarderThis post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project.
In a stunning reversal of popular wisdom, overzealous state legislators and interest groups are jeopardizing over $4 billion in economic activity and thousands of jobs promised in Missouri’s three-year-old renewable energy law. Missourians should consider the benefits of maximizing the state’s clean electricity production and override their mistaken legislators, reaffirming their commitment to local renewable energy.
In 2008, Missouri voters approved a state renewable energy standard with a two-thirds majority, requiring utilities to get 15 percent of their power from renewable sources within the state or nearby. But in January, the Republican-controlled legislature fired the first salvo against Proposition C, stripping the “buy local” provision from the law and allowing Missouri utilities to acquire renewable energy via accounting measures, rather than constructing wind and solar projects in the state. This summer, the law’s solar rebate program narrowly avoided a legal defeat when the Missouri Retail Association finally gave up its court battle.
Opponents to the renewable energy law have cited high costs, but their actions are heavy with irony: The economic benefits of keeping the “buy local” provision are at least 20 times higher than the savings from importing renewable energy from elsewhere.
The cost for in-state wind power would be less than 5 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh), including federal tax incentives. Even solar photovoltaics (PV) are affordable. With a 30 percent federal tax credit and the $2 state rebate (recently saved from the legal battle), solar PV can deliver electricity for 9 cents per kWh. For comparison, an average resident of Missouri currently pays around 8 to 9 cents per kWh of electricity.
There are meager savings from importing cheaper wind power instead of building locally. The cheapest wind power in the U.S. would save — at best — about 1.5 cents per kWh, compared to wind power generated in Missouri. Even if it could somehow be delivered to the state with zero transmission cost, meeting the state’s renewable energy goal with remote wind instead of local wind would save ratepayers $200 million.
But these savings are dwarfed by the economic value of in-state renewable energy. A single 2-megawatt wind turbine carries economic benefits of $2 million, according to the American Wind Energy Association. If the state met its renewable standard with in-state wind instead of imports, the economy would gain at least $4.2 billion and over 3,000 jobs.
Even an all-solar program would beat imported wind power by a 4-to-1 ratio. While the cost of solar electricity (and the state rebate program) would be higher — close to $1 billion — relative to imported wind power, meeting the state mandate with solar would balance the cost with an economic gain of $4 billion. And because solar is more labor-intensive, an all-solar 15 percent renewable energy program would also create nearly 80,000 jobs.
The benefits could rise even higher, to $13 or 14 billion, if wind and solar arrays built in Missouri were locally owned. The economic value of locally owned projects is 1.5 to 3.4 times higher than projects locally built but absentee-owned. Maximizing local wind and solar could create 65 times the savings from importing cheap wind power, and an all-wind, all-locally owned approach to the 15 percent standard would double the number of Missouri jobs created.
Given the economic advantages, Missouri voters would do well to pursue 100 percent renewable energy. A 2010 report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance found that the state could get 21 percent of its power from rooftop solar alone, and has enough high quality wind to power the state three times over. If Missouri met its electricity needs by maximizing rooftop solar and then using high-quality wind power, its economy would get at least a $27 billion boost — 20 times the savings from importing out-of-state wind. Maximizing solar and wind power production in this fashion could also create over 125,000 construction and maintenance jobs in the renewable energy sector.
Outsourcing Missouri’s renewable energy standard might possibly save a few pennies on electricity bills, but it’s penny-wise and pound-foolish, costing the state thousands of jobs and billions in economic activity. Missouri voters should ask for better.What better way to celebrate #TolkienReadingDay than to hear from the author himself?
Each year on March 25, Tolkien fans around the world mark the day by reading one of the many works penned by the popular Catholic author. According to the Tolkien Society, the annual event “has been organised by the Tolkien Society since 2003 to encourage fans to celebrate and promote the life and works of J.R.R. Tolkien by reading favorite passages.”
The date of March 25 has special significance to fans and Catholics alike. It is the day in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth when the One Ring is destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom and the evil empire of Sauron is defeated. In medieval Europe this day was believed to be the actual date when Christ died on the cross and destroyed death, opening the gates of heaven. Being a medievalist and a faithful Catholic, Tolkien likely knew the significance and specifically chose March 25 for the most earth-shattering event in his fantasy realm.
A most appropriate way to commemorate Tolkien Reading Day would be to listen to the author himself read portions of his great works. Thankfully, Tolkien recorded himself reading his own writings and left us with a rare treasure that brings his stories to life.
According to the website Brain Pickings, “In the summer of 1952, sixty-year-old J.R.R. Tolkien encountered a tape recorder for the first time [and]…So enchanted was Tolkien with this novel technology that he proceeded to record himself reading much of his work over the years to come.” A reader of that website compiled many of these recordings and shared them with Brain Pickings, which posted them online for all to enjoy.
So sit back and listen below to the entire compilation, which begins with one of the most famous lines from The Fellowship of the Ring:
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
Happy Tolkien Reading Day!Imagine that while a slick death spreads across the Gulf of Mexico, a group of respected reporters from America’s best-known media companies attend a pool party hosted by the VP of British Petroleum. Imagine that they take their kids to play with the kids of executives from BP and the oil industry, and that the journalists claim to have had a wonderful time and post pictures, and videos and tweets of their perfectly friendly interactions with the people who are responsible for the greatest environmental catastrophe in a generation.
Now imagine those journalists, a few days after the party, claiming that their integrity had not been compromised, and that they are perfectly capable of reporting accurately and aggressively on the doings of BP and the oil industry.
Would you believe them? Hold on to that answer, and consider this: No such meeting happened with BP. But on the grounds of the Naval Observatory last weekend, Vice President Joe Biden and the DNC hosted a pool party for their friends in the Washington journalism industry. It was “a nice way to spend a hot Saturday afternoon,” according to the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder.
It was also a great way for the journalists in attendance —Wolf Blitzer and Ed Henry of CNN, as well as David Sanger of the New York Times — to reveal that their integrity is water soluble.
Ambinder’s defense is the stock defense of all those involved in this seamy underworld of co-optation: This is how Washington works. Power holders like to socialize, and journalists only stand to gain by getting as close to them as they can whenever an opportunity presents itself. And in case anyone doubts that getting super-soaked by a boat-shoed Rahm Emanuel won’t lead to scoops that serve readers, well, what the hell do you know? Probably not as much as Ambinder, the editor of the politics channel at the Atlantic, a political consultant to CBS, and a former editor at ABC News. And now a flack for the Obama White House.
According to Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, “All of this just helpfully reveals what our nation’s leading ‘journalists’ really are: desperate worshipers of political power who are far more eager to be part of it and to serve it than to act as adversarial checks against it — and who, in fact, are Royal Court Spokespeople regardless of which monarch is ruling.”
Ambinder doesn’t see it that way. “A bunch of really good, hardened, news-breaking, interest-accountable holding reporters are in fact able to share more comfortable moments with people they cover.”
In other words, only the best journalists are fit for “convivial commingling” with the powerful. Lesser beings would come at the administration the next time around with a soft touch, a bashful smile and lowered eyes, like a recently deflowered newlywed facing his spouse for the first time in the post-coital light. But not Sanger, who engaged in “teasing banter” with Emanuel. And certainly not Ambinder, who still manages to eke out every now and again a piece with which the Obama administration is not completely happy. These men, and their sycophantic ilk, are seasoned tramps who like the sex, but know they can get it anywhere.
When his readers took him to task Tuesday morning for brushing off potential questions of bias, Ambinder turned on his critics. “I think that attending a nice Biden event does less damage to the profession than not acknowledging the ambiguities inherent in trying to live life as a young reporter in Washington. The reaction to my post has been uniformly negative, but then again, people rarely take the time to comment favorably.”
This mentality isn’t new, but for the first time, it’s news. Yes, Al and Tipper threw Halloween parties; Ted Kennedy threw Christmas parties, and the Cheneys threw occasional cocktail parties. And thanks to the restraint of journalists of yesteryear, their readers and viewers in podunk shitholes never knew that a secret relationship existed between press and politician; if they did know, they didn’t know to what extent.
They did not know about Anne Kornblut’s submissively saccharine pool reports or Richard Wolffe’s recurring acts of treason against the practice of honest journalism.
But they know now. So perhaps Ambinder et al should be commended for voluntarily revealing the extent to which they’ve been corrupted by Beltway culture.
The insidery pap that was on display last week at Biden’s abode isn’t just bad for America, it’s also killing journalism. And reporters who can’t see the line in the sand can bet their bought-and-paid-for asses that having to drop their chickens parmigiana at a moment’s notice won’t always be their biggest problem.The article contains characters who have appeared on the Canadian drama/action television series Flashpoint.
SRU [ edit ]
The Strategic Response Unit, modeled after the Toronto Police Service's Emergency Task Force unit,[1] is responsible for high-risk situations that cannot be resolved by regular police officers such as armed criminals, explosives, hostage rescue and counter-terrorism including support to other police officers when requested. There are 5 teams in the SRU, Team 1 being the one mainly featured in the show.[citation needed]
Main characters [ edit ]
Greg Parker [ edit ]
Greg Parker First appearance "Scorpio"
(episode 1.01) Last appearance "Keep the Peace (Part 2)"
(episode 5.13) Portrayed by Enrico Colantoni Information Full name Gregory Parker Nickname Boss Sarge Spouse Joanne Parker (ex-wife) Children Dean Parker (son) Career Department Police academy (instructor)
Previous:
SRU (Leader, Team One) (S1-5) Rank Sergeant
Sergeant Gregory "Greg" Parker is the Sergeant and leader of Team One. He is also Team 1's main crisis negotiator. As such, he prefers that situations be resolved through dialogue instead of lethal force. He learned the art of negotiation when he was able to survive a hard life under his strict father.[2] The stressful nature of his job took a toll on him and resulted in him turning to alcohol, resulting in his divorce and estrangement from his wife and son Dean. His ex-wife gained full custody of Dean and they moved to Dallas, Texas. She was still bitter and bans her ex-husband from seeing Dean for some time. In the Season 1 episode "Backwards Day" it is revealed that he had just seen his son for the first time in eight years,[2] regretting that he did not do so earlier.[3] Dean eventually goes back to Toronto on his own volition to ask his father to stop contacting him but witnesses Greg and the SRU on a call and realizes the importance of his father's job. Father and son reconnect as Dean began to visit Toronto regularly beginning in season 3. In the season 4 episode "A Call to Arms", he asks to move back to Toronto with his father.
Greg cares not only for his team, but for the lives of the innocents and those subjects who are about to make a mistake that will ruin an otherwise good life. He often puts the blame for a failed attempt to save a life solely on himself, something Ed frequently reminds him of. A recurring theme for him is that he always reminds his teammates to "keep the peace" during any SRU-led operation.
In the two-part series finale, "Keep the Peace", Greg is shot in the leg as he is holding off a mad bomber while trying to defuse his bomb. His leg wound forces him to retire from SRU, and a year later, he is teaching at the police academy. In a deleted scene, Dean and Ed's son Clark are both cadets at the police academy.
Ed Lane [ edit ]
Ed Lane First appearance "Scorpio"
(episode 1.01) Last appearance "Keep the Peace (Part 2)"
(episode 5.13) Portrayed by Hugh Dillon Information Full name Edward Tucker Lane[4] Nickname Eddie Family Roy Lane (brother) Spouse Sophie Lane Children Clark Lane (son)
Isabelle Lane (daughter) Career Department SRU (Leader, Team One) Rank Sergeant
Constable (S1-5)
Constable (later Sergeant) Edward "Ed" Lane is the veteran of the Strategic Response Unit team, he is the team's tactical leader in the field.[5] Ed's secondary role is to act as the crisis negotiator in direct contact with the subject(s). Though he has been trained to use lethal force, Ed is constantly troubled with the fact that he sometimes needs to use it to save the lives of others.[5][6]
Ed has some problems with his wife of fifteen years, Sophie, and teenage son Clark due to the nature of his job,[7] and the fact that he is strongly attached to his SRU colleagues. For example, he deliberately missed the anniversary of his in-laws and Clark's cello recital for work and a colleague's retirement party respectively. The couple begin to drift apart and there were hints at a separation but with the birth of their daughter Isabelle, they have reconciled.[8][9] Ed has a brother Roy, a detective with the Guns and Gangs task force.
In Season 5, Ed is forced to shoot an eighteen-year-old girl to stop her from killing her abusive father holding her mother at gunpoint. The team was eventually cleared as they were following protocol but for the rest of the season, Ed struggles with the guilt. In "Sons of the Father", the girl's mother expresses willingness to forgive him, but he refuses to accept her forgiveness. In "Forget Oblivion", Ed starts seeing the girl after he beats Sam during target practice. He finally sought counselling in the episode "Fit for Duty", after a hostage situation where he had froze when he was cleared to shoot an armed and increasingly violent schizophrenic man.
After the events of "Keep the Peace", Ed is promoted to Sergeant after a leg wound forces Greg to retire from SRU (as seen in the flash-forward). Clark eventually joins Dean Parker in following their fathers' footsteps, but the scene was deleted from the final cut.
Jules Callaghan [ edit ]
Jules Callaghan First appearance "Scorpio"
(episode 1.01) Last appearance "Keep the Peace (Part 2)"
(episode 5.13) Portrayed by Amy Jo Johnson Information Full name Julianna Callaghan Nickname Jules Family Unnamed father
Unnamed mother (deceased)
4 older brothers Spouse Sam Braddock[10] Children Sadie Braddock (daughter) Career Department SRU (Team One) Rank Constable
Constable Julianna "Jules" Callaghan was the only woman on Team One initially and is the primary love interest of Sam Braddock. Before Leah joined the team, Jules was the only woman and the sign outside the women's locker room read 'Jules' rather than 'Women'. In the later episodes of season two as well as in select other episodes, Jules often acts as an intelligence gatherer alongside Sgt. Parker. This role is necessary during times in which the subject(s) need to be properly profiled in order for the team to make the proper tactical choice. She's also a backup negotiator, and along with Ed and Sam, she is a trained sniper.[11] Prior to her transfer to the SRU, Jules served as an officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.[12] Jules has 4 brothers and mentioned in one episode that she was from Medicine Hat, Alberta.
Jules was shot by a sniper during season 2 episode 4, and was in the hospital for several weeks/episodes during the second season. During her period of recovery, she was briefly replaced on Team One by Constable Donna Sabine, played by Jessica Steen, who upon the return of Jules transferred to another team within the SRU which eventually led her to become the leader of Team 3.
Sam has been attracted to Jules ever since his recruitment to the SRU unit and the two of them dated over a period of several episodes, strengthening an already strong protective sense towards each other. It is revealed in the beginning of "Between Heartbeats" that Parker knows they are in a relationship, leading to a conversation where they discuss their future together versus their future in the team. The conversation is cut short, and later, when Jules is shot, Sam is devastated. When the rogue sniper takes Ed hostage, Sam is the one who makes the kill shot. He rushes to the hospital, where he holds her hand and cries saying he should've protected her. When Jules returns to the team after being shot, she breaks up with him, saying that they "can't keep breaking the rules forever" although, at the same time, reveals that she loves him. She broke up with him so that they could both stay with the 'family' (SRU Team 1), knowing that if their relationship was ever exposed one of them would have to transfer. In particular, Jules didn't like the idea of sneaking around behind the backs of their friends and teammates.[12] In the Season 4 premiere, it was revealed that Jules and Sam were getting back together because they realized their love for each other "wasn't going to go away" and kissed at Sam's apartment. This revelation was brought about by their intense questioning about their relationship from Dr. Toth, who was performing psychological evaluations in the Season 3 finale. At the end of the Season 4 premiere, Dr. Toth makes it a condition of the team's probation that they keep their relationship strictly professional. Through season 4, they are in a secret relationship that they are keeping hidden from the rest of Team One. In the episode 'The Cost of Doing Business' (4x10) Greg Parker finds out about their relationship and, at the end of the episode, he allows them to keep the relationship a secret provided their attitude doesn't change at work. In 'Priority of Life' (4x17), the work dynamic between Jules and Sam is addressed again when Jules is locked in a room with an armed subject as the confined lab quickly fills with Anthrax. Sam has an opportunity to bring an injured hostage or Jules to safety and, choosing to observe the Priority of Life Code, saves the hostage. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the rest of the team, Greg Parker has been suspended by Dr. Toth for concealing Jules and Sam's relationship. Greg and Dr. Toth watch the code being observed over a video feed, and Dr. Toth later tells Sam he will talk to Commander Holleran and try to allow them to stay on Team One together. At the end of Season 4 they receive the news that they're both allowed to stay on Team One together while being in a relationship. In "We Take Care of Our Own", it is revealed that Jules is pregnant. Jules and Sam get married in "Keep the Peace (Part 1)". In "Keep the Peace (Part 2)", a year later, their daughter Sadie is born.
Sam Braddock [ edit ]
Constable Samuel "Sam" Braddock was first introduced in the pilot episode as Team One's new recruit to replace the newly promoted Roland 'Rolie' Cray.[8] Due to his experience in Afghanistan, Sam believed that lethal force was the solution instead of using negotiation to resolve situations,[13] which some of his colleagues objected to.[3][14] His transfer to Team One is generally well received, however, and after training and guidance he becomes a valued member of the team, going out for drinks and joking with the rest of the team. Due to his military background, he is a highly skilled marksman and disciplined team player who is able to think on his feet and remain calm under duress, which the team comes to value. He is also nicknamed "Samtastic" by Spike after he aces his first shooting practice, which was run by Jules.[3] His main role is as a sniper on the team, although he has covered for Ed as the team's tactical leader in Season 4 while Ed recovered from an injury.[14] He is often Greg's next choice as "Sierra One" (the code for the designated sniper who will be taking the "kill shot" if needed) after Ed.
Sam was a police officer with 51 Division before joining the Canadian Army, where he reached the rank of Master Corporal.[15] He was a sniper with the Canadian Special Forces' Joint Task Force 2[14][15] and served on two tours of duty, one of which was with Task Force K-Bar, in Afghanistan.[16] Having lost comrades to suicide and friendly fire, he is particularly affected by cases involving veterans and would volunteer himself as the negotiator as he is able to relate to them, as shown in the episodes "Behind the Blue Line" and "We Take Care of Our Own".
Sam is generally reticent about his personal life; what little is known about his personal life is often from the information he divulges during negotiations with suspects. His father is a General who is apparently known by the sobriquet "Badass" and whose name has never been revealed. Sam once stated that he addresses his father as "Sir" at home[16] and often refers to him as "The General". Throughout the show Sam clashes with his father multiple times over the latter constantly asking Sam to go back to the military.[17] By Season 5, they seem to have reconciled, as Sam is seen speaking to his father on the phone about helping veterans, after closing a case where he had to talk down a suicidal veteran whose wife had died while he was deployed in Afghanistan.[18] It was revealed in the episode "Acceptable Risk" that he had a younger sister whom he, at the age of nine, witnessed being hit by a car while crossing the street. She died instantly, which has made him extremely protective of members of his team, most notably Jules. His other younger sister Natalie briefly stayed with him in Season 4 while looking for a job in Toronto. She appears to be the opposite of her older brother; Sam is disciplined and focused while she is free-spirited and carefree. At times Sam seems annoyed by his sister's spontaneity but he is protective of her. Jules surmises in the episode "Run, Jamie, Run" that Natalie was perhaps trying to find her own place in the world after having to grow up in a military family with a strict father and in the shadow of an older brother who is "the poster boy for perfection".
He is attracted to Jules from the beginning, and sometimes comes across as overprotective, partly because of his feelings and partly because of her gender (while he's not sexist and he values her skills, his experience watching his sister die has made him particularly protective of women).[19] In season 1 episode 10, he kissed Jules, and offered to drive her home after he realized she blamed herself for the events of the day. After that episode, Sam and Jules are in a relationship which they keep secret since they are not allowed to date because they are on the same team. It is revealed in the beginning of "Between Heartbeats" that Parker knows they are in a relationship, leading to a conversation where they discuss their future together versus their future in the team. The conversation is cut short, and later, when Jules is shot, Sam is devastated. When the rogue sniper takes Ed hostage, Sam is the one who makes the kill shot. He rushes to the hospital, where he holds her hand and cries saying he should've protected her. When Jules returns to the team after being shot, she breaks up with him, saying that they "can't keep breaking the rules forever". Sam understands, and sadly agrees to end the relationship, but even after the breakup, he is seen flirting with her on various occasions. He is incredibly protective of her and always wants to keep her safe. In the Season 3 finale, he and Jules are questioned by Dr. Toth (a psychological examiner with a specialty in team psychology) about their relationship, which prompts them to realize they still have feelings for each other. In the Season 4 premiere, Jules shows up at his apartment and he tells her that their love "isn't going to go away," and they kiss passionately. At the end of the Season 4 premiere, Dr. Toth makes it a condition of the team's probation that they keep their relationship strictly professional. Through season 4, they are in a secret relationship that they are keeping hidden from the rest of Team One. In the episode 'The Cost of Doing Business' (4x10) Greg Parker finds out about their relationship and, at the end of the episode, he allows them to keep the relationship a secret provided their attitude doesn't change at work. In 'Priority of Life' (4x17), the work dynamic between Jules and Sam is addressed again when Jules is locked in a room with an armed subject as the confined space quickly fills with Anthrax. Sam has an opportunity to bring an injured hostage or Jules to safety and, choosing to observe the Priority of Life Code, saves the hostage. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the rest of the team, Greg Parker has been suspended by Dr. Toth for concealing Jules and Sam's relationship. Greg and Dr. Toth watch the code being observed over a video feed, and Dr. Toth later tells Sam he will talk to Commander Holleran and try to allow them to stay on Team One together. At the end of Season 4 they receive the news that they're both allowed to stay on Team One together while being in |
that got me back into bicycling will screen on Wednesday, February 12th as the Laemmle Theaters show the classic bike movie Breaking Away as a fundraiser for the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition’s Operation Firefly to put lights on everyone’s bikes; 7:30 pm at the Laemmle NoHo 7, 5240 Lankershim Blvd in North Hollywood.
Celebrate a belated Valentines Day with Ride for Love: Explore the Changes of Watts, co-sponsored by Metro, C.I.C.L.E. and the East Side Riders. The ride will share love, community, and the joy of bicycling while exploring the history and changes of Watts; meet at 9:30 am at 10950 S. Central Ave.
Bike Newport Beach is hosting a Lunch in Laguna Beach Valentines Ride on Saturday, February 15th. Meet at the Newport Beach Civic Center for the 10 am, 18.3 mile moderately paced ride, returning about three hours later.
The first Los Angeles Bicycle Commuter Festival and Summit takes place on Sunday, February 16th from noon to 8 pm at The Village at Ed Gould Plaza, 1125 N. McCadden Place; tickets $10.
Also on the 16th, a fundraising ride from Pasadena to Silverlake will be held to benefit injured cyclist David Enright (see February 9th for more information). The ride will depart from Intelligentsia Coffee Bar in Pasadena at 10 am, riding by historical landscapes, quiet ravines, bustling neighborhoods, and the breathtaking Silverlake Reservoir, ending at the flagship Inteligensia in Silverlake. Suggested sponsorship is $200, however, sponsorship is not mandatory; all proceeds go to help Enright’s long road to recovery.
Get ready to get jiggy wit it as the LACBC invites you to celebrate their 16th birthday with a 1998-themed Bike Prom from 8 pm to midnight on Saturday, February 22nd at the American Legion Post 206, 227 N. Ave. 55 in Highland Park; earlybird tickets are $8 for LACBC members and $16 for nonmembers before February 7th.
Chinatown’s annual Firecracker Ride takes place on Saturday, February 22nd with rides of 20 and 30 miles; 943 North Broadway.
The LABC’s West Bike Ambassadors host a leisurely ride through Venice and Mar Vista on Sunday, February 23rd; the eight to ten mile ride starts at the Mar Vista farmer’s market at the intersection of Venice Blvd and Grand View at 10 am.
The San Fernando Valley Bike Club offers a twice monthly Campagni Group Ride — Italian for companion — on the second and fourth Sunday of every month. The moderately paced, leader-led no-drop ride on February 23rd offers a choice of 25 or 52 miles around Chatsworth Lake, departing from the Northwest corner of Nordhoff and Etiwanda in Northridge (CSUN Parking Lot B1) at 8 am sharp. Click here for more details (footnote d); lots of other great sounding rides on the list, too.
The 2nd Annual Bike Oven Fundraiser Auction takes place on Saturday, March 1st from 5 to 10 pm, 706 North Figueroa St. Donations of any kind are welcome, from auction items to refreshments.
Sunday, March 9th marks the return of the LA Marathon — and the world-famous Wolfpack Hustle: The Marathon Crash Race. As always, the ride meets at 3 am at Tang’s Donuts, 4341 W Sunset Blvd, rolling at 4 am through the closed marathon course to the coast.
C.I.C.L.E. hosts The Way Back When Ride: La Puente, co-sponsored by Metro and Bike SGV, on Saturday, March 15th. The family-friendly, leisurely paced ride meets at 10:30 am at the Park-N-Ride Lot at Stafford Street and Glendora Avenue in the City of Industry, rolling at 11 am.
Also on Saturday, March 15th, give your legs a test with the annual Malibu Seven Canyon Classic, with routes ranging from 50 to 100 miles, including a new fast, flat route along the coast. All rides start at 8 am.
Finish up the day with the first Streetsblog fundraiser of the year from 6 to 9 pm on Saturday, March 15th as they honor Streetsie Award winner Paul Backstrom, Transportation Deputy to Westside Councilmember Mike Bonin. The event, with a suggested donation of $100, will include Indian food, beer, wine and non-alcoholic beverages; location provided upon RSVP to [email protected]
The National Open Streets Summit is scheduled for Friday, April 4th through Sunday, April 6th in Los Angeles.
The next CicLAvia is scheduled for Sunday, April 6th on iconic Wilshire Blvd, LA’s historic main street. The free event rolls and walks from Downtown to the Miracle Mile with expanded hours from 9 am to 4 pm.
Fans of the Amgen Tour of California can ride the same official Stage 8 course the pros will when the L’Etape du California rolls on Sunday, April 6th in Thousand Oaks. Entry is limited to the first 1,500 riders to register.
The American Diabetes Association’s Tour de Cure Ship to Shore ride takes place on Sunday, April 27th at the Queen Mary, 1126 Queen’s Highway in Long Beach. Rides range from eight to 100 miles, with a $200 fundraising minimum.
On February 17th of last year, Damian Kevitt was hit by a minivan while riding his bike in Griffith Park. The driver attempted to flee the scene with Kevitt trapped under the vehicle, dragging him nearly 600 feet onto the 5 Freeway and leaving him for dead; the resulting injuries cost him a leg, and nearly took his life. On Sunday, April 27th, Kevitt is planning to finish the ride to raise funds for the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition and the Challenged Athletes Foundation.
The Ride 2 Recovery to benefit wounded vets returns to Southern California on Saturday, May 3rd in Thousand Oaks. The ride departs from the Lost Hills Sheriff Station, 27050 Agoura Hills Road, starting at 8 am; no cost for injured vets.
Mark your calendar for Glendale’s 2nd Annual Jewel City Fun & Fitness Ride on Sunday, May 18th, with rides ranging from seven to 45 miles.
LA’s most popular fundraising bike ride rolls on Sunday, June 22nd with the 14th edition of the LACBC’s Los Angeles River Ride. Ten rides of varying lengths, with starting points in Long Beach and Griffith Park, including two centuries, a 15-mile family ride and a free kid’s ride; discount prices available through May 27th.
Mark your calendar for the Peace Love & Family Ride for Crohn’s and Obesity in South LA on July 5th and 6th. Great cause; more details when they become available.
The year’s second CicLAvia takes place on Sunday, October 5th with a new variation on the classic Heart of LA route through Downtown LA, from Echo Park to East LA.
The first winter — or late fall, anyway — CicLAvia is also the first to roll through historic South LA on Sunday, December 7th, from the cultural center of the Southside in Leimert Park to the birthplace of West Coast Jazz on Central Avenue.
Find bike racing schedules and other cycling events at SoCal Cycling.
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EmailIt's a problem as old as time itself.
You want to drink an entire bottle of Prosecco without having to fanny about with refills, but you're worried that drinking it directly from the bottle will make you look like a complete and utter dickhead. You're right, it will.
However, it seems one enterprising online gift retailer has spotted this gap in the market and created a rather simple solution.
The Present Finder website's latest Prosecco-inspired product will no doubt have fizz-lovers up and down the country jumping for joy. Behold, the 750ml Prosecco glass.
Image credit: The Present Finder
This Christmas must-have is priced at £14.99 and will hold an entire bottle of your favourite bubbles. Perfect for those awkward festive get-togethers with family members you normally do your best to avoid.
The product description for the glass reads: "No more refills with this glass in your hand! Simply pop the cork and enjoy.
"Ideal for those extra special celebrations we also think this gift will hit the spot if you are too simply too fabulous to queue.
"We do always encourage responsible drinking but you'll be pleased to hear that this novelty gift comes in a fabulous gift box so it's a superb present even if you just want to poke a little fun.
"But you'll be pleased to hear our product testing team were more than satisfied to confirm that it does indeed hold a full bottle of prosecco so don't be shy to try it out for that big occasion!"
Image credit: The Present Finder
Prosecco fiends recently lost their shit when German budget supermarket chain Lidl offered shoppers the jaw-dropping deal of six bottles of the good stuff for no more than 20 quid ($26).
The steal of a deal had eager shoppers queueing up outside branches to get their hands on some discount fizz, at a price that works out at £3.33 ($4.31) a bottle. Admittedly, at £5.79 ($7.50) full retail, Lidl's Prosecco is hardly breaking the bank as it is, but in this cloudy financial climate every penny counts.
Darren Land witnessed the scenes at his local branch in Newcastle.
"Eager customers [were] queuing from the early hours to make sure they grabbed the bargain offer," he said.
"By five minutes after opening time they were down to half of the display stock as yet more and more customers arrived and flooded into the store.
"They were completely sold out within 10 minutes of opening."
Gillian Scott, also at the scene, commented: "There were at least 100 people in the queue by 7.45am. It was very good natured.
"The first person leaving the store received a cheer from the queue members. The boxes of Prosecco were gone by 8.05am, leading to many disappointed customers who expressed their disappointment most vociferously to the staff.
"Apparently, there will be more tomorrow."
Words: Paddy MaddisonThe Los Angeles Kings have agreed to terms with their current captain Dustin Brown for eight years with an AAV of a little over $5.75M. Brown is a 28-years old Right Wing, and the Captain of the Kings, who drafted him in the first round and 13th overall in 2003.
Dustin Brown has agreed to an eight-year extension with the #LAKings with an AAV of a little over $5.75M. — Chris Johnston (@reporterchris) July 18, 2013
Dustin Brown’s #LAKings contract breakdown: $7.25M, $7.25M, $7M, $6.5M, $5.5M, $5.5M, $4M and $4M. — Chris Johnston (@reporterchris) July 18, 2013
Dustin Brown has been credited with much of the LA Kings recent success, and played a pivotal role in securing the franchise’s first Stanley Cup in June 2012. Brown has spent his entire career with the Kings and it looks like he will be a captain of this team for the rest of his career. While all of the details are not yet clear about his deal, this does help LA Kings fans sleep better as their team has a solid core secured for a very long time with players such as Anze Kopitar, Mike Richards, Jeff Carter, Drew Doughty, Slava Voynov, and Jonathan Quick.
Brown has been known to be a rather “mean guy with a sprinkle of dirty” to his game. He is very tough to play against, and if your team plays against him during the playoffs, you will walk away not being his fan – and likely have many bruises to support your case. This may also be the reason he is one of the most liked LA Kings players. Brown has a knack for goal-scoring too. He is known to score clutch goals and has scored over 20 goals in his last five season, not including last “lockout” year as he only got 18 goals in 46 games (extrapolate to a full season and’s a shoe-in for a 30-goal year).
Brown’s stats with the Kings include 641 games played, 181 goals, 207 assists, plsu/minus -24, and 452 penalty minutes. He also has 50 play-off games played and 31 play-off points, including 20 in 20 games played during their Stanley Cup win.
Thanks for reading – as always feel free to leave comments below and follow me on twitter @LastWordOnNHL. Give the rest of the hockey department a follow while you’re at it – @lastwordBKerr, @IswearGaa and @BigMick99, and follow the site @lastwordonsport.
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Main photo credit: JulieAndSteve via photopin ccRatlam police honoured an 85-year-old woman, a former teacher in a government school, for her bravery after she helped them nab two thieves who were attempting to break into her house on Saturday night.
A widow, Premlata stays alone in Bank colony in Ratlam, as all her four sons are working in Mumbai.
According to a report in Bhaskar, on Saturday night, she was sleeping in her house when two young boys tried to sneak in. While they were cutting the grill, the noise woke her up. She saw the duo and charged towards them, splashing a bucket of water.
One of the accused caught Premlata by her hand, however, she managed to hold a stick that was lying nearby and hit both the criminals with it, simultaneously raising an alarm.
Her repeated calls woke up neighbours who immediately informed station road police. Within ten minutes, they reached her house and caught the thieves.
When Premlata was called to the police station to identify the criminals, she not only confirmed it was them but also asked the robbers to do sit-ups as punishment.
Looking at her bravery, police awarded her with Rs 5000 and a mobile phone.
SP GK Pathak said both the accused have been arrested and assured that action will be taken against them.~ Nyanko, this article seems to be quite empty! Unveil your knowledges on the Battle Cats Wiki by expanding it ~ Be brave! Taking just one step forward might totally change your world! This is a stub page, help wikia expanding this with information.
Battle Cats was a tower-defense game for Android and iOS platform and was deleted in both the US Google Play Stores and App Store.
Battle Cats - にゃんこ Information Developer(s): PONOS Platform(s): Android, iOS Release Date(s): November 15, 2012
Contents show]
Opening
"In 2019, the USA launched a secret project. To wake up Japanese people from being too peaceful, their new weapon was sent into Japan. Code name "Battle Cats".
Japanese people are too kind and nice to use cruelty weapons to the Battle Cats…
Only because of their cuteness..
Yes, Japanese leading-edge weapons are useless against Battle Cats.
By the way, I Saw the developer of the Battle Cats was interviewed on TV...
The interviewer asked, "Why is the new weapon a Cat?"
He answered: "I love pussy cats".
I know, it's insane..
My terrible hand writing made me stop writing this letter.
I have forgotten how bad my writing was,
My biggest mistake was that I wasn't sure who to write to.
When I look back on time, I used to have a ream becoming a major leaguer
Becoming a millionaire by running a SNS business is the dream I have now
Can't buy me love?
YES or NO
In either case,
I want to tell you one thing
"Battle Cats" are not really bad.
...That's all I want to say at the moment."
Characters
Cat Units
Cat Units only included 9 Normal Cats, the purchasable Special Cats, Valkyrie Cat, Bahamut Cat and Moneko. Most of the descriptions and some of the names were changed in The Battle Cats. The only special ability in this game is "Strong against Red Enemies", which was kept in later versions.
Enemy Units
There are 23 Enemy Units in the original Battle Cats, most of the names and description were changed due to inappropriate words. Since the original game only had 2 types of enemy: White/Normal and Red, enemies such as the Mooth or Assassin Bear are listed as a Normal Enemies.
Levels and Stages
Battle Cats features 3 Main Chapters, known as the Empire of Cats and Challenge Mode.
The Main Chapters takes place in Japan, with most of the stages named after a prefecture in Japan. All of the names and treasures are the same as those found in the current Japanese Version, Nyanko Daisensou.
Trivia
despite the game getting "taken down" the game was not taken down in Japan but instead updated to become the current Japanese version.
ReferenceThis article originally appeared in the Spring-Summer 2016 issue of Carolina Law.
For criminal defense attorney Jerry Buting ’81, being prepared for the unexpected turns of a trial is part of his day-to-day life. But no amount of research and planning could prepare him for the turn his life would take when he was featured in the popular Netflix 10-part documentary, “Making a Murderer,” in December.
The documentary chronicles the story of a Wisconsin man, Steven Avery, who served 18 years in prison for sexual assault and attempted murder before being exonerated in 2003. In 2005, Avery was arrested for the murder of a local photographer, Teresa Halbach. The series covers Avery’s arrest, prosecution and conviction in 2007. Buting and fellow defense attorney, Dean Strang, have been thrust into the limelight based on their work featured in the series.
“It has surprised me. As I look back on the series, we didn’t do anything any other good criminal defense attorney wouldn’t do,” says Buting, who receives thousands of emails from around the world and says he can’t walk half a block in New York without getting stopped.
Buting was interested in criminal law long before attending UNC School of Law. He was a forensic studies major at Indiana University but was interested in the substantive aspect of criminal law and procedure. “I knew I wanted to work with individual people as my clients and criminal law would allow me to do that,” says Buting.
While he didn’t know anyone in North Carolina, he had an affinity for the state where his mother was born. Buting visited law schools at Duke and Wake Forest before ultimately deciding on UNC. He was elected class president during his first year and was involved with the North Carolina Journal of International Law for a year. To actively support gender equality, Buting was also one of the only male members of the student organization Women in Law.
It was his experience with the law school’s clinical program that had the biggest impact on him personally and professionally. “I was able to work with real clients on a string of cases in several counties—Orange, Wake and Durham,” says Buting. “It was great exposure.”
His time in the clinics also introduced him to the prisons in North Carolina, an experience that would serve him well in his chosen career. He remembers the stark contrast between the bullet-riddled glass of Central Prison and the long halls of the Butner Federal Correctional Complex — both sending the psychological message that he was entering a different kind of world.
His first summer job during law school was a study on whether the death penalty was applied fairly in homicide cases. Buting and other students studied every homicide case in North Carolina for a one-year period to determine what made a case a capital offense. The study ultimately showed that the designation was dependent on the prosecutor and the county.
After law school, Buting had hoped to stay in North Carolina working as a public defender, but at that time staffed public defender programs were in the infancy stage with five offices in the state and no open positions. Buting still applied for a position and studied for the bar in North Carolina but ultimately was recruited to join the public defender program in Wisconsin. He met his future wife, another public defender, on his first day on the job. Since then he has called Brookfield, Wisc., home and opened Buting, Williams & Stillings, S.C., a criminal defense firm specializing in difficult or challenging cases.
The Steven Avery case featured in the documentary has propelled Buting and the overall criminal justice system into the spotlight. The series raises a number of questions Buting hopes will lead to discussions within the law community about the legality of interrogating a juvenile without the parents’ knowledge and whether or not prosecutors should be allowed to hold press conferences prior to jury selection. He also hopes the series will educate people on the importance of jury duty and the fact that it shouldn’t be seen as an inconvenience.
“By not providing an education process on serving or a reasonable wage for people to serve, decisions will be made by people who don’t necessarily represent the cross section of a community,” Buting says.
With so many television shows and movies depicting defense lawyers as villains, Buting is pleased the documentary is presenting a different view. “There aren’t really any defense lawyer role models,” says Buting. “I hope people will see that you can do your job ethically, honestly, with integrity and represent your client. I am humbled by it.”
Buting has been married for 26 years and has two children in their 20s. He says he is grounded in his Catholic faith and
his calling to defend his clients in an honest way – his driving motivator.
His advice to other alumni or students embarking on their law careers: “Follow your heart. Try to make a difference in whatever way you can, whether that is through law, church or community work.”UC Berkeley emeritus professor of music Richard Taruskin accepted a Kyoto Prize in arts and philosophy last week from the Inamori Foundation for his contributions to the study, performance and critical discourse of early music, modern Russian music and Western music history.
He noted that he was the first musicologist to receive an award that, when given to musicians in the past, has gone to composers and performers. Taruskin went on to say that an effective musicologist must be a trained musician as well as a trained scholar.
Past Kyoto Prize recipients from the music field include composer John Cage and jazz musician Cecil Taylor, both of the United States. Computer theorist Richard Karp of UC Berkeley, also a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, won the prize in 2008 in its advanced technology category.
Taruskin expressed gratitude for the honor, which he said provides encouragement and an incentive to be worthy of the prize.
The Kyoto Prize is an international award to honor those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind. It is presented annually by the non-profit Inamori Foundation in the categories of advanced technology, basic sciences and arts and philosophy. The prize is accompanied by a cash prize and a a 20-karat gold medal.
The 2017 laureates were honored during the 33rd Kyoto Prize week, November 8-17, which featured an awards ceremony, commemorative lectures and workshops.Chances are it’s more like your skills are consolidated into one of the three buckets, based on what you studied and/or did before PM:
That’s a fine elevator pitch of your job, but it isn’t a fine way to approach your own learning. Almost no one is equally strong in all areas — most people fall into a flavor.
It’s really tempting to say you sit at the middle of Technology, Design and Business. This is what most people assume Product Managers are.
First, you need to figure out where you are as a Product Manager.
Since those are basically how you learn anything, I’ve broken them down in a way to think about it for Product in particular. This guide is hopefully a way to go from Product 101 (which we’ve got covered) to Product 401.¹
I’ve been experimenting. Here’s how to get better at Product in four easy steps.
We lack content on “how to get better” and I think it’s because everyone does it differently. Companies define it differently, it reports to different departments, and Product Managers have widely divergent backgrounds. Career ladders don’t all look the same. You’d need more than a lifetime to learn every skill that might be useful.
Too much Product content still relates to “what is “Product” (ugh), “how to get into Product” (ok cool, but then what), and “do we really need Product anyway?” (double ugh).
This obviously isn’t a perfect model. I’d lump anthropologists more towards the design bucket. I’d lump data scientists more towards PMM or Engineer. It depends. You can fill in the circles for yourself based on which skills you have. Here’s a piece that outlines some example skills in each area. As you grow, each circle will become fuller.²
That’s where most people stop when they think about how to set their baseline as a PM. There’s two other components.
The one nobody talks about is how others currently perceive you.
When I first started working, I had a piece of paper that said “engineer.” This meant my engineering skills were always vastly overestimated, and my design skills were typically underestimated.
The perception matters because it can impact what work people give you, how they will judge your performance, and how much they will trust the results. It may not be worth your time to prove someone “wrong” if they’ve decided you’re bad something (even if you aren’t!) — or it might be absolutely critical.
Then, to use a phrase I hate, “soft skills.”
There are a ton of so-called hard skills that go into Product — using SQL, running a great user interview, figuring out pricing. Yet, more so than in other disciplines there are interpersonal things to keep in mind.
Is your team motivated? Are you good at keeping the team motivated?
How much do people “like” you — management, peers, subordinates? Can you manage up/down/out?
How strong are your written communication skills?
I cannot emphasize how much these things matter for how you’re perceived as a Product Manager.
So before you decide what you want to learn, think through these three things to figure out what you’re good at, and what you aren’t good at.
Business/Design/Technical Skills Others’ Perception of your skill set Interpersonal skills
You aren’t going to be good at everything, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t good at Product. There are plenty of things some people would say are “crucial” that I still can’t do.
Decide what to learn next.
Once you know where you’re at, you need to decide what to learn next. Here’s four angles to try:
(1) Where do you struggle now?
The easiest way to know this is “my boss asked me to learn to X” or “my boss says I have to get better at X,” but things usually aren’t that straightforward in Product.
Instead, I try to look at it for myself. I’ve been a long time fan of Josh Elman’s work on a Product Manager’s job:
The weird line breaks are mine, it’ll make sense in a second.
I think this is the single best way to assess if you’re doing your job as a PM. If you aren’t already sold on that, go read that piece and come back (and if you haven’t read it before, go read it!)
If one of those pieces feels weakest, chances are there’s something you can do to do your job better. I bucket them into Product areas:
So then you can dive into it to try to figure out a smaller aspect to learn first:
If your Product team doesn’t feel connected to the company, are you missing an aspect of business strategy? How do your metrics align to the overall metrics? Do you talk to the sales team enough? Have you done a sales call to see how it goes and build empathy?
It’s okay the thing you want to learn is broad — even as broad as “I have no idea what finance is.”
(2) Where is the company is going next?
Sometimes there isn’t a big issue at work! Sometimes it feels like the team is going smoothly.
That’s a great time to try to intentionally learn something. If you want to it to help the company, it’s also a great time to break out the Wayne Gretzky sentiment — “Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is.”
If you’ve got one, you can skip to deciding how to learn it.
(3) Play to your strengths.
Sometimes you aren’t in a job, or aren’t particularly interested in learning something to make that job better. It’s good to have ways to decide what to learn that aren’t just related to your job.
I think the most fun way to learn (and probably the one I do most) is based on what I’m curious about.
This is a pretty popular technique. It’s more likely you’ll stay motivated to work on it. It’s also been shown that people are hired for their strengths, not for their lack of weaknesses.
(4) Address weaknesses.
That said, addressing your weaknesses can still be a valid path. Especially if they’re interfering with other growth.
For a long time, I felt really anxious about getting development environments set up. Actually writing some code, fine. Getting ready to write code, thinking about writing code, not so fine. I made it my new year’s resolution so I’d be forced to be more comfortable.
Recap
There are at least four good ways to figure out what to learn next:
Where you struggle now. Where your company (or just you) is going next. Reinforcing your strengths. Reducing your weaknesses.
Once you’ve figured out what to learn, you have to figure out how to learn it.
Decide how to learn it.
Once you’ve figured out what you want to learn, you decide how to learn it. Unfortunately most PMs skip straight to this step.
Instead, ask yourself these five questions, based on what you’ve decided you want to learn:
Each of these is a spectrum. If you have your idea in mind, I’d draw out five spectrums so you can put an “X” on them as you go through this.
Informal vs. Formal Learning
One end of the spectrum is “I’m an autodidact, I can teach myself anything.” The other is “I like to sit in a formal classroom with an expert.”
Personally, I lean far more towards the right. I wish I was great at teaching myself things, but I do better when I’m accountable and have resources available.
Tactical vs. Strategic Knowledge
If you wrote down before that you don’t know what finance is (I said it was fine!) that’s more a strategic problem. You probably want to understand the underpinnings of how to think through your business model, or how to make money. If you wrote down something like “I need to do payroll this month” that would be tactical.
Strategic is a way to add another perspective or another way of thinking to wha you’e doing. Tactical is more likely to solve a problem in the short term.
Adjacent vs. Not
It is easier to learn things that are close to what you know. Let’s say you wrote down before that you’re very strong in running A/B tests. You also just heard a talk about multi-arm bandit tests. That’s directly adjacent to what you were doing.
Now say you said before you were good at A/B tests, but you wrote down you wanted to learn how to do a good user interview. Not adjacent.
How much do I need this?
I think of this as a spectrum between “nice to know” and “mission critical.”
If you decided to learn something for pure interest sake (doubling down on strengths) and it doesn’t seem like it’ll impact you in the short term, that’s towards nice to know.
If you don’t think your product will succeed unless you figure this out, that’s mission critical.
Do I need credibility?
Last one is if you need credibility or not. In some working environments, being able to “do the work” is enough. In others, you need a formal degree to get the title or promotion you want.
Putting it together.
Once you’ve drawn this out five times, you end up with a picture like this for your skill. Let’s say I’d written down “Building a Financial Model” back in 2014, pre-MBA.
I personally like to learn formally. Understanding how to make a product make money (vs. be something people liked) was more strategic. It had nothing to do with what I’d done before — engineering and design. It was pretty important to me to become a better product leader. To some extent no one wants a spreadsheet that you just made up. Having some credibility when you make a financial model is nice.
Only once you’ve gotten here should you start trying to figure out the right place to learn. This is the last possible step in deciding how to learn.
I bucket the ways to learn into five major areas:
It’s not just about reading the list and deciding what sounds best. Each will be better depending on the type of thing you are trying to learn.
An MBA was a good way for me to learn how to make a financial model, but only because I like learning that way, it was a big new area for me (not like anything I’d done!) and I thought it was important. That’s not going to be the case for everyone.
An MBA would not have been a good way for me to learn to manage. That was done much more effectively by a combination of actually managing a team (new job) and self directed education.
“Should I get an MBA?” isn’t a question.
It’s an answer to “How can I learn to make products that people love, AND generate sustainable enterprise value?”
Repeat.
As soon as you feel confident in your new knowledge and skills, you can start this process over again. I’ve taken new jobs. I’ve gone to school for all of the “core” product disciplines — engineering, design, and business. I’ve taken other, unrelated classes. I’ve asked for advice from friends and mentors. I’ve read books. I’ve used everything I learned so far and tried to teach it to others to see how applicable it was. All of it has helped make me the PM that I am today.
If you take one thing from this, as a Product Manager, please never ask yourself “do I need an MBA?” or “do I need to go to a code bootcamp?”
Instead, ask yourself,
“What’s the best thing I can learn next? How can I learn that most effectively?”
This framework is the culmination of my entire career trying to learn about Product.³ Found it helpful? I’d appreciate your support (one week only!) for my next set of writing.This INFERNO is heating up – check out the latest from the Horus Heresy Weekender!
Looks like the battle for Prospero is on the way next! And you know what that means…PRIMARCH TIME!
via Battlebunnies 2-7-2016
More info on the Horus Heresy Timeline
Reports are in that it is indeed the Primarch of the Space Wolves – Leman Russ! That is also not his final head – it’s just a WIP. Battlebunnies also had some boots on the ground checking out the Seminar for Inferno and here is what they are reporting (unedited):
via Battlebunnies 2-7-2016
New stories from Black Library soon for Space Wolves.
Gav Thorpe is working on audio called The 13th Wolf. Different side of Prospero Burns this time.
Chris Wraight working on book on Leman Russ and Space Wolves during the Heresy.
Involving one or maybe more Primarchs. Including some hes not got on with…… Graham McNeill nearly done with Crimson King! Also working on more Magnus based stories. Russ will get an axe and a sword.
Inferno. This Mechanicum planet is targeted as he is associating with Magnus. Sisters of Silence will be a small allies list – not a “full force”.Space Wolves attack Arkhadia (Mechanicum world) – part of the campaigns in. This Mechanicum planet is targeted as he is associating with Magnus. Custodians are their own elite force, not like Space Marines 2.0! The Emperor saved the Custodes the best toys so look forward to heavy master weaponry. It’s a highly lethal mobile force. They were designed to kill Space Marines if something goes wrong. 100% loyal to the Emperor, even beyond free will. Playtest – 5 Custodians against 20 Tactical Marines, none of the Tacs were alive to fight back in combat!!! Not the full rules im sure – again, it’s still playtesting.
Rules will come for Spireguard, possibly not models though. Might be a variant to the Solar Auxilia models.Space Wolf Characters unconfirmed apart from Leman Russ, Freki and Geri. Thousand Sons have a plan in their playstyle, not fully confirmed, still playtesting, be less of them, not usually in attritional warfare. Possibility of picking your option for Psyker-yness, that may improve equipment/weapons. Tutilaries/Familiars will have above listing type (equipment/weapons). Sisters of Silence almost like Assassins hunting down all psykers.
During Heresy there will be limitation on unit types (they did not have access to certain things around this time) for Space Wolves, as their way of war gives them limitation to certain things. BUT! Space Wolves will have their own bespoke consuls and unit types!Earlier this month, Comcast told the Federal Communications Commission that it needs the green light to purchase Time Warner Cable as a way to stay competitive with Google, Netflix, and others.
Nevertheless, in its latest quarterly earnings report published on Tuesday, Comcast reported that it made $1.9 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2014—an 18 percent increase year-over-year.
“Our operating momentum is continuing as we enter 2014 and is highlighted by our second consecutive quarter of video customer growth, as well as strength in high-speed Internet and business services,” Comcast CEO Brian L. Roberts said in a statement.
The cable giant also noted that it had added 383,000 new Internet customers during the three-month period, leading to a “revenue growth of 9 percent,” which it described as being its “strongest rate of growth in two years |
ari off the edge and guard Lane Taylor with a spin move but was defeated by starters Marshall Newhouse and T.J. Lang.
"I had a couple pass rushes today and I felt pretty good doing them," Neal said. "I don't think I lost a step or anything like that, which is a good thing."
Neal is agreeable to playing defensive tackle or linebacker on passing downs.
"It doesn't matter if I have my hand down or I'm in two-point (stance)," added Neal. "I just feel confident that I can use what I have, which is my athleticism."
Little deal:Vince Young's one-year contract is for the veteran's minimum of $715,000 and contains no guaranteed money.
If Young lands on injured reserve, his base salary of $715,000 will be reduced to $383,000. Most rookies have so-called "split" contracts in their first and second seasons, but that would be most unusual for a 30-year-old quarterback to be handed one.
Because of the NFL's veteran salary benefit, Young is counting $555,000 against the Packers' salary cap.
In town: Former NFL tight end Ernie Conwell gathered the players around him after practice Wednesday at Nitschke Field and delivered a 15-minute address in his role as a field representative for the NFL Players Association.
"Ernie came in and gave us the details of what they've been discussing with the NFL," said Mulligan. "It was a quick skim of what they're doing."
Several players said part of the discussion involved testing for HGH.
Conwell played for the New Orleans Saints in 2003-'04 when McCarthy was their offensive coordinator.
Wide receiver Jordy Nelson serves as the Packers' player rep, and cornerback Tramon Williams is the alternate.
"It was after practice and it was kind of hard to focus," Daniels said. "Guys are tired. You see a lot of eyes rolling. He said something about testing guys, but I didn't pay attention to it because I don't take anything."
Bigger man: Guard Josh Sitton didn't participate in the pass-rush drill. He experiences knee soreness at times, and it's a long camp.
Late last week, Sitton said his pass blocking clearly wasn't as good yet on the left side as it had been on the right side.
"That's a big switch," said Sitton. "Footwork and hand placement — that's something that will continue to get better."
In the 2012 off-season, Sitton said his weight got as low as 300 pounds. He reported for training camp at 310.
This year, Sitton is back up to 322 after making a concerted effort to add bulk and reinforce his drive blocking.
"I just wanted a little bit more power and probably a little more strength," Sitton said. "I put on a lot of muscle plus fat, too. I was squatting a lot heavier and benching a lot heavier than I normally do."
Tom Silverstein of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.WASHINGTON — The commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, John A. Koskinen, expressed regret Wednesday for management mistakes but called an attempt by House Republicans to impeach him “improper,” warning that such threats would discourage people from government service.
“A lot of people are going to say, ‘Why should I risk my career or my reputation to do public service?’ in that context,” Mr. Koskinen told the House Judiciary Committee at its third hearing to consider arguments by conservatives in Congress that he be removed from office.
He also rejected Republicans’ calls for him to resign, but said he would leave office if the next president so wishes. Otherwise, Mr. Koskinen’s term ends in November 2017.
The commissioner fielded hostile questions and comments from Republicans for nearly four hours at the hearing, which was scheduled last week by House leaders to persuade conservatives to shelve their demand for an immediate impeachment vote by the full House. No executive branch official below the cabinet rank has ever been impeached, and not even a cabinet member has faced such proceedings in 140 years.Associated Press
Concord — House Republicans delayed a debate and vote on Thursday on legislation that would add protections for transgender people against discrimination.
Speaker Shawn Jasper had pushed to table the bill, citing concerns that men would exploit the legislation to enter women’s restrooms.
Tabling a bill means it receives no debate or up or down vote.
Democratic Rep. Ed Butler, its prime sponsor, urged his colleagues not to sidestep debate on the issue. A second effort by Democrats later in the day to debate the bill also failed.
“Our job is not to skirt challenging issues but to engage them,” Butler told his colleagues.
The bill would’ve barred discrimination based on gender identity in housing, employment and public accommodations at places such as restaurants or movie theaters.
Eighteen other states, including every other New England state, have similar protections in law. New Hampshire provides protections already based on race, religion, sexual orientation and several other factors.
“There’s a lot of fear and misunderstanding, and that’s unfortunately what seems to lead the way instead of just listening and debating,” said Jennifer Huckman, the mother of a transgender teenager.
Republican leadership argued that the bill was flawed and could have unintended consequences.
The bathroom argument caught fire among conservative lawmakers, mirroring arguments made during similar debates nationally and in states such as Texas and North Carolina. New Hampshire Republican Governor Chris Sununu said on Wednesday he had no position on the bill.
“This bill is poorly written and raises too many concerns,” said House Speaker Pro Tempore Sherm Packard, a Republican.
Jasper had argued the legislation would make it hard for men to protect their wives and daughters if they saw other men entering women’s bathrooms under the guise of being transgender.
Such situations do not appear to be happening on a widespread basis in states that have similar protections.
Cornerstone Action, a conservative advocacy group that is against the bill, praised the tabling decision and warned lawmakers against trying to revive the bill.
“This morning’s vote to table (the bill) is a temporary reprieve for the many New Hampshire voters who have spoken up with their concerns about the bill during the past week,” board member Shannon McGinley said.
It would take a two-thirds majority vote to bring the bill up for a debate.The United State Postal Service (USPS) was created in 1775 -- a year before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In 2006, Congress forced the USPS to pre-fund 75 years of health care benefits in three years, and gave itself oversight powers.
This week, the USPS said it was likely to default on a $5.5 billion payment, and another $5.6 billion payment due in September, unless Congress exercised said oversight powers and allow it to resolve the mess, made worse by declining revenues over the past few years.
Congress promptly adjourned. A bill responding to the Postal Service's plight passed the Senate in April, but the GOP-dominated House hasn't taken it up.
Meanwhile, calls to privatize the USPS are being heard from mainstream outlets and on the Right. Bloomberg recently published a piece on the subject from Peter Orszag. Much on the Right issues from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)and a group called the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation (IRET), which is funded by the Scaife Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, and the Charles G. Koch Foundation.
It's hard, in this pass, not to wonder if the Right Wing is forcing the issue by creating a crisis, then pressing for action. This, after all, has been its strategy for shrinking the Federal Government -- systematically starve it for money by cutting taxes and larding it with debt, then call for drastic reforms to stave off disaster, a la the Ryan Plan.
There's even what amounts to a business plan for privatizing the USPS, published by the AEI in 2011, called "Return to Sender: Reforms for the Failing Postal Service." The premise: The USPS is obsolete and doomed, and the taxpayers' interests have to be protected by getting it off the government's books as soon as possible.
Written by a Cornell University associate professor named R. Richard Geddes (Mr. Geddes also writes for the Hudson and Cato Institutes), it lays out a step-by-step outline for moving from today's government agency to, eventually, a public, stock-based corporation. It's all based on the idea that if the USPS was a private company, it could survive and even prosper in the world of e-mail. In fairness, Mr. Geddes does observe that many of the USPS's problems were created by the 2006 law.
But the idea raises a question: If Geddes and the AEI are correct and the USPS is such a bottomless money pit, why would anybody want it? Who ever heard of buying a service company with no upside? What's in it for them?
Well, real estate, actually, and Geddes and every commenter hints at this. Privatizing the USPS has the potential of being one of history's biggest -- and most profitable -- real estate deals ever.
Here's how it could work.
When the USPS became a private, investor-owned corporation, it would be split into two entities, an operating company that handles mail and packages, and a separate company that owns the real estate. The share prices paid by investors would probably reflect the company's discounted revenues -- not the value of the real estate.
The real estate company would then sponsor a series of vehicles -- real estate investment trusts, probably, or even limited partnerships -- each appealing to a specific subset of investors.
These in turn would lease some of those properties back to the USPS, and lease or sell others. That first would increase the operating expenses of the USPS, but also reduce its taxes, since leases are tax deductible. It would be billed as a way to subsidize the operating company, preserving universal mail delivery, jobs, and benefits. The unions would love it.
Then the real estate companies would take the cash flow from the USPS lease payments, and the other lease payments, and turn it into bonds.
Since the leases would be on commercial real estate, the income would be sheltered from taxes for years, because as commercial property, it could be depreciated. When the bonds matured, the company could lease the properties all over again, or sell them. The properties not treated this way would either be sold, re-developed, or re-developed and then sold.
How big would this deal be? Well, the USPS leases 24,671 square feet of space -- mostly small rural post offices -- and that property wouldn't be affected. But it also owns 8,621 properties (totaling about 318 million square feet of interior space), and about 500 acres of vacant land.
Most of that owned real estate is prime, downtown real estate in every town and city in America -- the main Post Office and the neighborhood branches in cities, suburban branches, and big operations centers. The land is scattered all over the country, but pretty much none of it is in wilderness areas.
How much is it worth? Nobody really knows. The USPS, like every government entity, doesn't regularly appraise its properties. But there is an estimate nosed about by the Right; the IRET reported in a 2003 paper that the USPS carried its properties on its books at $15 billion, and that in 1999, it reported that properties it sold went for about seven times book value.
So by the Right Wing's estimates, the owned USPS property portfolio is worth about $105 billion.
A deal like that is too big to be done all at once; it would flood the market and undercut itself. It would have to be done slowly, quietly, and under the radar -- hopefully so no one notices. If, as business prospects for the USPS fell, it eventually collapsed -- well, the organizers could always say the USPS was a sinking ship, and it sank.
But the real estate company wouldn't sink. And the deal could be used as a template for other privatizations -- your local Board of Education, for instance
Unless, that is, the Congressional oversight committee let the USPS do it itself. In that case, it would probably never have to worry about money again.Sonia Bailley has written a piece for Vlad Tepes about the Islamic significance of Thursday, June 23rd, the 17th day of Ramadan. See the post at Vlad’s place for notes, plus more examples of the hijinks that Muslims have gotten up to in the past on this wonderful, peaceful holy day in the Islamic calendar.
Operation Badr — Beware the 17th of Ramadan — June 23, 2016
by Sonia Bailley
“Badr will come again, O Muslims!”
If ever there was a date to be remembered and commemorated in Islam, it’s the 17th of Ramadan. This year it falls on Thursday, June 23rd, beginning Wednesday evening at sundown — same day as Brexit.
This date holds great military and spiritual significance within Islam, as it was on this day that the greatest and most significant battle in Islamic history took place: the Battle and Victory of Badr in 624 AD (about 150 miles south of Medina), in which 313 Muslims defeated 1,000 non-Muslims from the Koresh tribe of Mecca who just wanted to return home safely from Syria with their trade caravans.
This battle marked the first significant military victory for Islam, which solidified Mohammed’s position as ruler of the first Islamic State in Medina.
It was a spiritual victory as well. The Koran (8:11-18) discusses how Allah sent blessings to guide and purify his Muslim warriors in preparation for battle. However, Allah also sent thousands of angels to help his warriors win by making their hearts more firm to Allah’s command to kill unbelievers, and by removing all uncertainty and fear within them. It was also the time when Mohammed mandated the killing of captives in battle.
Dates are significant for jihadists. The 17th of Ramadan is a date that Westerners should become familiar with, and take heed. Jihadists are ramping up attacks against the West during the Islamic military month of Ramadan, especially now that the caliphate has been re-established.
The 17th of Ramadan is a date jihadists hold very close to the heart, a date they memorialize… and wouldn’t think twice about reliving it in order to inflict more horrific carnage upon unbelievers.If I have to hear another breakdown of the state of the world the last time the Golden State Warriors won in San Antonio during the regular season, I might go crazy.
You say iPhones weren't popular? Facebook wasn't even around yet? How did people complain about the refs during the game without twitter or post vines of Chris Mullin jumpers?
We get it: it's been awhile.
Besides wanting to see the Warriors end the San Antonio Spurs' home winning streak (we would have printed Bucks-like t-shirts in Warriors colors "The Streak is over!"), the Warriors wanted to end all the talk around the league that they are pretenders. The impact of this loss doesn't reflect the conversations it will bring. Golden State STILL HOLDS a three game lead in the standings. They STILL ARE on pace for the best record in the history of a regular season. All that said, the conversation now is "Can Curry perform against Popovic's defense?" and "Have the Warriors been exposed?"
The answer to both of these questions is hopefully and optimistically "no".
We have seen it time and time again over the last two years: sure Golden State has been dominant, but they also respond to adversity so much better than teams give them credit for. After the loss in Detroit, they responded with a whooping in Cleveland and Chicago. After the loss to the Milwaukee Bucks, they won 11 of the next 12. The staff has these guys focused, prepared and aware of the work they have to put in.
With confidence the team will recover, this only leaves the concern for the fans.
Those who watched all 48 minutes of that defensive slugfest have to be waking up and going through the four stages of losing to the Spurs. It's a common process: they have won 44 straight home games, so much like the Warriors, many teams walk away from their games scratching their heads. We break down those stages of grief and let fans know "Hey guys! It will be ok!"
Stage #1: Anger
The refs sucked last night! Danny Green traveled! So did Kawhi on the pass in the 4th!
Ok, sure. The refs didn't have the greatest of nights last night. They blew a few calls around the hoop, but in all honestly they missed calls in both directions. Let's call it equal opportunity horribleness.
The more important feature of their bad officiating was the slapfest that they allowed on Steph Curry. Danny Green, Tony Parker and Patty Mills were allowed to play "I'm touching you" all night long sticking with Curry and simply getting in his head. Other teams that employ this technique are the Los Angeles Clippers with Chris Paul, and they too seem to get away with the all night mugging. Call this a "Curry Defense", but there are hand check rules for a reason, and nobody seemed to care about them. The Spurs finished with a 15-8 advantage at the line, but many of those came at the end of the game. This game was pretty much called "hands off" for most of the evening, and the low score showed.
Well everyone, the Spurs won't be able to get away with it in Oakland. And if the refs set the tone early after Kerr makes them aware of it next time, they won't be able to get away with it in SA either.
Stage #2: Causality
Well of course the Warriors lost! They were missing Iguodala! They were missing Bogut!
This is quite true. If you add in Festus Ezeli, you are talking about three core role players in the Warriors rotation. That is a big number of minutes and vet leadership coming off the bench.
However... would Andrew Bogut have seen much of the floor? The Warriors started with an augmented version of the lineup-of-death with Brandon Rush at the 4, Draymond Green at the 5. Bogut MIGHT have seen some time, but like the NBA finals, he becomes less effective in certain matchups. Look at the other side of the court: Tim Duncan didn't get the start for the 3rd time in his career. He scored one point.
This might not have been an optimal game for big men. Iguodala was missed, but maybe not as much as you think. Rush played great defense all night long and ended the night with the best shooting numbers on the team. The second unit runs a better offense with Iguodala on the floor, so his impact will be felt in more subtle ways than scoring, but Rush did fill in admirably.
Teams are never at full strength. To blame this loss on Iguodala and Bogut missing is a bit short-sighted, but still has some merit. The Warriors had their core three all-stars, and that was enough to keep them in this game until late into the fourth quarter.
Stage #3: Dismissal
This game didn't mean much. It was on the back end of a back-to-back and 5 games in 7 days. The playoffs will be different.
Yes, the Warriors have a tough schedule right now. This Texas trip is not an easy one to handle after a long season, in the middle of a rush of games heading toward the end of the season. They played a high-paced game in Dallas on Friday before heading the San Antonio in prime time, and predictably their jumpers weren't going in as effectively as hoped.
The playoffs however will be quite similar. Add in another 15 games of regular season, then the process of getting through 2-3 more series before the Warriors will possibly face the Spurs again. Fatigue is always a factor, however these are professional NBA players who play back-to-backs all the time. Curry even sat out the 4th quarter on Wednesday against the Knicks, and in reality played 37 minutes of the game last night. He should have been ready, and even admitted it was more his shooting touch being off than fatigue.
The concern here is that the Warriors try to shoot their way out of trouble. If the threes are not falling - 9-for-36 on the night - they need to keep attacking the basket to manufacture shots. The Spurs can focus in on the outside shooting if you show that you will settle for a three before attacking the hole and getting to the line. Harrison Barnes, Klay Thompson - these players need to attack the basket to keep San Antonio honest. The Warriors cannot become one-dimensional when it counts.
Stage #4: Acceptance
Ok... these Spurs are pretty good
Yea. They are. There is no shame in losing to a good team. There is shame in losing to the Lakers in L.A., but not to the Spurs on in San Antonio where they win consistently.
The Warriors had the lead in the fourth quarter, grinding out baskets and playing fantastic defense. They found ways to score even when Curry was shooting horribly. They were a missed Andy Varejao hook away from taking a lead, before the Spurs grabbed the board, ran the floor and stole the momentum with a quick layup, then a follow up three. They came back from 11 points down in a place where you are not supposed to find momentum. Golden State was out rebounded 53-37 as the Spurs created one-and-dones and let watched Golden State shoot themselves into the loss.
The shots will fall in the rematch. So will the calls. Both teams will be healthy, and these games will live up to the hype. Nobody loves to lose, but everyone was treated with the high-IQ basketball that we were hoping for. The good news? The Warriors get another shot at stopping the Spurs winning streak in three short weeks. And this time, it might be for the single-season wins record.
I can only begin to imagine the stages of grief Spurs fans will be going through if we beat them then...Do Nothing - Some might think nothing should be done.
- Some might think nothing should be done. Ban Gliscor - Since it's the only real problematic abuser of Sand Veil, it makes sense to only remove it, especially since it's also at the root of the Baton Pass teams that everyone loves to hate.
- Since it's the only real problematic abuser of Sand Veil, it makes sense to only remove it, especially since it's also at the root of the Baton Pass teams that everyone loves to hate. Ban Sand Veil - Sand Veil is deemed uncompetitive and should be removed altogether, regardless of its user. Gliscor is still allowed with Hyper Cutter.
- Sand Veil is deemed uncompetitive and should be removed altogether, regardless of its user. Gliscor is still allowed with Hyper Cutter. Ban Sand Veil and Snow Cloak under the Evasion Clause - While Sand Snow Cloak isn't as prominent because of its worse enabler and abuser, it works exactly like Sand Veil and it makes sense to file it under the Evasion Clause. Gliscor is still allowed with Hyper Cutter.
The player has reached the Semi-Final of the Smogon Classic DPP Cup;
The player was one of the people who collected the most amount of DPP Points in Smogon Tour 19 or Smogon Tour 20 (Top 3 amount);
The player played DPP in the 6th SPL, and has at least played 6 DPP Games in it (out of a maximum of 11, so at least 50%);
The player played DPP in the 10th WCoP, and has at least played 3 DPP Games in it (out of a maximum of 6, so at least 50%).
The player is a Tournament Director.
Some explanations regarding the criteria We requested a minimum of games played in WCoP and SPL because we often see people playing one game in a metagame they barely know just because their team was out at the moment they subbed the player in for example.
We only took the tournaments that have happened in the past year, as they're the most up to date with the metagame advancement.
Do Nothing Ban Gliscor Ban Sand Veil Ban Sand Veil and Snow Cloak under the Evasion Clause.
simple 50%+ majority to be implemented, unless an option reaches a 2/3 + 1 supermajority at any point
Sample Vote said: 3
4
2
1 Click to expand...
11:59 PM EST, Saturday the 2nd, January
For the record, this vote won't count toward the Tiering Contributor Badge.
We've had a good discussion and a lot of interesting points and suggesions have been brought up. There is an almost unanimous agreement thatshould be done regarding Sand Veil and we're gonna proceed with that. To be honest, things looked bright as soon as Conflict rallied the cause...Anyway, what's up for contention isexactly are we going to do. Different propositions have been mentionned and we retained these one:We considered Jibaku's proposal, but we deemed it too messy and not consistent with some of our previous bans (for example: Blaziken).Much like the BW vote with Excadrill and the Weather Abilities, we'll let the players decide what's the appropriate course of action for the tier. We used similar criteria to establish the list of voters, they are as follows:Here are the players that have earned their vote under these criteria:How will the vote work? We will be using instant-runoff voting, akin to the BW vote in its time. You will have four options to choose from, and you should list them in order of preference. Be sure to bold your list. The options are:An option will just need to hit a, in which case that option will be implemented. Here is what your vote should look like:You have to. You mayedit your vote once it is sent. To make sure this won't happen, Raseri will immediatly reply to the PM you sent with your own vote.The deadline to vote isLast month, some 15,000 fans gathered in a small Illinois town, surrounded by miles of cornfields, for what was ostensibly a day-long music festival. But most of us who had come to Dixon, Illinois, for the third stop in the American Gentlemen of the Road tour weren't there for the seven bands who whiled away the day. We were there for the headliners: the prodigious folk quartet known as Mumford & Sons.
After nearly six hours of musical performances, the time had come. The sun was set, the stage was black. Streams of tiny light bulbs were strung over the lawn, from the sound booth to the stage. But like the audience, they had yet to be electrified by the impending performance. At once, people could be seen on stage, and with the sound of a syncopated acoustic guitar, the crowd erupted in cheer as they recognized the opening chords to "Little Lion Man." The roar of the crowd colliding with the music put me more at the scene of a victory celebration after battle than a folk festival.
Three years ago, Mumford & Sons were just another ragtag London folk band. But their course was forever changed by their 2009 debut LP, Sigh No More. The album soon became a hit, and ever since, the group has toured endlessly. In an age when record sales are on the decline, Sigh No More has gone four times platinum in the UK, thrice platinum in Australia, and twice platinum in the U.S.
Mumford & Sons have a fresh and distinctive sound. The rousing combination of traditional folk instrumentation, militaristic drum patterns, grandiose brass, and aggressive vocal tracks give their tunes an arresting and joyful sound. But their sonic creativity alone is not what has captured...
1The United Nations has called on Israel to cancel all of its restrictions on the movement of people and goods in the Gaza Strip.
“The cumulative impact of Israel’s restrictions, some of which have been in place for more than a decade, has devastated the livelihoods of families in Gaza, such as the farmers and fishermen we met today,” said James Rawley, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestinian areas, during a visit to the Gaza Strip Wednesday. “These restrictions affect the poorest the most; they impede development of a sustainable economy and increase dependency on aid.”
Rawley was leading a mission of humanitarian agencies and international representatives to Gaza to meet with local fishermen and farmers to discuss the impact of Israeli restrictions.
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The UN statement on Rawley’s visit said that residents of the Strip suffered due to limited access to 35 percent of its farmland and over two-thirds of its fishing grounds. The UN estimated those losses as $76 million (NIS 276 million) annually.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry brushed aside the criticism and laid the blame at the doorstep of the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip.
“As soon as Hamas reaches out to Israel and asks to sit with us to coordinate lifting the restrictions, we will be able to say what is possible and what is not,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told The Times of Israel. “As long as Hamas continues to speak about Israel only as the target of rockets, speaking of lifting restrictions sounds particularly hollow.”
Also on Wednesday, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released its latest fact sheet (PDF) on the Gaza Strip in which it claimed that Israeli restrictions on Gaza undermine the living conditions of its 1.7 million residents. The report also alleged that Israel’s measures are part of its “policy of separation” between Gaza and the West Bank, denying Gazans access to work, family, and education.
Rawley did note that the situation has improved since the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel following Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012, but stressed that “only a full lifting of restrictions on access, as well as on exports and transfers of produce, will enable recovery of the fishing and agricultural sectors and the livelihoods of those who depend upon them.”
Palmor rejected the OCHA’s allegations as one-sided.
“It’s been a long time since everyone understood that OCHA is betraying its own mission by only issuing Palestinian-based reports instead of fulfilling its humanitarian mission,” he said. “This is why OCHA reports are never taken seriously in New York, by anyone. They continue to waste good UN money on documents that do not reflect any reality other than that of Palestinians, actively ignoring any possible Israeli input, and willfully confronting Israel on any possible real or imaginary points.
“This attitude rightly brought them complete discredit within the UN apparatus and that’s why their reports are never taken as basis for debate or action by any serious body that aims to actually move things in the right direction.”
Israel and Hamas agreed to a six-mile (9.5 kilometers) limit on fishing grounds in the waters off Gaza after the November ceasefire. However, in March the IDF restricted Gaza fishermen to a three-mile limit after repeated rocket attacks on Israel from the Strip.
In May, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon restored the area available to Palestinian fishermen, who can again ply the waters up to six miles from the shore.
The UN statement also expressed concern that the economic situation in Gaza was forcing thousands of Palestinians, including children, to rely on goods smuggled via tunnels between Gaza and Egypt.
Gaza uses the tunnels mainly for goods limited by Israel, including cement, gravel, iron rods and fuel. Most consumer products have been shipped through an Israeli cargo crossing since Israel eased its border restrictions three years ago.
Between 150 and 250 trucks pass through the Kerem Shalom crossing daily, providing fuel, essential medical supplies, and food to the residents of Gaza.
In normal times, about 70 tunnels are active — most for cargo, but some also for travelers evading Egyptian border controls. Tents or in some cases houses cover the openings on the Gaza side of the 14-kilometer border. Hamas levies customs on smuggled imports and has turned the tunnel zone into a closed, bonded area, with a line of checkpoints searching cargo trucks.
Last week, the Egyptian military cracked down on smuggling, severely disrupting the tunnel trade, causing a fuel shortage, doubling the price of building materials and shutting down some construction sites in the Hamas-ruled territory.
Rawley expressed understanding for Israel’s security concerns, noting that the UN has repeatedly condemned rocket fire toward Israel, but hinted that Israel’s responses were disproportionate.
“Any response to such concerns,” he underscored, “including limitations on the free movement of people and goods, must comply with international law; they must be proportionate to a specific threat and must not be punitive in nature.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.The Luxembourg-based European Court of Auditors on Wednesday (23 May) said EU assistance to the Turkish Cypriot community in northern Cyprus is complicated by political and legal difficulties.
The auditors looked at 34 EU-funded contracts worth €97.5 million from 2006 to 2011.
"The construction of a seawater desalination plant, which is the programme's largest project, ended in failure," said the auditors. "More generally, the sustainability of the projects is often in doubt."
The seawater desalination came with a €27.5 million price tag but the project fell apart when Greek Cypriot workers were denied access to the site by Turkish armed forces in 2010.
But the European Commission may be partly to blame, say the auditors. "By contracting the works at the latest possible moment, the commission also missed an opportunity to offer the contract to another tenderer," the Court said. The contract was terminated in December 2011.
Cyprus, which is next in line to assume the six-month EU presidency is the only member state to host military bases from another EU member. The UK has two bases on the island. The UN also has about 1,000 soldiers still in place.
The de-facto buffer zone separating the Turkish north and the Greek south has also yet to be entirely demined. Meanwhile, only Turkey recognises the legitimacy of the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.
An April 2004 referendum to join the two halves was overwhelmingly rejected by Greek Cypriots, while some 65 percent of Turkish Cypriots approved it. A month later, Cyprus joined the EU as a divided member state.
The entire island is legally part of the EU but the application of EU laws and standards is mostly suspended in the northern territory.
Consequently, the European Commission was unable to set up a delegation in the Turkish-controlled half. Instead, it had to establish a headquarters-based task force in the south with a local programme support office in the northern part of Cyprus.
Unlike normal delegations, the support office had no head and had to defer all its decisions back to commission headquarters.
"The political context was clearly complicated," said David Bostock, a member of the Court of Auditors who presented the report.
Gas discovered off Cypriot coast
Meanwhile, Cyprus says some 100 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas lies off its coastline.
On Monday, Turkey threatened sanctions against 29 companies bidding to explore for oil and gas deposits in the area, with Ankara saying a solution to the island's division must be addressed prior to gas exploration.
Cyprus says the undersea reservoirs lies within its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) enabling it to explore and exploit resources up to 200 nautical miles from its coastal baseline.
The island has already ratified delimitation of EEZ agreements with both Egypt, Lebanon and Israel and is currently negotiating agreements for the common exploitation of the hydrocarbons.
But Turkey contests existing maritime boundary demarcation agreements with Cyprus.
Cyprus, for its part, has promised to make integrated maritime policy a focus point of its EU presidency starting July. The policy covers areas from customs rules to pollution and coastal tourism.
Relations with Israel have also been strengthening since 2009, most recently in the area of hydrocarbons.
"We have to co-operate in order to maximise our profits," Cypriot minister of foreign affairs Erato Kozakou-Marcoullis told reporters in Brussels last week.
Cyprus expects to fully exploit the offshore natural gas within 10 years.In order for Cadillac to feel confident enough to introduce the industry’s first truly hands-free driving system to the public, the car company wanted to be sure it had enough data on the US highway system before it launched. How much data? Well, all of it.
To do this, Cadillac didn’t deploy a fleet of camera-mounted vehicles to record footage of the nation’s highways, like Google does for Street View. Nor did it rely on “fleet learning” like Tesla, in which many vehicles operating on the same software work together to build a more detailed map. Instead, Cadillac used vehicles equipped with high-powered LIDAR sensors to build a highly detailed map of the US highway system.
“we have mapped them within five centimeters of accuracy.”
“We went out and mapped 160,000 miles of interstate highways,” Barry Walkup, chief engineer of Cadillac’s Super Cruise, said in an interview with The Verge at the New York International Auto Show this week. “We have mapped them within five centimeters of accuracy. So that’s pretty impressive. This is the first use of a LIDAR map. You’re going to see more of that in autonomous [vehicles]. But this is the first application.”
“The car can see farther than the sensors on the car with the map,” He added. “With the map, we’re able to see about 2,500 meters ahead. So if we have a sharp curve, we can anticipate that, decelerate the car in order to maintain a g-level that we tune to take the curve.”
The new technology will be rolled out in Cadillac’s flagship CT6 sedan later this fall. Car buyers can expect to shell out $2,500 for the standalone option on luxury (sticker price: $66,290) and platinum models ($85,290). Also on luxury models, Super Cruise requires buyers to purchase the $3,100 driver assist package.
But the inclusion of the LIDAR maps is what Cadillac thinks will set Super Cruise apart from its competitors. Tesla recommends its drivers only use the semi-autonomous Autopilot system while driving on the highways, but technically the electric car company can’t do anything to enforce that. Cadillac has more control over how its customers use Super Cruise because of the mapping data. Super Cruise is restricted to only “divided, limited-access highways — highways with defined ‘on-’ and ‘off-ramps,’” the company says. In other words, no cities and no residential communities.
“We know where the car is because of the LIDAR map and the other data in the car,” said David Caldwell, product communications manager at Cadillac. “Therefore we have the ability to geofence it.”
But a map is only as useful as the road itself.
But a map is only as useful as the road itself. With construction and lane closures occurring randomly, it could be a problem if Cadillac’s LIDAR maps tell a different story than the conditions on the road ahead. To address this issue, Walkup said that Cadillac’s mapmakers |
Ume resMax=$resMax") ; # return 0; } #remove my $ume = 0 ; my $ii = 0 ; $MAEstr = "" ; $MAElen = 0 ; my @hash= () ; foreach my $line(@dat) { my $jj = $ii + 1 ; my ($name,$mail,$hizke,$honb,$sub) = split(/<>/,$line) ; if($jj eq 1) { if($name!~ /(●=|侍=|☆=|旭=|麒=)/) { #&Report(" ★スレ=skip[$name]"); return 0; } else { $sub =~ s/
//g; #&Report(" ★スレ=GO[$name] $orgKey $sub"); &debLog("GO! $BBS:$orgKey:$resMax") ; } $SUB = "$sub"; $SUB =~ s/
$// ; } $hash[$ii] = &makeHash($ii,$line,$orgKey) ; $ii ++ ; if(!&isUmetate($jj,$line,$orgKey,@hash)) {next;} $ume ++ ; #&debLog("AAremoveUme $jj=$hizke") ; } if($ume < 1) { #&debLog("P53 ng($BBS:$KEY) ume=${ume} [$P53]") ; return 0; } ##return 0; # create new dat #unlink("$newFile") ; #&debLog("removeUme(new) $newFile") ; if(-f "$newFile") { &debLog("removeUme() already exist $newFile"); #return 0; } #&debLog("removeUme($datFile)") ; #&debLog("ume=$ume") ; #return 0; &debLog("P53 \033[0;36mgo\033[0;39m($BBS:$orgKey) ume=${ume} [$P53]") ; #&debLog("http://${SRV}/test/read.cgi/${BBS}/${OLDkey}/l2") ; if($P53 ne "on") {return 1;} #return 0; if(!open(DAT,"> $newFile")) { &debLog("removeUme() open Error $newFile"); return 0; } my $p53 = "P53a<>やっとでました<>date<>やっとでた<>title"; $ii = 0 ; my $xx = 1 ; my @zz = () ; $MAEstr = "" ; $MAElen = 0 ; foreach my $line(@dat) { my $jj = $ii + 1 ; $ii ++ ; # バイト文字列(外部からの入力)を内部文字列に変換($strがShift_Jisの場合) #$line = decode('Shift_Jis',$line); my ($name,$mail,$hizke,$honb,$sub) = split(/<>/,$line) ; #my $p53 = "P53a<>やっとでました<>$hizke<>やっとでた<>$sub"; if(&isUmetate($jj,$line,$orgKey,@hash)) { next ; } $zz[$jj] = $xx ; $xx ++ ; $p53 = $line ; ##if($jj eq 1) {$p53 =~ s/
$/ p53
/ ;} #href="../test/read.cgi/iPhone/1447905734/742" target="_blank"> #if($p53 =~ /href=\"\.\.\/test\/read.cgi\/(\.+)\/([-\d]+)\/(\d+)\" target=\"_blank\">/) if($p53 =~ /\/([0-9a-zA-Z]+)\/([0-9]+)\/([0-9]+)\"/) { my $bbs = $1 ; my $key = $KEY ; my $nn = $3 ; if(!$nn) {$nn = 1;} if($nn >= $jj) {$nn = 1;} my $yy = $zz[$nn] ; if(!$yy) {$yy = 1;} #&debLog(">>$nn - $yy($jj)") ; #$p53 =~ s/href=\"\.\.\/test\/read.cgi\/\.+\/[-\d]+\/\d+\"/href=\"\.\.\/test\/read.cgi\/$bbs\/$key\/$yy\"/ ; #$p53 =~ s/href=/href=AAA\/${bbs}\/${key}\/${yy}BBB/ ; $p53 =~ s/href=\"\.\.\/test\/read\.cgi\/([0-9a-zA-Z]+)\/([0-9]+)\/([0-9]+)\"/href=\"..\/test\/read.cgi\/${bbs}\/${key}\/${yy}\"/ ; $p53 =~ s/>>[\d]+/>>${yy}/ ; } ## if($p53 =~ />>([\d]+)/) ## { ## my $nn = $1 ; ## my $yy = $zz[$nn] ; ## #$p53 =~ s/>>[\d]+/>>yy ${nn} → ${yy}/ ; ## $p53 =~ s/>>[\d]+/>>${yy}/ ; ## } # 内部文字列をUTF-8バイト文字列に変換する場合 #$p53 = encode('Shift_Jis', $p53); print DAT "$p53"; } close(DAT) ; my $szOld = (stat("$datFile"))[7]; ## file size my $szNew = (stat("$newFile"))[7]; ## file size if($kaime < 1) { if(!open(DAT,">> $newFile")) { &debLog("removeUme(2) open Error $newFile"); return 0; } my $OLDkey = $KEY ; $SUB =~ s/
//g; $p53 = "" ; $p53.= "p53 ★<>" ; $p53.= "やっとでました<>" ; $p53.= "やっと出た<>" ; #$p53.= "$thisCgi <br>" ; $p53.= "<a href=\"../test/read.cgi/${BBS}/${OLDkey}/1\">>>1</a> 元のスレ " ; #$p53.= "<br>" ; #$p53.= "$SUB " ; $p53.= "<b>$szOld -> $szNew</b> (バイト)<br>" ; #$p53.= 'p53 テストに夢中。これ以降書いても消えちゃうかも<br>' ; #$p53.= 'p53 テストに夢中。ちょっと通りますよ。再開↓<br>' ; #$p53.= 'p53 とは、http://server.maido3.com/?txt=kirei#top<br>' ; $p53.= "<>
" ; print DAT "$p53"; close(DAT) ; } # swap chmod(0555, "$datFile") ; rename("$datFile","$datFile.tmp") ; rename("$newFile","$datFile") ; rename("$datFile.tmp","$newFile") ; my $sakusei = "作成済"; if($kaime > 10) #if($kaime > 1) { $sakusei = "不作成" ; unlink("$newFile") ; #unlink("$datFile.tmp") ; } else { my $pool = "$home/_datArea/$BBS/pool/$KEY.dat" ; #&debLog("BBS[$BBS]") ; #&debLog("newFile[$newFile]") ; #&debLog("pool[$pool]") ; #rename("$datFile.tmp","$newFile") ; my $cmd = "mv $newFile $pool" ; #&debLog("cmd[$cmd]") ; system("$cmd") ; #rename("$newFile","$pool") ; #_mv("$datFile.tmp","$pool") ; } $SUB =~ s/[ \t ]+$//; $SUB =~ s/\[転載禁止\]//; $SUB =~ s/©2ch.net//; $xx -- ; &Report("$BBS $szOld -(${ume}削)-> $szNew(bytes) $SUB($xx)"); &Report(" 現スレ=http://${SRV}/test/read.cgi/${BBS}/${OLDkey}/l2 ${kaime}回目"); &Report(" 元スレ=http://${SRV}/test/read.cgi/${BBS}/${KEY}/l2 ${sakusei}"); return 1; } ################################################################################# # getResNum # ################################################################################# sub getResNum() { my ($fName) = @_; my @dat = () ; if(!open(DAT,"$fName")) { return 0; } @dat = <DAT> ; close(DAT) ; my $resMax = @dat ; return $resMax ; } ################################################################################# # HowManyDan # ################################################################################# sub HowManyDan() { my ($honb) = @_; if(!$honb) {return 0;} my @n1 = $honb =~ /<br>/gi ; # 数えられる(文字列の個数もOK) my $ko = scalar(@n1) ; #個数 return $ko ; } ################################################################################# # HowMany # ################################################################################# sub HowMany() { my ($word,$honb) = @_; if(!$honb) {return 0;} my @n1 = $honb =~ /${word}/gi ; # 数えられる(文字列の個数もOK) my $ko = scalar(@n1) ; #個数 return $ko ; } ################################################################################# # onaji # ################################################################################# sub onaji() { my ($n0,$n1) = @_; if($n0 < $n1) { my $nx = $n0 ; $n0 = $n1 ; $n1 = $nx ; } if($n0 < 20) {return 0;} my $sa = int($n0 * 0.2) ; if($n0 - $n1 < $sa) {return 1;} return 0 ; } ################################################################################# # isUmetate # ################################################################################# sub isUmetate() { my ($resNo,$line,$orgKey,@hash) = @_; #&debLog("isUmetate()") ; #&debLog("isUmetate($resNo,$orgKey) Hash=$#hash") ; if($resNo < 20) {return 0;} if(!$line) {return 0;} my ($name,$mail,$hizke,$honb,$sub) = split(/<>/,$line) ; my $mailLen = length($mail) ; if($mailLen > 12) {return 1;} my @gyo = split(/<br>/, $honb) ; my $gyoN = $#gyo ; if($gyoN > 13) {return 1;} if($gyoN > 5) { #&debLog("gyoN=$gyoN"); my @ll = () ; my $ii= 0 ; foreach my $gg (@gyo) { my $lll = length($gg) ; if($lll < 20) {next;} if($ii > 1 &&!($ll[$ii-1] -30 < $lll && $lll < $ll[$ii-1] +30)) {next;} $ll[$ii] = length($gg) ; #&debLog(" -- $orgKey $resNo -- gyoN=$gyoN [$ii]=$ll[$ii]"); $ii++; } ##if($#ll > 4 && $ll[1] eq $ll[3] && $ll[1] eq $ll[4]) {return 1;} if($#ll > 4 && &onaji($ll[1],$ll[3]) && &onaji($ll[1],$ll[4]) ) {return 1;} #return 0; } my $abc = $honb ; $abc =~ s/<br>//gi ; $abc =~ s/[\. 0-9a-zA-Z\/\: ]//gi ; my $abcLen = length($abc) ; if($abcLen < 10) {&debLog("abcLen=$abcLen [$abc][$mail]");} if($abcLen < 10) {return 1;} if($honb =~ /Rock/i) {return 1;} my $len = length($honb); if($len > 1500) {return 1;} #if($len > 1000) {&debLog("len=$len");} #my $dan = &HowManyDan($honb); #if($dan > 13) {return 1;} my $href = &HowMany("href",$honb); #if($href > 5) &debLog("HowMany(href) = $href") ; if($href > 5) {return 1;} my $ttp = &HowMany("ttp",$honb); #if($ttp > 9) &debLog("HowMany(ttp) = $ttp") ; if($ttp > 9) {return 1;} #&debLog("Hash=$#hash") ; if($resNo < 2) {return 1;} my $resIdx = $resNo-1; my $ImaStr = $hash[$resIdx] ; my $ImaLen = length($ImaStr) ; for(my $iii=0;$iii<$resNo-1;$iii++) { my $MaeStr = $hash[$iii] ; my $MaeLen = length($MaeStr) ; #&debLog("Hash[$iii] L=$hashL") ; #&debLog("000($resIdx,$iii) Hash=$#hash len $MaeLen -> $ImaLen
Mae=[$MaeStr]
Ima=[$ImaStr]") ; if(&samePost($MaeStr,$MaeLen,$ImaStr,$ImaLen)) { &debLog("($resIdx,$iii) Hash=$#hash len $MaeLen -> $ImaLen
Mae=[$MaeStr]
Ima=[$ImaStr]") ; return 1 ; } } return 0; my $IMAstr = $honb ; #$IMAstr =~ s/[0-9a-zA-Z]+//g ; $IMAstr =~ s/\d+//g ; #$IMAstr =~ s/(ー|？|！|。|、)//g ; $IMAstr =~ s/\x83[\x40-\x96]//g ; # カタカナ #$IMAstr =~ s/\x82[\x9f-\xf1]//g ; # ひらがな #$IMAstr =~ s/(ア|イ|ウ|エ|オ)//g ; $IMAstr =~ s/<\/?.*>//g ; $IMAstr =~ s/
//g ; $IMAstr =~ s/ //g ; $IMAstr =~ s/ //g ; $IMAstr =~ s/<br>//g ; my $IMAlen = length($IMAstr) ; if(&samePost($MAEstr,$MAElen,$IMAstr,$IMAlen)) { &debLog("($resNo) len $MAElen -> $IMAlen
$MAEstr
$IMAstr") ; $MAEstr = $IMAstr ; $MAElen = $IMAlen ; return 1 ; } $MAEstr = $IMAstr ; $MAElen = $IMAlen ; return 0; } ################################################################################# # makeHash # ################################################################################# sub makeHash() { my ($resNo,$line,$orgKey) = @_; #&debLog("makeHash($resNo,$orgKey)") ; #if($resNo < 20) {return "";} if(!$line) {return "";} my ($name,$mail,$hizke,$honb,$sub) = split(/<>/,$line) ; my $IMAstr = $honb ; #$IMAstr =~ s/[0-9a-zA-Z]+//g ; $IMAstr =~ s/\d+//g ; #$IMAstr =~ s/(ー|？|！|。|、)//g ; $IMAstr =~ s/\x83[\x40-\x96]//g ; # カタカナ #$IMAstr =~ s/\x82[\x9f-\xf1]//g ; # ひらがな #$IMAstr =~ s/(ア|イ|ウ|エ|オ)//g ; $IMAstr =~ s/<\/?.*>//g ; $IMAstr =~ s/
//g ; $IMAstr =~ s/ //g ; $IMAstr =~ s/ //g ; $IMAstr =~ s/<br>//g ; return "$IMAstr"; } ################################################################################# # debLog # ################################################################################# sub samePost() { my ($maeStr,$maeLen,$imaStr,$imaLen) = @_; if($maeStr eq $imaStr) {return 1;} #if($imaLen < $maeLen - 2) {return 0;} #if($imaLen > $maeLen + 2) {return 0;} return 0; } ################################################################################# # debLog # ################################################################################# sub debLog() { my ($mes) = @_; my $now = time ; my ($sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year, $wday, $yday, $isdst) = localtime($now); $year += 1900 ; $mon ++ ; if($mon < 10) {$mon = "0$mon" ;} if($mday < 10) {$mday = "0$mday";} if($hour < 10) {$hour = "0$hour";} if($min < 10) {$min = "0$min" ;} if($sec < 10) {$sec = "0$sec" ;} #print "$year/$mon/$mday $hour:$min:$sec $mes
"; if(!$debdeb) {return 0;} if(!open(LOG,">> $debFile")) {return 0;} print "$hour:$min:$sec $mes
"; #print LOG "$year/$mon/$mday $hour:$min:$sec $mes
"; print LOG "$min:$sec $mes
"; close(LOG) ; return 0; } ################################################################################# # Report # ################################################################################# sub Report() { my ($mes) = @_; my $now = time ; my ($sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year, $wday, $yday, $isdst) = localtime($now); $year += 1900 ; $mon ++ ; if($mon < 10) {$mon = "0$mon" ;} if($mday < 10) {$mday = "0$mday";} if($hour < 10) {$hour = "0$hour";} if($min < 10) {$min = "0$min" ;} if($sec < 10) {$sec = "0$sec" ;} #print "$year/$mon/$mday $hour:$min:$sec $mes
"; if(!open(LOG,">> $repFile")) {return 0;} print LOG "$mon/$mday $hour:$min $mes
"; close(LOG) ; return 0; } ################################################## sub _cp { local $/; open(local *SRC, $_[0]) or return; open(local *DST, '>', $_[1]) or close(SRC), return; my $st = stat(*SRC); print DST <SRC>; close(DST); close(SRC); chmod($st->mode, $_[1]); utime($st->atime, $st->mtime, $_[1]); 1; } sub _mv { rename($_[0], $_[1]) and return 1; $! == EXDEV or return; _cp($_[0], $_[1]) and unlink($_[0]); } sub _rm_rf { opendir(local *D, $_[0]) or return; while (defined (my $e = readdir(D))) { if ($e eq '.' || $e eq '..') { } elsif (-d "$_[0]/$e") { _rm_rf("$_[0]/$e"); } else { unlink("$_[0]/$e"); } } closedir(D); rmdir($_[0]); } exit; ################################################################################# # end of hs file # #################################################################################
RAW Paste Data
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w use strict 'vars'; use warnings; # ソースコードはUTF-8として保存 # utf8プラグマを有効にする ##use open ':std', ':encoding(UTF-8)'; #use utf8; #use Encode 'decode'; #use Encode 'encode'; use LWP::UserAgent; use HTTP::Request; use HTTP::Status; use HTTP::Request::Common; $| = 1 ; umask(0) ; my $P53 = "off" ; # "off" = off, "on" = on $P53 = "on" ; # "off" = off, "on" = on my $KB = 1024 * 400 ; # 出動バイト数 # 自動修復 p53 を作るぞ at hello.2ch.net/_bg/ my $debdeb = 1; #my $thisCgi = "p53.cgi ver 0.00 (Perl,SJIS) 2015/11/18 FOX. [$P53]"; my $thisCgi = "p53 ver 0.05 (Perl,SJIS) 2015/12/26 FOX. [$P53]"; my $home = $ENV{"HOME"}; my $here = "$home/public_html/_bg"; my $debFile = "$here/1p53.txt"; my $semFile = "$here/sem.p53.txt"; # タイムゾーンの設定 $ENV{'TZ'} = "JST-9"; my $now = time ; my ($sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year, $wday, $yday, $isdst) = localtime($now); $year += 1900 ; $mon ++ ; my $exe_uptime= `/usr/bin/uptime`; my $LA1 = $exe_uptime; $LA1 =~ s/.+load averages: //; $LA1 =~ s/,.+//; $LA1 =~ s/
//; if($mon < 10) {$mon = "0$mon" ;} if($mday < 10) {$mday = "0$mday";} if($hour < 10) {$hour = "0$hour";} if($min < 10) {$min = "0$min" ;} if($sec < 10) {$sec = "0$sec" ;} my $repFile = "$home/public_html/_service/p53-$year$mon$mday.txt"; $debFile = "$here/logs/p$year$mon$mday.txt"; &debLog("===== $thisCgi =====") ; #&debLog("here=[$here]") ; if(-f $semFile) { print "$year/$mon/$mday $hour:$min:$sec skip?
"; my $modtime = time - (stat($semFile))[9]; print " # $modtime pasted.
"; if($modtime < 60*15) { print " # < 15 min skiped.
"; exit; } print " # > 15 run!
"; } print "$year-$mon-$mday $hour:$min:$sec run run run!
"; if(open(SEM,"> $semFile")) { print SEM "now making $thisCgi
"; close(SEM); } my $SRV = &getThisServer() ; my $BBS = "bbs???" ; my $KEY = "key 123???" ; my $SUB = "sub スレタイ???" ; my $OLDkey = "old key 123???" ; my $MAEstr = "" ; my $MAElen = 0 ; if($min eq "00") {&Report("## これは = $thisCgi)");} &foxP53() ; &debLog("### ended. $thisCgi") ; unlink($semFile); exit; ################################################################################# # getThisServer # ################################################################################# sub getThisServer() { my $fName = "/var/tmp/hostname"; my @srv = () ; if(!open(HOST,"$fName")) {return "??? $fName";} @srv = <HOST> ; close(HOST) ; my $server = $srv[0] ; return "$server" ; } ################################################################################# # foxP53 # ################################################################################# sub foxP53() { #my ($dir,$oFile) = @_; #&debLog("foxP53()") ; #&execP53("../newsplus") ; $BBS = "iPhone" ; #&execP53("../$BBS") ; #&execP53("$home/public_html/_zzz/$BBS") ; #return 1; my $dir = ".." ; $dir = "$home/public_html" ; #&debLog("dir=[$dir]") ; if(!opendir(DIR, "$dir")) { &debLog("foxP53() open Error $dir"); return 0; } my @filelist = grep!/^\./, readdir DIR; closedir(DIR); foreach my $time (@filelist) { #&debLog("foxP53() $time"); $BBS = $time ; if($BBS =~ /tr$/) {next;} #&execP53("../$BBS") ; my $speed = &getSpeed("$home/public_html/$BBS/SETTING.TXT") ; if(!$speed) {next;} &execP53($speed,"$home/public_html/_zzz/$BBS") ; } return 1 ; } ################################################################################# # getSpeed # ################################################################################# sub getSpeed() { my ($txt) = @_ ; my @set= () ; return 300; return 1000; if(!open(SET,"$txt")) {return 0;} @set = <SET> ; close(SET) ; foreach my $line (@set) { if($line =~ /FOX_P53=(\d+)/) { my $speed = $1 ; if($speed < 1) {$speed = 0;} if($speed > 3333) {$speed = 3333;} #&debLog("stopSetting($txt)=$line($speed)"); return $speed ; } } return 0; } ################################################################################# # existDat # ################################################################################# sub existDat() { my ($key) = @_; my $dat = "123" ; # check here $dat = "$home/public_html/_zzz/$BBS/dat/$key.dat" ; if(-f "$dat") { #&debLog("here =[$dat]") ; return 1; } # check there 1 $dat = "$home/_datArea/$BBS/pool/$key.dat" ; if(-f "$dat") { #&debLog("there 1=[$dat]") ; return 1; } # check there 2 my $k4 = substr($key,0,4) ; $dat = "$home/_datArea/$BBS/oyster/$k4/$key.dat" ; if(-f "$dat") { #&debLog("there 2=[$dat]") ; return 1; } return 0 ; } ################################################################################# # makeNextKey # ################################################################################# sub makeNextKey() { my ($key) = @_; my $ii = 0 ; for($ii=0;$ii<200;$ii++) { $key ++ ; if(!&existDat($key)) {return $key;} } return 0 ; } ################################################################################# # execP53 # ################################################################################# sub execP53() { my ($speed,$bbsDir) = @_; #&debLog("execP53($bbsDir)") ; my $dir = "$bbsDir/dat" ; #&debLog("dir=[$dir]") ; if(!opendir(DIR, "$dir")) { #&debLog("execP53() open Error $dir"); return 0; } my @filelist = grep!/^\./, readdir DIR; closedir(DIR); my %timefile; foreach my $file (@filelist) { #my $mtime = (stat("$dir/$file"))[9]; my $mtime = (stat("$dir/$file"))[7]; ## file size #my $mtime = $file; ## file name #&debLog("execP53() $file = $mtime"); #print "$file = $mtime
"; push @{$timefile{$mtime}},"$file"; } my $delCount = 0 ; my $thrCount = 0 ; foreach my $time (sort {$b <=> $a} keys %timefile) { foreach (@{$timefile{$time}}) { if($_!~ /\.dat$/) {next;} $thrCount ++ ; my $key = $_ ; $key =~ s/\.dat// ; $OLDkey = $key ; $KEY = &makeNextKey($key); if(!$KEY) {next;} my $kaimeX = $KEY - $key ; my $kaime = $KEY - $key ; if($kaime < 1) {$kaime = 1;} if($kaime > 5) {$kaime = 5;} my $limit = int($speed * (0.7 ** $kaime)) ; my $rNum = getResNum("$dir/$_") ; if($rNum < 20) {next;} my $ratio = int($time / $rNum ) ; if($ratio < $limit) {next;} if(!(-w "$dir/$_")) {next;} #next; # if($time < $KB) {next;} #if($key ne "1447778990") {next;} #if($key ne "1447905734") {next;} #&debLog("execP53($BBS) $time/$rNum=$ratio($speed,$kaime,$limit) $key - $KEY"); if(&removeUme("$dir/$key.dat","$dir/$KEY.dat",$kaimeX,$key)) { &debLog("execP53($BBS) $time/$rNum=$ratio($speed,\033[0;33m${kaimeX}\033[0;39m,$limit) $key - $KEY"); $delCount ++ ; } } } #&debLog("execP53($BBS) $delCount/$thrCount found."); return 1 ; } ################################################################################# # removeUme # ################################################################################# sub removeUme() { my ($datFile,$newFile,$kaime,$orgKey) = @_; #&debLog("removeUme($datFile)") ; #&debLog("removeUme($newFile)") ; # check if(-f $datFile) { #&debLog("checkD($datFile)=exist") ; } else { &debLog("checkD($datFile)=NOT exist") ; return 0; } if(-f $newFile) { &debLog("checkN($newFile)=exist") ; return 0; } else { #&debLog("checkN($newFile)=NOT exist") ; } if(-w $datFile) { #&debLog("checkD($datFile)=writable") ; } else { if($BBS eq "iPhone") {&debLog("checkD($BBS/$KEY)=NOTw");} return 0; } if(-w $newFile) { #&debLog("checkN($newFile)=writable") ; } else { #&debLog("checkN($newFile)=NOT writable") ; } #return 0; # read my @dat = () ; if(!open(DAT,"$datFile")) { &debLog("removeUme() open Error $datFile"); return 0; } @dat = <DAT> ; close(DAT) ; my $resMax = @dat ; if($resMax < 900) { #&debLog("removeUme resMax=$resMax") ; # return 0; } #remove my $ume = 0 ; my $ii = 0 ; $MAEstr = "" ; $MAElen = 0 ; my @hash= () ; foreach my $line(@dat) { my $jj = $ii + 1 ; my ($name,$mail,$hizke,$honb,$sub) = split(/<>/,$line) ; if($jj eq 1) { if($name!~ /(●=|侍=|☆=|旭=|麒=)/) { #&Report(" ★スレ=skip[$name]"); return 0; } else { $sub =~ s/
//g; #&Report(" ★スレ=GO[$name] $orgKey $sub"); &debLog("GO! $BBS:$orgKey:$resMax") ; } $SUB = "$sub"; $SUB =~ s/
$// ; } $hash[$ii] = &makeHash($ii,$line,$orgKey) ; $ii ++ ; if(!&isUmetate($jj,$line,$orgKey,@hash)) {next;} $ume ++ ; #&debLog("AAremoveUme $jj=$hizke") ; } if($ume < 1) { #&debLog("P53 ng($BBS:$KEY) ume=${ume} [$P53]") ; return 0; } ##return 0; # create new dat #unlink("$newFile") ; #&debLog("removeUme(new) $newFile") ; if(-f "$newFile") { &debLog("removeUme() already exist $newFile"); #return 0; } #&debLog("removeUme($datFile)") ; #&debLog("ume=$ume") ; #return 0; &debLog("P53 \033[0;36mgo\033[0;39m($BBS:$orgKey) ume=${ume} [$P53]") ; #&debLog("http://${SRV}/test/read.cgi/${BBS}/${OLDkey}/l2") ; if($P53 ne "on") {return 1;} #return 0; if(!open(DAT,"> $newFile")) { &debLog("removeUme() open Error $newFile"); return 0; } my $p53 = "P53a<>やっとでました<>date<>やっとでた<>title"; $ii = 0 ; my $xx = 1 ; my @zz = () ; $MAEstr = "" ; $MAElen = 0 ; foreach my $line(@dat) { my $jj = $ii + 1 ; $ii ++ ; # バイト文字列(外部からの入力)を内部文字列に変換($strがShift_Jisの場合) #$line = decode('Shift_Jis',$line); my ($name,$mail,$hizke,$honb,$sub) = split(/<>/,$line) ; #my $p53 = "P53a<>やっとでました<>$hizke<>やっとでた<>$sub"; if(&isUmetate($jj,$line,$orgKey,@hash)) { next ; } $zz[$jj] = $xx ; $xx ++ ; $p53 = $line ; ##if($jj eq 1) {$p53 =~ s/
$/ p53
/ ;} #href="../test/read.cgi/iPhone/1447905734/742" target="_blank"> #if($p53 =~ /href=\"\.\.\/test\/read.cgi\/(\.+)\/([-\d]+)\/(\d+)\" target=\"_blank\">/) if($p53 =~ /\/([0-9a-zA-Z]+)\/([0-9]+)\/([0-9]+)\"/) { my $bbs = $1 ; my $key = $KEY ; my $nn = $3 ; if(!$nn) {$nn = 1;} if($nn >= $jj) {$nn = 1;} my $yy = $zz[$nn] ; if(!$yy) {$yy = 1;} #&debLog(">>$nn - $yy($jj)") ; #$p53 =~ s/href=\"\.\.\/test\/read.cgi\/\.+\/[-\d]+\/\d+\"/href=\"\.\.\/test\/read.cgi\/$bbs\/$key\/$yy\"/ ; #$p53 =~ s/href=/href=AAA\/${bbs}\/${key}\/${yy}BBB/ ; $p53 =~ s/href=\"\.\.\/test\/read\.cgi\/([0-9a-zA-Z]+)\/([0-9]+)\/([0-9]+)\"/href=\"..\/test\/read.cgi\/${bbs}\/${key}\/${yy}\"/ ; $p53 =~ s/>>[\d]+/>>${yy}/ ; } ## if($p53 =~ />>([\d]+)/) ## { ## my $nn = $1 ; ## my $yy = $zz[$nn] ; ## #$p53 =~ s/>>[\d]+/>>yy ${nn} → ${yy}/ ; ## $p53 =~ s/>>[\d]+/>>${yy}/ ; ## } # 内部文字列をUTF-8バイト文字列に変換する場合 #$p53 = encode('Shift_Jis', $p53); print DAT "$p53"; } close(DAT) ; my $szOld = (stat("$datFile"))[7]; ## file size my $szNew = (stat("$newFile"))[7]; ## file size if($kaime < 1) { if(!open(DAT,">> $newFile")) { |
has more than 75,000 followers, and 20 other groups have more than 1,000. Their common symbol is a bent thumbs-up sign, modeled after the Facebook "like" icon, though Kmitis says it has no special significance.
Martsinkevich’s well-manicured persona has inspired a legion of young cult followers to follow in his footsteps. Occupy Gerontifilyay was started in 2012 by Philip Dyonits, a 16-year-old Slasher protege who used to lure alleged pedophiles with fake dating profiles before breaking off to launch his own group.
Occupy Peodfilyay’s regional affiliate groups are guided by Martsinkevich’s basic ideology — he regularly publishes stylized videos and holds regional seminars — though they operate in different ways. Some clearly resort to physical violence during sting operations (or "safaris," as they’re called) while others take a more hands-off approach. Dmitry Mikolenko, founder of the Occupy Pedofilyay movement in Kiev, Ukraine, says he doesn’t think violence is "meaningful," adding that moral abuse is more effective than physical aggression. He acknowledges, however, that his group frequently douses its "live bait" with urine.
The groups also differ in their respective philosophies on law enforcement. Mikolenko says he has no intention of cooperating with local police, alleging that authorities in Kiev are intent on "protecting pedophiles." But Kmitits and others say they’re on good terms with the police, with some claiming that they closely coordinate their operations.
"They know us," says Alexander Mikheev, leader of the Occupy Pedofilyay movement in the Russian city of Irkutsk. "We work closely with them, and if we have solid evidence, we call the police and give [the suspect] over."
The extent to which Martsinkevich dictates Occupy Pedofilyay’s agenda remains unclear. Kmitits says his colleague is in charge of the movement’s Moscow headquarters, and that the various satellite branches are "semi-autonomous." It is clear, though, that his persona and notoriety have garnered a broader cult following. Both Mikheev and Mikolenko say they’ve never met Martsinkevich in person, and started their respective branches after learning of the movement online.
Critics say anti-gay Movements "trample on human dignity."
Some VK users are calling upon the police to arrest Occupy’s leaders, on the grounds that their intimidation and physical aggression violate Russian law. Karina Frangulyan started an anti-Occupy Gerontifilyay group on VK last month, in the hopes of bringing down a movement that, as she says, regularly "tramples on human dignity." Frangulyan has collected around 15 videos from Occupy Gerontifilyay and is hoping to present them as evidence against its leaders, though she says that police have ignored many previous complaints. As of August 3rd, Frangulyan’s group had nearly 900 members, while two similar pages had close to 1,000, in total.
Although Frangulyan and her peers are explicitly targeting Occupy Gerontifilyay, they find its larger sister movement equally despicable, and have filed complaints against both to VK moderators. In an email statement to The Verge, a VK spokesperson says the site has shut down all groups related to Occupy Gerontifilyay, in addition to several Occupy Pedofilyay pages that were found to contain "insults, incitements to violence, or spam." It appears that VK has indeed shuttered all of Occupy Gerontifilyay’s pages, though critics say the site hasn’t gone far enough, pointing to the slew of safari videos, images, and Occupy Pedofilyay groups that remain online.A new study out of Stanford University concludes that people may perceive they are more alone in their emotional problems than they really are. More often than not, people underestimate how often others feel unhappy or lonely, thinking in turn, that they are the only ones who are experiencing such negative emotions, the study notes.
In part one of the study, participants reported that their negative emotions were more hidden than their positive emotions. ( SHUTTERSTOCK )
The problem lies in how people express their emotions, said Alexander Jordan, a social psychologist at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and co-author of the study. “We can only observe other people in a social setting. (And) people tend to feel better when there are others around,” he said in an interview Wednesday with the Star. The study Misery Has More Company Than People Think: Underestimating the Prevalence of Others’ Negative Emotions was published in December in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
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Jordan added it’s the cultural norm to put on a happy face when others are around. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are prime examples of this, he said. It’s more common for a Facebook user to write about how happy they are on their Facebook status, than if they are depressed or lonely. The research was conducted between 2007 and 2010, and sampled 400 first-year undergraduate students at Stanford. It was divided into four smaller studies, with Jordan and his team monitoring participants’ thoughts throughout. In the first part, participants reported that their negative emotions were more hidden than their positive emotions. In part two, participants underestimated how many among them in the group had negative, rather than positive, experiences.
In the third part, participants underestimated negative emotions and overestimated positive emotions among their peers. In the fourth part, researchers found that lower estimations of the occurrence of negative emotional situations predicted greater loneliness and lower life satisfaction. Higher estimations for positive emotional situations, however, predicted lower life satisfaction.
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But Jordan doesn’t advocate that people should complain more to one another. Negativity breeds negativity, he said. Instead, he said he hopes that people realize that “they aren’t alone” in their negative feelings, and empathize more with others.The production crew for SBS’s “Running Man” has formally stated their position in regards to the recent cast change controversy.
On December 15, the production team stated, “We would like to state our position regarding the recent controversy on the cast changes for ‘Running Man.'” The team then revealed that they were unable to wrap up the communication procedures for the goal of launching the second season in January of 2017.
See Also:
“Running Man” Production Allegedly Decided Song Ji Hyo And Kim Jong Kook Were To Leave Show
Kang Ho Dong Says No To “Running Man” Due To Controversy Over Song Ji Hyo and Kim Jong Kook’s Departure
They continued, saying, “With the news of the unexpected reorganization being released, we hurt both Song Ji Hyo and Kim Jong Kook, two members who we have treated like family for the past seven years. In regards to that aspect, we would like to sincerely apologize to both of them.”
The production team ended their statement with, “We sincerely apologize once more for not being more thoughtful and considerate towards both of them. We would also like to apologize to the other ‘Running Man’ members who are feeling confused.”
Meanwhile, Song Ji Hyo’s and Kim Jong Kook’s respective agencies recently confirmed that both cast members would be leaving the official cast.
Source (1)
Update: “Running Man” Cast Holds Emergency Meeting With PD, SBS Responds To Report Of Show EndingTwo weeks ago spiritually-minded people from across the country flocked to Hot Springs, NC for the 2015 Wild Goose Festival. The Wild Goose Festival is a progressive Christian festival celebrating art, justice, and spirituality.
One of the talks was given by Sarah Lund, author of “Blessed Are the Crazy,” and David Hosey, Associate Chaplain for the United Methodist Protestant Community at American University in Washington, DC. Their presentation, entitled “Christ on the Psych Ward,” explored the intersection of mental illness with Christian spirituality. This was one of the first times the topic of mental illness had been addressed at Wild Goose. In order to continue the extremely important conversation around mental health and perpetual journey towards mental, spiritual, and physical healing, I have ceded this month’s post to David — my friend and man I plan to marry in 42 days. In 2011, David was diagnosed with a form of bipolar disorder. To read more of David’s writing or find more resources on mental health, visit his blog: Foolish Hosey.
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After Sarah Lund and I gave our talk on mental illness at the Wild Goose Festival a few weeks back, there have been a few things that I’ve been pondering, mainly based on stories or questions that people shared with me after the talk.
One recurring question had to do with medication. Different people asked it in different ways, but it boiled down to something like this:
“I know that since I [or a loved one] have been diagnosed with a mental illness that taking prescribed medication is the healthy thing to do. I know it’s harmful to think that if I [or my loved one] just prayed harder or had more faith, that this would go away. So why does it still feel like prayer should make this better?”
I get where they’re coming from.
At a certain, important level, this is just a case of stigma doing it’s thing. Even if I don’t hold the personal, intellectual belief that positive thinking or prayer or ‘just having more faith’ would make mental illness go away, there’s enough of that kind of thinking floating around for me to internalize it on an emotional level. Folks who have decided that even if we pray for a sickness to be healed, we should probably see a doctor, too, find the idea that mental illness is somehow in a different category a bit stickier to overcome.
But on another level, I think this feeling that prayer or faith ought to be able to get us out of mental health crises is worth paying some attention to. Because mental illness — and, I think, illness in general — really does go after us at a spiritual level, even if there is a biological or chemical or psychological explanation for it.
Here’s what I mean. When I talk about spirituality, a term that can be rather nebulous, what I’m talking about is meaning-making. I’m talking about questions like, “Who am I? What am I doing here? What’s my purpose? What are my passions? What are my deepest held beliefs?”
It’s exactly all of that — purpose, meaning, identity, worth — that mental illness attacks.
While medication can defend against those attacks by restoring some equilibrium, helping us build our resilience, moderating our out-of-control moods — it can’t actually, by itself, do the hard work of healing the damage done to the “Who am I and what am I here for?” part of our lives.
What medication can do — and this is super-important — is give us a bit of the stability that we need to do some of that hard work. ‘Cuz it’s awfully hard to spend time in, say, vocational discernment mode when your brain is trying to kill you.
I’m reminded of a passage from Barbara Brown Taylor’s hauntingly beautiful Learning to Walk in the Dark. She speaks of her guides on a cave expedition in which she and her guides spend some time sitting in the sort of absolute darkness that can only exist deep below the earth’s surface:
When it is time to go, I follow Rockwell and Marrion back out of the cave again, thinking about what good guides they are. They kept me safe while letting me practice courage. They pointed me in the right direction without telling me what to see. Though they have been here many times before, they let me explore my own cave. Maybe that is the difference between pastoral counselors and spiritual directors. We go to counselors when we want help getting out of caves. We go to directors when we are ready to be led farther in.
To ‘pastoral counselors,’ we who grapple with mental illness or mental health crises could add therapists, psychiatrists, social workers — all the people who help us out of the cave when we feel like we’re running out of oxygen.
Ultimately, we’ll need to do the work of going into our darkness, of poking around in it. Whether that’s a matter of spiritual direction or some other practice of faith, it’s only by going in and through that we can discover our true selves and begin to work out what it is that we are called to be.
But in the meantime, the medication, the counseling, the treatment — that keeps us from drowning.
I hope this is helpful for folks who are wrestling with this question. We need all the help we can get, honestly.
Back in 2011, during my series of psychiatric hospitalizations, I wrote a song called ‘sufficient.’ One line that I scribbled down in a journal kept coming back to me until it found it’s way into music: “ain’t no pill that’ll fill this hole in your heart.”
That line is true. It takes a whole lot more than a lithium pill to start to feel human again.
Take the pill, anyway.
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The quote is from Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark (HarperOne, 2014), pg. 129.Dead money. A mantra drummed into impressionable minds by well-meaning family and friends from a very young age. It's dead money, renting; dead money. I recall this ingrained and familiar refrain from my adolescence in stoic, parsimonious Preston, Lancashire; still it echoes in my early 30s now living and working in Liverpool.
My name is Matthew. I'm an architect – and a tenant. I've shared a house with friends for about a decade, enjoying – or enduring – the fruits of the private rental housing market.
I moved to Liverpool to study at 20 and renting a place was a natural entry into independent living. But handing over money for something that you will never own – awful, no? Tolerable for a few years following education while you save a deposit, but unthinkable in the long term, surely? The desire to own property is so embedded in the national psyche that it fosters the insecurity inherent in any other form of tenure; would not the rental market be better supplied and serviced if it weren't seen as a second-class option?
How then to adjust when there can be little doubt that property ownership has become more remote from many people my age, especially those without assistance in some form from family, even here in the north-west, where prices are not at the London level. What's becoming clear is that inheritance is becoming the prerequisite to property ownership.
We're left with a situation where you need to save forever, or so it seems; property prices continue to rise while salaries stagnate, hardly circumstances to facilitate saving. Or else you turn to investment from the "bank of Mum and Dad". But many of us are "unfortunate" in that our families are not wealthy enough for that.
It seems galling that they ought to provide not only the means of education, but also our place in the great property-owning democracy.
Have we abandoned the idea that successive generations might prosper and enjoy greater standards of living than their parents? If we place such importance as a country on the culture of property ownership, we are fostering inequality if this is reserved only for those who "inherit" (or, as is more often the case, receive before any parental death).
Government schemes that provide loans for deposits rely on a supply of new housing, which on any estimate is far from forthcoming. We seem to have abandoned the idea that the provision of housing should be subject to anything other than the prescriptions of the market. And the market quite inevitably is interested in serving opportunities for profit, with, importantly, the least possible risk.
This means large segments of the population, those with a definite need for housing but who can't access a mortgage, are poorly served. Instead, the market is geared towards those with the greatest means, but often least need, and all in the service of profit. The very definition of a structurally dysfunctional system.
It's hard to comprehend that on the same day I can read that we have a dramatic shortage of housing, apparently requiring the construction of some hundreds of thousands of dwellings a year, and also read that a celebratory demolition of hundreds of homes – the Red Road flats – will form the centrepiece of the opening ceremony for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
Perhaps these are very much the "wrong" sort of houses, in the "wrong" sort of place. After all, they are high-rise and might even be built of such a terrible thing as concrete (a typical synonym for decay and malaise). Now, it seems, a home must be a commodity, and a desirable one at that. If home ownership really is a tenet of modern Britain, we need radically to reassess our current situation. Increasing the supply of housing will help more people have access to home ownership, but this will take years and is far from straightforward, given the complexities of planning and often the resistance of communities to new development.
Although here in Liverpool we can accommodate some measure of population expansion, the same can't be said of other parts of the country.
Perhaps we need to accept renting as a way of life, to build better and much more for this purpose, and to raise standards in the private rental market to match the more professionalised commercial property sector. We need to begin the conversation in which we liberate the word tenant from any shame, liberate it from the notion of dead money.
A better-served rental market should provide more affordable rents, assisting those who can and wish to do so to save for that all-important deposit. There doesn't seem any great appetite for this kind of debate at government level, despite the high-profile campaigns of organisations such as Shelter. Instead, the recent pension reforms announced in the budget would seem to increase the likelihood of a buy-to-let trend among retirees, further exacerbating the housing supply problem without any forthcoming solution. In the north-west, we don't perhaps have the additional burden of overseas investment feeding a price boom as in London, but we certainly have a shortage of affordable housing and at best early signs of recovery in the housebuilding sector.
Can we think differently about housing after the cultural shift embodied by the council house sell-off in the 1980s? If we treat property only as a commodity – call it a pension, investment or what you will – we're left with a market hardly open to all.
From where I'm standing, it doesn't feel as if – to coin a phrase – we have a right to buy.
Matthew Ashton is a chartered architect living and working in LiverpoolNew Delhi: UB Group chairman Vijay Mallya told a Delhi court on Friday that he intends to return to India but authorities have revoked his passport.
A trial court in Delhi was hearing a plea filed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) seeking cancellation of exemption granted to Mallya from personally appearing before the authorities.
Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Sumit Dass had asked Mallya to personally appear in court in connection with a case related to Foreign Exchange Regulation Act investigated by the ED.
Mallya allegedly made payments of over $2 million to a British firm for displaying the Kingfisher logo in Formula One World Championships. This case will be heard next on 4 November.
Mallya’s new stance comes a day after a consortium of banks has asked the Supreme Court to issue an arrest warrant against him.
The banks and the government have repeatedly insisted on a personal appearance by Mallya in previous hearings.
In a strongly-worded affidavit filed on Thursday, the banks have indicated that Mallya is wilfully defying court orders.
Also Read: Lenders move Supreme Court for arrest warrant against Vijay Mallya
The banks’ contempt petition said that Mallya and his company, Kingfisher Airlines, have tried to sell assets to defeat the proceedings initiated against them before a debt recovery tribunal in Bengaluru.
In April, the apex court directed Mallya to disclose all the assets held by him and his family, after the consortium of creditors spurned his offer to repay ₹ 4,000 crore to settle the debt of Kingfisher Airlines. He later agreed to disclose a list of assets held by him in India in a sealed envelope to the Supreme Court and requested it to not hand this information to banks.
The banks had moved the debt recovery tribunal against Kingfisher Airlines Ltd in 2013 for defaulting on loans. The consortium of 17 banks is owed a combined ₹ 9,091 crore by the defunct Kingfisher Airlines. The banks have informed the court that they were willing to negotiate a settlement.
In a 13 March statement, Mallya claimed that banks had already recovered ₹ 2,494 crore from Kingfisher Airlines since 2013.
Several cases by the ED and dishonour of cheque cases are also pending across the country against Mallya.
Meanwhile, Mallya’s defence of his passport being revoked is unlikely to hold ground, according to authorities seeking his return to India.
“An emergency certificate is always available to any Indian citizen wishing to return to India. Mallya simply has to apply to the Indian High Commission," said a government official, who is aware of the developments in the case. The official did not want to be identified.
Elizabeth Roche contributed to this story.
Also Read: Vijay Mallya to stay on as United Breweries chairman1 of 14
Charlie Riedel/Associated Press
Rebuilding is not about immediate gratification. It's about staying the course and waiting for young talent to develop. These teams fit the bill.
Atlanta Braves
The Braves have done things the right way.
They've committed to rebuilding and built one of the deepest farm systems in baseball, giving their prospects time to develop while plugging roster holes with short-term veteran additions.
While they may still be a couple years away from making a legitimate push toward contention, there is already an impressive offensive core in place with Freddie Freeman, Ender Inciarte, Dansby Swanson and Ozzie Albies penciled into starting jobs and Ronald Acuna expected to join them in short order.
If even a couple of their high-end pitching prospects develop as hoped, they'll be set up nicely for long-term success.
Chicago White Sox
Props to general manager Rick Hahn for the work he's done bolstering the White Sox farm system.
Dating back to the winter meetings last year, a whopping 12 of the team's top 20 prospects—per MLB.com—have been added to the organization via trade or the draft. And that doesn't include Yoan Moncada, Lucas Giolito and Reynaldo Lopez, who exhausted their prospect status.
The future is incredibly bright.
The immediate future is a different story, but there's no reason to mortgage what they've spent the past year stockpiling. Just look to the North Side and follow the blueprint.
Cincinnati Reds
The Reds have topped 90 losses each of the past three seasons and there's still work to do before they are ready to call themselves contenders again.
Most of the questions are on the pitching side of things.
The rotation has the potential to be a strength if Anthony DeSclafani and Homer Bailey are healthy and young guys like Luis Castillo and Robert Stephenson can take another step forward.
Those are big ifs, though.
For now, the focus remains on farm-system development and internal player assessment before they consider making any splashy offseason moves.
Detroit Tigers
The Tigers dove headfirst into rebuilding at the trade deadline when they shipped out Justin Verlander, Justin Upton, J.D. Martinez, Justin Wilson and Alex Avila.
That trend has continued this winter as Ian Kinsler was dealt to the Los Angeles Angels.
There's not much left in the way of moveable pieces on the roster, so now the No. 1 priority will be prospect development.
Among the team's top 20 prospects, Franklin Perez (1), Daz Cameron (5), Jake Rogers (7), Isaac Paredes (9), Grayson Long (14) and Dawel Lugo (15) have all been acquired via trade since last summer.
Kansas City Royals
The mass free-agency exodus of Eric Hosmer, Lorenzo Cain, Mike Moustakas, Mike Minor, Jason Vargas and Alcides Escobar has left the 2015 World Series champions at a turning point.
The door has slammed shut on their window of contention and they're left with a roster that's lacking in controllable impact talent and a farm system devoid of top-tier prospects.
The question now is whether they'll start selling off remaining pieces like Kelvin Herrera, Danny Duffy, Whit Merrifield and Scott Alexander in an effort to restock the system.
Either way, there's no sense of desperation in the first year of what figures to be a lengthy rebuild.
Oakland Athletics
So far, the Athletics have opted to hold onto moveable pieces like Khris Davis, Sean Manaea, Kendall Graveman and Blake Treinen.
In fact, they actually swung a trade to acquire bounce-back candidate Stephen Piscotty and his team-friendly contract from the St. Louis Cardinals.
The Oakland front office committed to a full rebuild last summer and there's no reason to think they've they'll walk that back before the offseason is over.
In fact, with plenty of good, young talent on the MLB roster, this could be a team to watch in 2018.
San Diego Padres
Bob Nightengale of USA Today reported last week that the Padres had emerged as the "clear-cut favorites" to sign free agent Eric Hosmer.
If that happens, great.
If not, they're still focused on two or three years down the road, not 2018 and there will be other high-profile free agents to target along the way before the Friars are ready to contend again.Peter Jackson confirms a third “Hobbit” will be made. (MATT SAYLES/INVISION/AP)
The Oscar-winning filmmaker — who, as Smeagol scholars are well aware, directed the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy to much critical acclaim and financial success — had hinted about a third “Hobbit” during a recent appearance at Comic-Con. But today’s statement officially confirms that a third, not-yet-titled movie will follow “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” and ”The Hobbit: There and Back Again.” Part three of the Bilbo Baggins saga is slated for release in summer 2014. “Unexpected Journey” arrives this December.
In a statement posted to his Facebook page, Jackson noted that he and collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyles made the decision after watching an early cut of the first film-and-a-half’s worth of “The Hobbit.”
“All of which gave rise to a simple question: Do we take this chance to tell more of the tale?” Jackson said. “And the answer from our perspective as the filmmakers, and as fans, was an unreserved ‘yes.’”
When decisions are made to stretch a story into more movies than originally planned, it’s natural to assume that it is, at least in part, a money decision. By extending the “Harry Potter” franchise from seven films to eight, or “Twilight” from four movies to five, or “The Hunger Games” from three parts to four, each respective studio gets yet another guaranteed box office home run based on an established franchise.
Undoubtedly the studios backing “The Hobbit” — Warner Bros., New Line and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer — were happy about this “Hobbit” call for that reason. But given Jackson’s artistic integrity, this doesn’t seem like a straight-up money grab. If Jackson says that he, Boyles and Walsh (who also happens to be Jackson’s wife) agreed that they couldn’t tell the story properly in just two movies, then I am inclined to think narrative quality was more of a motivator than ticket sales.
Still, there is something to be said for keeping a story as streamlined as possible. The “Lord of the Rings” movies, as originally released, each clocked in around three hours, give or take. The extended editions later released on DVD and Blu-ray padded out the running times even more.
My only concern is that Jackson is skipping over the swiftly edited version of “The Hobbit” and going right for the extended edition, which may mean he’s getting bogged down into much detail. (In his statement, he noted that he wants to share “the richness of the story of ‘The Hobbit,’ as well as some of the related material in the appendices of ‘The Lord of the Rings.’”) Seriously, when a longer, director’s cut inevitably gets released, it may take an entire week to watch it.
Granted, this is a minor quibble over what most consider something to be celebrate: news that there will be more of Middle-earth for fans to savor, presented by the very capable Jackson. Indeed, in the short time since the New Zealander first posted the news about a third “Hobbit” on his Facebook page, he has already amassed more than 12,000 likes.Bill Nye’s new Netflix talk show, Bill Nye Saves the World, officially has a premiere date: April 21st. Nye made the announcement at an event in New York City today, suggesting that it’s only too fitting that it airs on the eve of Earth Day.
A “fact-based” talk show
The new series will feature celebrities like Donald Faison and Rachel Bloom tackling topics like sex, global warming, and alternative medicine. Nye told the audience, with a wry scoff, that it will take a “fact-based” approach to informing its audience.
The series is Nye’s big return to television after his landmark PBS series Bill Nye the Science Guy. That series turned Nye into a household name, allowing him to make frequent appearances in media in the years since. Obviously, we’re looking forward to this one.By Occupy the SEC
Jamie Dimon’s plan to enfeeble the Dodd-Frank reforms, specifically the Volcker rule, has blown up spectacularly. Apparently JPM was so confident that their interpretation of the hedging exemption would prevail, that they got ahead of themselves and operated as if this loophople were in effect. But then things went horribly wrong for them. And the losses are even more damaging since the blowup is the result of activity the law was meant to curtail. Double trouble now for JPM, since it’s inconceivable that the hedging exemption they designed will make it into the final rulemaking. If it does survive, then we’ve got bigger issues with our regulators than we imagined.
In today’s New York Times, James Wyatt provides an under the radar view of how laws are gutted when the regulators involved in rule-making are heavily lobbied by the regulated. One objective of Occupy the SEC was to inject a non industry perspective in this process as a counterweight to the overwhelming industry influence. By looking for loopholes we intended to shed light on the self-serving interests of the bankers and the vulnerability of the regulators to concerted industry pressure. Wyatt describes the lobbying efforts:
Several visits over months by the bank’s well-connected chief executive, Jamie Dimon, and his top aides were aimed at persuading regulators to create a loophole in the law, known as the Volcker Rule. The rule was designed by Congress to limit the very kind of proprietary trading that JPMorgan was seeking. “JPMorgan was the one that made the strongest arguments to allow hedging, and specifically to allow this type of portfolio hedging,” said a former Treasury official who was present during the Dodd-Frank debates.
Portfolio hedging is at the heart of the London Whale debacle.
The loophole is known as portfolio hedging, a strategy that essentially allows banks to view an investment portfolio as a whole and take actions to offset the risks of the entire portfolio. That contrasts with the traditional definition of hedging, which matches an individual security or trading position with an inversely related investment — so when one goes up, the other goes down. Portfolio hedging “is a license to do pretty much anything,” Mr. Levin said. He and Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who worked on the law with Mr.Levin, sent a letter to regulators in February, making clear that hedging on that scale was not their intention. “There is no statutory basis to support the proposed portfolio hedging language,” they wrote, “nor is there anything in the legislative history to suggest that it should be allowed.”
We were extremely concerned about this loophole and argued against it in our comment letter to the regulators.
We are alarmed by the focus on.“portfolio hedging.” throughout the risk-mitigating hedging exemption. We interpret the intent of this exemption as relating to Delta One or central execution desks that have become ubiquitous across banking entities in recent years. Certainly these central hedging operations pose significant risks, as famously exemplified in the rogue trading scandal that caused a $2.3 billion loss in 2011.84 While it is clear that such practices necessitate increased oversight and significantly improved risk-management procedures, there are other instances of aggregated hedging that will be inappropriately included within.“portfolio hedging.” that require consideration. Even outside of central execution desks, many risks a recurrently managed on an aggregated basis, due to the numerous, and often compounding, proprietary portfolios that exist on every market making desk of every covered banking entity. With so many independent strategies at play, it is not uncommon for large exposures across a variety of assets to result when they are combined in the view of a manager. Management will often make use of a.“back book.” or.“management book.” for the dual purposes of conducting broad-line hedges against lumpy trading-desk exposures, and taking proprietary positions that fall outside of the mandate or risk-limits of an individual trader. While it is expected that such obvious proprietary exposures will diminish with the implementation of this Rule, we fail to understand the continued relevance of most management hedging operations once individual trading books pare their component exposures. We are troubled by the potential for such.“back books.” to become havens of prohibited proprietary activity after the implementation of this Rule. A specific requirement that each type of exposure be designated as one that is hedged exclusively on an Individual or an Aggregate basis is essential. Risks should never be hedged on both an individual and aggregate basis, and most risk types are appropriately mitigated in only one of the categories. For instance, counterparty risk should always be (and in practice, typically always is) mitigated on a portfolio basis, and individual traders should not be able to make use of the hedging exemption by claiming mitigation of such a risk. These risks can be managed by a level of organization that is out of touch with the day-to-day operations of a trading desk. We propose that the Agencies consider requiring banking entities to create central.“Risk Management.” groups to perform aggregated hedges, to the extent that such groups are not already in place. The broad allowance for aggregated hedging is troubling and its exemption is inconsistent with the intentions of this Rule. This rule mandates strict risk mitigation at a micro level, and should remove all Implicit or explicit allowances for the dangerous practice of management hedging. More generally, a banking entity.’s need for substantive aggregated hedging is indicative of a failure to appropriately mitigate risks at lower levels within an entity, and is therefore in violation of the spirit of the Rule. We acknowledge that the statute allows for aggregated hedging in Section 619(d)(1)(C),85 and we hope that the Agencies are prepared to be diligent in monitoring this activity closely to discourage abuses, which we see as a serious risk.
It’s way past time for ordinary citizens to have there voices heard in this process. We were encouraged that over 15,000 letters in support of a strong Volcker Rule were submitted to the regulators during the comment period. That was a clear signal that ordinary citizens want some checks on the power of the banks. Additionally, its encouraging that another 1,800 people petitioned the regulators to do the same.
Thanks to Jamie Dimon, perhaps the regulators will finally lend and ear to the clear message the citizens of this country are trying to get them to hear.There are plenty of rowdy stadiums in college football — the din from a Louisiana State game in 1988 registered on a local seismograph and the press box above Texas A&M’s Kyle Field moves when the students link arms and sway during games. But perhaps no stadium rocks more than Wisconsin’s Camp Randall, thanks to a tradition that grew from a marketing employee named Kevin Kluender who spontaneously pushed the play button on “Jump Around.”
In 1998, during the first night homecoming game for Wisconsin, Kluender was looking for something to keep the crowd energized between the third and fourth quarters. He had a list of suggested songs provided by Ryan Sondrup, an intern in the marketing department and a former Badgers football player. Kluender chose “Jump Around” and looked away from the field to check his notes. When he turned back, he said the leaping students looked “like popcorn popping.”
Wisconsin hung on to beat Purdue, 31-24, despite 83 pass attempts by Drew Brees, still an N.C.A.A. record. At one point in the song, the phrase “jump around” is repeated three times, followed by “jump up jump up and get down,” and then the word “jump” is repeated 18 times. Soon, the hopping students and shaking press box became as much a part of Wisconsin’s game-day experience as the smell of bratwursts grilling and the sight of empty cans of Milwaukee’s Best littering the sidewalks.
“It’s turned into something really special and unique in college football,” said Barry Alvarez, Wisconsin’s athletic director and former football coach.
Soon, television cameras made a point to broadcast the moment, and a tradition was born.
“I would love to tell you it was the result of months of market research and focus groups, but it just kind of happened,” said Kluender, who is an assistant athletic director for marketing and promotions. “And that’s a reason it’s still so popular: it wasn’t scheduled or planned.”
The phrase “Jump Around” now appears on Wisconsin T-shirts and is such a part of Wisconsin’s identity that its fans become ornery when other universities attempt to adopt the phrase and the jumping that comes with it. When Kluender’s fiancée moved to Madison, she ordered a “Jump Around” credit card and impressed the credit union employees by telling them that her future husband started the tradition.
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But Kluender said the tradition officially became a phenomenon in 2003 when Pat Richter, then the athletic director, asked him before the home opener against Akron not to play the song. Camp Randall was under construction, and there was concern that the shaking could be dangerous.
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Students were livid when the song did not come on between the third and fourth quarter. Some turned their backs to the field, and Kluender recalled that the focus became more about why the song was not played than the game itself. Calls, letters and e-mails flooded the news media and the athletic department, and a quick safety study was conducted. Soon, Chancellor John D. Wiley announced that “Jump Around” could be played the next week.
“It rose to the point where the chancellor of Wisconsin had to put out a press release |
F-α (at all doses) [Figure 7I; F (4,20) = 2.901, p = 0.048] after multiple administration. These results revealed that ketamine may affect IL-6, IL-1β, and TNF-α expression levels in mouse hippocampus at the transcription level.
FIGURE 7
FIGURE 7. Effects of acute and chronic ketamine administration on the mRNA levels of IL-6, IL-1β, and TNF-α in mouse hippocampus. (A–C) The results of qRT-PCR show that 6 months intraperitoneal injection of ketamine increased the mRNA levels of IL-6 and IL-1β, but decreased the mRNA level of TNF-α. (D–F) The results of qRT-PCR show that single intraperitoneal injection of ketamine increased the mRNA levels of IL-6, IL-1β, and TNF-α. (G–I) The results of qRT-PCR show that multiple intraperitoneal injection of ketamine increased the mRNA levels of IL-6, IL-1β, and TNF-α. Data are expressed as mean ± SEM, n = 5 for each group. Statistical analysis used ANOVA to compare the difference between saline-treated group and each ketamine-treated group (*p < 0.05; **p < 0.01).
Discussion
In the present study, our findings indicate that hippocampal inflammatory cytokines IL-6, IL-1β, and TNF-α may be involved in the subanesthetic ketamine-induced behavioral changes in mice.
The Y maze task is a specific and sensitive test of spatial recognition memory in rodents (Dellu et al., 2000). A large number of studies have shown that long-term ketamine administration markedly induces learning and memory impairment in humans (Morgan et al., 2004; Chan et al., 2013) and mice (Tan et al., 2011). In our study, we used the Y maze test to measure spatial recognition memory, and found that only the mice that received chronic ketamine administration at 60 mg/kg (not 30 mg/kg) exhibited spatial memory deficit. This was supported by a study in which mice exposed to 30 mg/kg ketamine for 6 months showed no apparent deficit in learning and memory (Sun et al., 2011), and another study in which rats exhibited learning and memory impairment when exposed to ketamine at 80 mg/kg but not at a lower dose of 30 mg/kg in a 7 days administration paradigm (Wang et al., 2014). Previous works by our research group showed that a higher dose of ketamine (60 mg/kg) resulted in significant spatial learning and memory impairment after 6 months administration, while lower dose of ketamine (30 mg/kg) did not induce any apparent deficits in Morris water maze tests and radial arm maze test (Ding et al., 2016). These results indicate that cognitive function impairments after chronic ketamine administration are dose-dependent in mice. A previous study reported that a single i.p. injection of ketamine at subanesthetic and anesthetic doses did not impair recognition memory or reference memory and did not cause neurodegeneration in adult mice (Ribeiro et al., 2013). Similarly, we did not observe a significant difference between the saline-treated group and each ketamine-treated group (10, 20, 40, or 80 mg/kg) after acute administration, whether with single or multiple administration. We can conclude that acute ketamine administration has no effect on spatial recognition memory in mice.
In the open field test, our results showed that chronic ketamine administration at high dose had a significant anxiolytic effect. Mice displayed reduced anxiety-like behaviors after long-term administration at the dose of 60 mg/kg, while low dose ketamine (30 mg/kg) had no effect. Moreover, we did not observe significant differences after acute ketamine administration, whether with single or multiple administration. The results of previous studies investigating the anxiety-related acute effects of ketamine were completely different, with reports of anxiolytic (Imre et al., 2006; Engin et al., 2009), anxiogenic (da Silva et al., 2010; Akillioglu et al., 2012), and null (Sobota et al., 2015) results. Some of the conclusions were inconsistent with our results. The reason may be due to the fact that we performed the behavioral tests 3 h after the last injection of ketamine or saline, whereas the above-mentioned studies involved a much shorter period (15–90 min) after ketamine injection. Ketamine has a short half-life, and its metabolites are quickly cleared by urinary excretion (Sinner and Graf, 2008). In our study, we aimed to determine the stable and persistent effects of ketamine on the mouse central nervous system rather than its immediate effect. The acute application of ketamine may just give rise to transient behavioral states, so behavioral tests performed a long time (such as 3 h) after acute administration of ketamine may not show effects on emotional response and cognitive function in mice.
Neuroinflammation has been suggested to play an important role in neurodegeneration (Heneka and O’Banion, 2007; Cameron and Landreth, 2010), and to cause cognitive impairment both in humans (Hoogman et al., 2007) and animals (Langdon et al., 2008). There is extensive evidence that IL-6, as a proinflammatory cytokine, may affect brain function and may be involved in pathological neurodegenerative disorders. Studies have reported a positive association between plasma IL-6 level and impairment in a wide range of cognitive domains in humans (Gimeno et al., 2008; Simpson et al., 2013; Heringa et al., 2014). Meanwhile, IL-6 overexpression in the brain of transgenic mice has been shown to cause severe neurological disease (Heyser et al., 1997). IL-6 knockout mice have been found to exhibit better and faster acquisition in learning and memory processes, demonstrating a facilitation of spatial learning using the radial arm maze test (Braida et al., 2004). With regard to IL-1β, it is required for normal learning and memory processes, but exogenous administration or excessive endogenous levels may produce detrimental cognitive behavioral effects (Chen et al., 2008). A previous study demonstrated a synergistic interaction between IL-1β and other cytokines, causing enhanced cognitive dysfunction (Allan et al., 2005). Another recent study confirmed that IL-1β is involved in cognitive impairment after sepsis in rats (Mina et al., 2014), showing that IL-1β may be involved in brain dysfunction. TNF-α has been proven to play an important role in central nervous system development and functions including neuronal plasticity, cognition, and behavior (Garay and McAllister, 2010), where the disruption of TNF-α signaling leads to abnormal development of the hippocampus and impairments in cognitive function (Baune et al., 2012). TNF-α was initially described as a cell death inducer, and as a proinflammatory cytokine, it is generally recognized as a worsening factor in the pathology of psychiatric disorders. Several studies have suggested a link between increased TNF-α levels and cognitive alteration (Yirmiya and Goshen, 2011; Swardfager and Black, 2013), and a recent study showed that local increase of TNF-α in the hippocampal dentate gyrus activated astrocyte TNF receptor type 1 (TNFR1), which in turn triggered an astrocyte-neuron signaling cascade that resulted in persistent functional modification of hippocampal excitatory synapses (Habbas et al., 2015). On the other hand, TNF-α has also been suggested to have neuroprotective effects against cell death induced by various neurotoxic insults (Orellana et al., 2007; Rojo et al., 2008). Recent studies showed that decreased serum TNF-α level in chronic schizophrenia patients was significantly negatively correlated with psychopathological symptoms (Lv et al., 2015). Collectively, there is a positive association between IL-6 and IL-1β levels and impairment in brain function. On the other hand, TNF-α seems to have a more complex functionary mechanism, where it plays a dual role in producing either neurodegeneration or neuroprotection in the central nervous system (Orellana et al., 2007).
Ketamine has been shown to modulate the inflammatory response. Previous studies showed that ketamine had an anti-inflammatory effect under inflammation conditions and therefore recommended it for use in the surgery of sepsis patients (Takahashi et al., 2010; Ward et al., 2011). In a chronic stress-induced depression model, 10 mg/kg ketamine injection showed a rapid antidepressant effect and effectively reduced the protein expression levels of IL-6, IL-1β, and TNF-α (Wang et al., 2015). In a septic rat model, low dose ketamine (0.5 and 5 mg/kg) had an anti-inflammatory effect, but high dose ketamine (50 mg/kg) induced the expression of inflammatory cytokines (Sun et al., 2004). In primary cortical cultures, a sustained increase in IL-6 and a slight decrease in TNF-α were observed during ketamine (0.5 μM) exposure in vitro (Behrens et al., 2008). Another experiment in vitro found that in the presence of lipopolysaccharide (LPS), treatment with 100 μM ketamine for 30 min significantly increased IL-6 and TNF-α levels (Meng et al., 2015). These findings suggest a close relationship between ketamine and the inflammatory cytokines IL-6, IL-1β, and TNF-α; moreover, ketamine may have different regulatory effects on inflammatory cytokines under different conditions.
Our present study differed from previous investigations using the animal models induced by stress, LPS or sepsis, where we directly determined hippocampal cytosol protein levels of IL-6, IL-1β, and TNF-α by using acute and chronic ketamine administration models. We found that single ketamine administration increased the protein levels of IL-6 (only at the dose of 80 mg/kg), IL-1β, and TNF-α; multiple and long-term administration of ketamine increased the protein levels of IL-6 (only at 80 mg/kg when subjected to multiple injection) and IL-1β but significantly decreased the protein level of TNF-α in mouse hippocampus. These results indicate that the effects of ketamine on the levels of IL-6 and TNF-α are dose-dependent. Most importantly, the effects of ketamine administration on the level of TNF-α may be diametrically opposite under different conditions, depending on the dose and duration of administration. A sustained and repetitive stimulation could decrease the TNF-α level, whereas single administration produced different results. Our inference is well supported by a recent study in which the authors measured serum TNF-α, IL-6, and IL-18 levels in the 155 chronic ketamine abusers and 80 healthy control subjects, and observed increased protein expression levels of IL-6 and IL-18, whereas a significant decreased protein expression level of TNF-α (Fan et al., 2015). As we mentioned above, TNF-α may play a dual role in promoting either neurodegeneration or neuroprotection in the central nervous system; it seems that the effects of TNF-α on brain function may be inconsistent under different conditions. In chronic status, TNF-α may manifest beneficial rather than harmful effects and there may be a bi-directional regulatory pathway of TNF-α under different circumstances (Fan et al., 2015). The increased TNF-α level induced by single administration of ketamine facilitates neuroinflammation, but conversely, continuous repetitive stimulation by ketamine decreases TNF-α level, thereby weakening the neuroprotective effect of TNF-α and further aggravating the neurotoxicity of ketamine in the central nervous system. We also directly determined hippocampal mRNA levels of IL-6, IL-1β, and TNF-α, and most of results were consistent with the changes of corresponding protein levels. But to our surprise, the mRNA level of TNF-α after multiple ketamine administration was still significantly increased, which was contrary to the changing tendency of TNF-α protein level. This may be due to the increased protein degradation of TNF-α, although the exact reason is unclear.
The underlying molecular mechanism by which ketamine affects expression of IL-6, IL-1β, and TNF-α needs to be further explored. Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) has been suggested to be responsible for LPS recognition and subsequent production of pivotal inflammatory cytokines, such as IL-1β, IL-6, and TNF-α (Beutler and Rietschel, 2003). It has been shown that ketamine produces a proinflammatory effect by increasing TLR4 expression in a NMDA-independent manner. In a recent study, TLR4 was silenced with TLR4-siRNA vector and found that after TLR4-siRNA transfection, RAW264.7 cells pretreated with ketamine no longer promoted IL-6 and TNF-α expression in the presence of LPS (Meng et al., 2015). However, the exact mechanism of how ketamine induces dual function of TNF-α under different conditions still remains to be determined.
Although, the present study indicates that inflammatory cytokine levels may be involved in behavioral changes in mice, there are still limitations. After all, the spatial recognition memory and emotional response in mice did not strictly correspond to the alterations in the levels of IL-6, IL-1β, and TNF-α induced by ketamine, so some other factors must exist. Moreover, it is still unknown whether the behavioral performances would change if the expression of these inflammatory cytokines were silenced. In future studies, we should focus on the underlying mechanism, exploring the exact roles of IL-6, IL-1β, and TNF-α in spatial memory deficits and emotional response.
Conclusion
We found that chronic ketamine administration at the dose of 60 mg/kg (not 30 mg/kg) induced spatial recognition memory deficit and reduced anxiety-like behaviors in mice. Moreover, our findings indicate that ketamine can increase the levels of the inflammatory cytokines IL-6 and IL-1β, which would lead to neuroinflammation. Interestingly, the effects of ketamine on the level of TNF-α are inconsistent under different conditions, depending on the dose and duration. Single ketamine administration can increase TNF-α level, while sustained and repetitive stimulation decrease it. These results reveal new insights that alterations in the levels of IL-6, IL-1β, and TNF-α may play an important role in the neurotoxicity of ketamine.
Author Contributions
XW, YLu, and YLi conceived and designed the experiments. YLi, RS, GW, RD, AD, and ZD performed the experiments. JZ and GW helped to analyze and interpret the data. YLi and RS drafted the manuscript. XW, YLu, RZ, and GZ provided critical revision. All authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript.
Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Funding
The present study was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Fund of China (81171032, 81100807, 81671867), Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning, China (201102264, 2015020514) and Research Project of Liaoning Department of Education (L2014316).
Acknowledgment
We are indebted to the participants for their dedication to this study.
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That's the widely-accepted theory, anyway. Ocean acidification has been examined in a number of regions (in some parts of the Pacific, the ocean is already so acidic it's dissolving sea snails' shells) and extensively modeled. But we lacked a comprehensive, data-supported picture of what the phenomenon looked like on a global scale.
Enter Columbia University's Taro Takahashi and his team, who have just published research that paints "the most comprehensive picture yet of how acidity levels vary across the world's oceans," and presents the results in a series of detailed maps.
"I started out from a neutral point to prove or disprove whether that information was correct or not," he told me in an interview. "What I found was that it was being acidified according to the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere."
No surprise there—but, as Takahashi says, it's "good to know" for sure, so we can plan for the future.
"The main point is that I am laying a foundation, in 2005, of where the ocean was," Dr. Takahashi said. Until now, "there was no global observation of data."
The ocean's pH levels in 2005—red is a mellow alkaline, purple is acidic as hell.
So, Takahashi analyzed four decades' worth of ocean data to better pinpoint where the acidity was greatest. The Indian Ocean, it turns out, is ten percent more acidic than average. And colder oceans near the poles are acidifying far more rapidly than temperate ones. Waters near Iceland as well as the Antarctic Ocean, for instance, are acidifying at an astonishing rate of five percent per decade.
Right now, his research suggests that the Bering Strait is the most acidic place on Earth during the winter.
So why does this matter? Marine ecosystems can tolerate small pH drops; they're used to some acid swings. But when oceans get too acidic, they can prevent shellfish from forming shells, or result in deadly coral bleaching, for example. In the Arctic Ocean, which we now know is becoming much more acidic, levels of the mineral aragonite have fallen, which makes it harder for tiny, bottom-of-the-food-chain sea snails to grow—thus decreasing the food supply for Arctic fish.
Levels of aragonite in the oceans—some sea creatures need this stuff to grow their shells.
And while no scientist can be sure what, exactly, will happen as the oceans absorb even more CO2, we're heading towards a tipping point where oceans will be more acidic more of the time.
"Ocean acidity changes seasonally up and down," Takahashi told me, "so the marine ecosystem is used to fluctuations in acidity. But by 2050, it's going outside of the normal seasonal changes."
And that's when we could see some serious problems. His findings are in line with those of Europe's Environment Agency, which also found that beginning around 2050, marine animals like coral would have serious trouble growing.
Takahashi stresses that as with the CO2 rise in the atmosphere, there will be winners and losers in the marine world, and that it's impossible to predict what will shake out. But he still sounds concerned.
"We should take care of our oceans. Many human lives rely on it," he told me. "We don't want to see a catastrophic change in the oceans; that would have a dramatic effect on human life."(CNN) Top House Intel Committee member Adam Schiff expressed frustration Thursday about FBI Director James Comey, saying the FBI was not forthcoming about their investigation of ties between Russia and the Trump administration, and said for the first time there should be a special prosecutor to investigate.
His comments came after revelations that Attorney General Jeff Sessions met twice with Russia's ambassador to the US and failed to disclose those meetings when asked about the topic during his confirmation hearing.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a California Republican, shook his head and said "no" when asked if he agreed with having a special prosecutor.
Nunes also reiterated he hasn't seen evidence yet of contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign. He would not say if Sessions should recuse himself.
Schiff said Comey briefed members in the committee for upward of three hours Thursday and offered new information that had not been provided to other Congressional leaders yet.
Read MoreStorm Angus and yesterday’s ‘Amber’ rain have taken their toll, flooding is widespread and disruption is extensive.
This graphic from the website FloodAlerts from yesterday afternoon sums up the problems in Devon and Somerset
This is the gauging station data from the Exe in Exwick where I live – the first peak (20/11) shows the water levels caused by Storm Angus, the second peak (yesterday) is as a result of the ‘amber’ rain – note this is a new record high.
As a result this has just been issued by the BBC – no trains in and out of Exeter for 48 hours – we’ve been here before ……. (see here)
We have undoubtedly had a lot of rain but many of us think the problems have been exacerbated by certain land management practices – I have written extensively about this in the past with particular reference to maize cultivation (see here for all my writing on that topic) and today my Twitter feed is full of other people saying pretty much the same thing.
Here is a tweet from an Environment Agency Manager in Herefordshire – look familiar?
And here is the Chief Executive of the West Country River’s Trust making the same point by commenting on flood management expert Phil Brewin’s tweet and photos from Somerset
Understanding management practices on land are essential in the fight against flooding and maize in inappropriate places really makes things worse. Many of us have also been arguing for ‘natural flood management’ solutions such as those implemented at Holnicote (see here)
Here is a tweet (yesterday evening at 5pm) from Nigel Hester of the National Trust who project managed the Holnicote Natural Flood Management Project
Ironically yesterday the Guardian published a piece which featured Holnicote and stated that the Government is not funding any Natural Flood Management Schemes at present – see here.
Lets hope some of these things change soon.On March 24, 2016, Tibor Machan, former editor of reason and co-founder of Reason Foundation, died peacefully in his sleep, surrounded by his family, after a short illness. Here, his two co-founders memorialize his life and contributions to reason.
Manny Klausner
I first came in contact with Tibor in 1969, after listening to his radio show on KPFK in Los Angeles. He had a 15-minute weekly commentary on this left-wing Pacifica-affiliated station, at a time when the left was somewhat more tolerant of diverse views. He impressed me with his coherent and insightful observations about liberty, delivered in his robust voice. I contacted Tibor, and we quickly became friends.
At the time, I was a litigation lawyer at a mid-sized Los Angeles law firm. I had become a libertarian at New York University (NYU) Law School in the early 1960s, after studying with Sylvester Petro and Ludwig von Mises (who taught at the NYU Graduate School of Business) and becoming acquainted with Murray Rothbard, who was then working on his magnum opus, Man, Economy, and State.
There was an embryonic libertarian movement, barely visible to the general public. During that period, there were several small-circulation libertarian magazines, mostly short-lived. Tibor asked me if I'd like to come to Santa Barbara to meet Bob Poole and talk about taking over a magazine called reason.
We were all young and highly motivated, and we were all libertarians. Tibor and Bob were more influenced by Ayn Rand, while Mises and Rothbard were my mentors.
Tibor gave me excerpts from Atlas Shrugged to read. Although he was a devoted admirer of her work, Tibor had been "excommunicated" by Rand in the 1960s for a letter he sent to her to clarify a question he had. But he kept in contact with Nathaniel Branden, who actively marketed Rand's work and developed an international movement for her philosophy of Objectivism.
Tibor arranged to interview Branden for reason in 1971—a significant journalistic achievement because it was Branden's first public statement after his dramatic split with Rand in 1968. We vigorously promoted the interview, and this led to a major increase in new subscribers for reason.
During that time, no one had any sense of "the libertarian moment." Rather, it wasn't unusual to be referred to as a libertine—and I was once even mistakenly introduced as a librarian.
Tibor, Bob, and I made a unique team. As a philosopher, a systems engineer, and a lawyer, we worked well together from our cross-disciplinary backgrounds.
Tibor was kind and generous of spirit, and he thoroughly enjoyed ideas. He was a prolific writer and an energetic speaker—and although English was not his native language, he was remarkably eloquent. He had an international network of friends, professional colleagues, former students, and admirers—and an exceptional family. He leaves an impressive legacy of work. Tibor's keen mind, his warmth, his passion for ideas and for life, and his friendship will be missed.
Robert W. Poole Jr.
Tibor was born in Budapest in 1939. He was such an individualist that he already loathed Communism as a young teenager. For his own safety, his mother decided to have him smuggled out of Hungary at age 14. Making his way to the United States, he joined the Air Force rather than waiting to be drafted into the Army. There he discovered the novels of Ayn Rand, which led him to attend college at Claremont McKenna College, graduate school at New York University, and finally obtain a Ph.D in philosophy at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 1971.
reason founder Lanny Friedlander, for whom I had written an article in late 196 |
you speak with an American accent?
DR: I did in that. Yes. In fact I spoke with an American accent the whole time, from like morning till night. Nobody working on that film heard me in an English accident.
MM: And it was a Southern American accent?
DR: No it wasn’t. I actually was learning the Southern American accent for something else and I really enjoy it. It’s weirdly… it’s closer to an English accent than a lot of other American accents because the Rs are less pronounced.
MM: Did you have to get tapes of people going “How are you? [in Southern accent]”
[Skipping ahead]
DR: America and Americans have a thing about the Southern accent as sounding sort of dumb, and like silly, whereas the rest of the world thinks they sound f***ing cool. We’re all like, they sound like cowboys, they sound tough, they sound awesome. That is a great accent.
MM: I think they do get stereotyped, but I stopped doing that. You spend time down there and you’re like holy sh*t, this place is beautiful.
DR: There are so many awesome people. Everyone I tell I filmed this movie in Virginia everyone was like’whoa, whoa Virginia’ and I’m like, ‘no, guys, it’s lovely.’ The people are great. Richmond is super… [indecipherable].US President Donald Trump arrived at his golf course just hours after tweeting he had a busy day filled with "meetings and working the phones" and Twitter viciously taunted him for it. Early Wednesday (22 November), Trump tweeted that he "will be having meetings and working the phones from the Winter White House in Florida (Mar-a-Lago)".
"Stock market hit new record high yesterday - $5.5 trillion gain since E. Many companies company back to the US. Military building up and getting very strong," he continued.
The president flew to Florida for Thanksgiving on Tuesday after the traditional turkey-pardoning ceremony at the White House.
However, White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters told reporters travelling with the president that he plans to make calls this week on tax reform but otherwise expects a "low-key day" on Wednesday, according to a pool report.
Within minutes, the pool reporter issued a correction that read: "While the White House communications staff expects the press pool to have a 'low-key day', the president will NOT have a low-key day and has a full schedule of meetings and phone calls."
Shortly after the clarification, the president's motorcade was spotted rolling into the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, located less than 8km away Mar-a-Lago at about 9:30AM. Reporters, who are not allowed into the golf club while Trump is there, were waiting at a nearby public library.
It is unclear if the president was golfing with anyone.
However, it did mark the 74th round of golf for his presidency, many of which have been at his own golf clubs. Prior to taking office, Trump frequently criticised his predecessor Barack Obama for his time on the course. Back in October 2014, he tweeted: "Can you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the US, President Obama spent the day playing golf. Worse than Carter."
Naturally, Twitter swiftly criticised the president saying he should "stop pretending" and call the trip his "vacation retreat" instead.
One Twitter user wrote: "To be clear, Trump went golfing (self profiting) today at Mar-a-Lago about 90 minutes after his aide told the press he had a 'full schedule of meetings and phone calls.' America is in the hands of a dangerous, disgusting, thieving idiot".
"Sorry sir, ordering take-out does not qualify as 'working the phones,'" one person shot back while another said "the guy has no shame."
Many also slammed the president for referring to Mar-a-Lago as the "Winter White House".
"It's not the 'Winter White House'; each visit costs taxpayers millions; and it's using public office to promote his private members-only club that costs $200k to join, which Trump profits from directly," Brian Klaas tweeted.
One person chimed: "If they want to call Mar-a-Lago the 'Winter White House' then we should start calling the White House the 'Western Kremlin'."Ivanka Trump (CBS / Screengrab)
Donald Trump did not consult the Office of Government Ethics over his decision to bring on daughter Ivanka as a formal White House adviser, the office told CNN.
The ethics office’s statement contradicts Sean Spicer’s assurance that the first daughter acted “in consultation with the Office of Government Ethics” when she took an official role at the White House. The White House press secretary made those remarks in March, after Politico and the New York Times reporter Ivanka obtained security clearance.
As CNN reports, Office of Government Ethics officer Walter Shaub Jr. released a letter Monday insisting they were not made aware until those reports, adding the office contacted Trump’s lawyer on March 24 to insist Ivanka file paperwork to become an official federal employee.
In a statement, Ivanka said she was “voluntarily complying with all ethics rules.”
“Throughout this process I have been working closely and in good faith with the White House counsel and my personal counsel to address the unprecedented nature of my role,” she insisted.Ahoy-hoy! This week we’ve got a few nice fixes lined up for y’all:
the abs_n op in MoarVM now correctly turns -0e0 into 0e0 (Zoffix Znet)
closing an async socket now can’t cause the VM to crash. (jnthn)
fix a numeric overflow that could prevent a full collection from occurring (dogbert17)
on windows, MoarVM now correctly accepts unicode command line arguments and environment variables (thanks, nanis!)
the string repeat op will no longer cause the VM to panic if GC kicks in at just the right moment (samcv++, dogbert17++, and jnthn++)
smart matching char ranges against char ranges now works (MasterDuke17, Zoffix++)
a whole bunch of data races were fixed in precompilation-related code in rakudo (jnthn++)
smart matching a Str against a Numeric now no longer throws an exception if the Str can’t be coerced to a Numeric (Zoffix++)
the iterator used for implementing the rotor method used to violate the iterator protocol by pulling more values out after IterationEnd had been signalled, leading to strange exception messages (Zoffix++)
rational numbers used to normalize inconsistently between printing out and getting the numerator and denominator pulled out of ’em (Zoffix++)
a whole lot of useless coercions from int to num happened during even compiling the empty program in perl6. that number has been drastically reduced by MasterDuke17++
lizmat++ made Int.WHICH a bunch faster, which should make object hashes with Int keys in them faster, too.
I drafted a little op for MoarVM that’ll let you grab some statistics about the inner state of MoarVM. I’m intending to give info that might be interesting to have in a monitoring tool, for example if you’re running a server or web app. I’d love to hear some feedback on what pieces of data you might be interested in!
Ecosystem, Docs, and Bloggage
That’s it for now! Tune in again next week for more 🙂
Advertisements'Space & Time' is from the Incubus frontman's new project, Sons of the Sea.
Brandon Boyd's new music has Beach Boys and Nilsson influences. (Photo: Brian Bowensmith) Story Highlights Song comes from Boyd's new EP, 'Compass,' out June 25
A full-length album from his project Sons of the Sea is due later this year
Boyd calls Sons songs "more accessible"
The lyric video for Brandon Boyd's Space & Time acquaints listeners with a new side of the Incubus frontman, best known for alt-rock hits such as Drive and Wish You Were Here. Created as an "in-house" project rather than a studio product, the musician concocted the video himself using iMovie and an uncopyrighted NASA animation video.
"I watched the video on silent and it was just uncanny how much the imagery lined up with the lyrics of the song in a literal sense," Boyd says of the clip, which is in support of his new EP, Compass, out June 25.
The four-song solo record comes by way of his music project Sons of the Sea with producer Brendan O'Brien. The tunes evoke the sounds of the Beach Boys and Harry Nilsson while still echoing Boyd's funk-metal style, developed over 20 years as Incubus' lead vocalist.
Piano- and rhythm-based, and playing off his "weird pop tendencies," Boyd was excited to find that each song on Compass sounds unlike anything he's done before. It's a diverse palette of musical sensibilities that he'll further be exploring on a full-length album, slated for release later this year.
"Probably the most striking difference between Sons of the Sea and Incubus is that Sons of the Sea is more accessible, I guess you could say?" Boyd says. "It's not as much heavy or alternative rock like Incubus, it's a lot more song-based."
Check out the Space & Time lyric video, premiering on USA TODAY.
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Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/16iOG3KAUGUSTA — More than half of the domestic abuse homicides reviewed by a state panel were committed by someone who exhibited suicidal behavior before killing or trying to kill a family member or partner.
The panel also found that a handgun was used in most domestic violence homicides in Maine from 2009 to 2013.
Additional Photos Assistant Attorney General Lisa Marchese, center, speaks during a news conference announcing release of the 10th report of the Domestic Abuse Homicide Review Panel on Thursday in the State House Hall of Flags in Augusta. She is flanked by Department of Public Safety Commissioner John Morris, left, and Attorney General Janet Mills, who also spoke at the event. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal Attorney General Janet Mills speaks at a news conference announcing release of the 10th report of the Domestic Abuse Homicide Review Panel on Thursday in the State House Hall of Flags in Augusta. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal Related Headlines Read the Maine domestic abuse report
Three of the victims of those domestic abuse homicides had protection from abuse orders against their killer, and five others had expired orders.
Of the 21 homicides studied by the panel, 14 were witnessed by children.
Those findings were among several patterns revealed in a report released Thursday by the Domestic Abuse Homicide Review Panel. Professionals representing a cross-section of disciplines – including health professionals, law enforcement and attorneys – make up the panel, which reviewed adjudicated homicide cases that occurred from April 2009 to September 2013.
The panel used the information to develop nearly 60 recommendations, ranging from stricter gun controls to encouraging faith communities to offer more support for victims of abuse.
Of the 21 homicides the panel reviewed, 17 were committed by a current or former partner or spouse. In the other four, the person was killed by a family member.
More than 66 percent of the killers – 14 of the 21 – showed signs of suicidal behavior before killing or trying to kill someone. Seven of those subsequently killed themselves.
The suicidal behavior included giving away large sums of money, saying goodbyes, making amends, buying a handgun or threatening suicide.
“Threats of violence and threats of suicide must be taken seriously,” Attorney General Janet Mills said. “Telling your boyfriend or girlfriend, ‘I can’t live without you,’ can quickly cross from innocuous to devastating. In the context of an abusive relationship these utterances are veiled threats of violence, with a strong undercurrent of manipulation and control. Recognizing the signs of abuse is key to preventing homicide.”
The panel made a number of recommendations involving firearms. These include having the state take firearms away from anyone who makes homicidal or suicidal statements and creating a repository of concealed-handgun permits accessible only to law enforcement.
The repository would include information about the status of a permit, including whether it has been suspended or revoked. The panel also called on the judiciary to create a method to track whether weapons have been confiscated.
“Firearms continue to be the weapon of choice,” said Assistant Attorney General Lisa Marchese, who prosecutes homicide cases. “All too often the only difference between a battered woman and a dead woman is the existence of a gun.”
Julia Colpitts of the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence said it is up to friends, family and neighbors to report what they see and hear and up to judges, doctors and other professionals to hold potential suspects accountable.
Colpitts referred to the domestic violence murder case against Jared Remy, who is charged with killing his girlfriend, Jennifer Martel. Remy, the son of Red Sox broadcaster Jerry Remy, is accused of stabbing Martel to death after a decades-long history of domestic violence charges that never led to a jail sentence.
The panel found that 10 of the homicides it reviewed were committed by serial abusers. Colpitts also said there have been cases where violent behavior has been overlooked.
“That needs to change,” she said. “When someone murders the very person they are supposed to cherish, it rocks us to our core.”
Other recommendations:
• Create programs that enhance collaboration between law enforcement and resource centers.
• Urge health care providers to screen all patients for abuse and controlling behavior. The screenings should be private, regular and occur especially frequently during pregnancy.
• Offer consistent and ongoing school-based education about domestic abuse and dating violence.
• Create high-risk response teams that include multi-disciplinary professionals in each county or region.
• Assign an investigator in each state police troop to receive specialized training in domestic violence investigations.
• Ask judges to use legible handwriting when filling out protection from abuse orders. “If court orders are not legible, they cannot be enforced,” the panelists wrote.
• Increase training for court clerks, lawyers and judges about intervention programs.
Colpitts said people who have lost family members to domestic violence consistently urged the panel to make the deaths matter. Implementing the recommendations will help achieve that goal.
“They want to make sure that what happened to them will never happen to anyone else,” Colpitts said. “Our work doesn’t change the tragedy, but it offers one element of meaning.”
Craig Crosby can be contacted at 621-5642 or at:
[email protected]
Twitter: @CraigCrosby4
ShareSocial fascism was a theory supported by the Communist International (Comintern) during the early 1930s, which held that social democracy was a variant of fascism [1]because—in addition to a shared corporatist economic model—it stood in the way of a dictatorship of the proletariat. At the time, the leaders of the Comintern, such as Joseph Stalin and Rajani Palme Dutt, argued that capitalist society had entered the "Third Period" in which a working class revolution was imminent, but could be prevented by social democrats and other "fascist" forces. The term "social fascist" was used pejoratively to describe social democratic parties, anti-Comintern and progressive socialist parties and dissenters within Comintern affiliates throughout the interwar period.
Overview [ edit ]
Poster of the Portuguese MRPP from the 1970s, commemorating a killed party member, whose slogan reads: "Neither Fascism, nor Social fascism. Popular Government"
At the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928, the end of capitalist stability and the beginning of the "Third Period" was proclaimed. The end of capitalism, accompanied with a working class revolution, was expected and social democracy was identified as the main enemy of the communists. This Comintern's theory had roots in Grigory Zinoviev's argument that international social democracy is a wing of fascism. This view was accepted by Joseph Stalin who described fascism and social democracy as "twin brothers", arguing that fascism depends on the active support of the social democracy and that the social democracy depends on the active support of fascism. After it was declared at the Sixth Congress, the theory of social fascism became accepted by the world communist movement.[2]
The new direction was closely linked to the internal politics of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). After a faction fight inside that party following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, the victorious group around Stalin shifted decisively to the left, advocating the end of the mixed economy New Economic Policy and declaring an intensification of the class struggle inside the Soviet Union. An atmosphere of revolutionary fervour was created that saw any enemy of the ruling group around Stalin denounced as "wreckers" and "traitors" and this attitude was translated on to the international stage where both social democrats and communist dissidents were denounced as fascists.
At the same time, under leadership of German chancellor Hermann Müller the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) agreed with anti-communist parties that "red equals brown".[3] This led to mutual hostility between social democrats and communists, which were additionally intensified in 1929 when Berlin's police (under control of the SPD government) shot down communist workers demonstrating on May Day (Berlin's Bloody May). This and the repressive legislation against the communists that followed served as further evidence to communists that social democrats were indeed "social fascists".[4] In 1931, in Prussia—the largest state of Germany—the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which referred to the Nazis as "working people's comrades", united with them in unsuccessful attempt to bring down the state government of SPD by means of a plebiscite.[5] German communists continued to deny any essential difference between Nazism and social democracy even after elections in 1933. Under the leadership of Ernst Thälmann, the KPD coined the slogan "After Hitler, our turn!" – strongly believing that united front against Nazis was not needed and that the workers would change their opinion and recognize that Nazism—unlike communism—did not offer a true way out of Germany's difficulties (see also Wilhelm Hoegner and Walter Kolbenhoff.[6]
After Adolf Hitler's Nazis came to power in Germany, the KPD was outlawed and thousands of its members were arrested, including Thälmann. Following these events, the Comintern did a complete turn on the question of alliance with social democrats and the theory of "social fascism" was abandoned. At the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935, Georgi Dimitrov outlined the new policy of the "popular front" in his address "For the Unity of the Working Class Against Fascism". The "popular front" did not stop the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
Trotsky's criticism [ edit ]
Leon Trotsky argued against the accusations of "social fascism" and in the Bulletin of the Opposition of March 1932 declared: "Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank... And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory".[7] However, Trotsky said in the same essay that any cooperation with the social democrats was only tactical and temporary and that in the final analysis the social democracy would have to be defeated and subverted by the revolutionary faction:
The front must now be directed against fascism. And this common front of direct struggle against fascism, embracing the entire proletariat, must be utilized in the struggle against the Social Democracy, directed as a flank attack, but no less effective for all that... No common platform with the Social Democracy, or with the leaders of the German trade unions, no common publications, banners, placards! March separately, but strike together! Agree only how to strike, whom to strike, and when to strike! Such an agreement can be concluded even with the devil himself... No retraction of our criticism of the Social Democracy. No forgetting of all that has been. The whole historical reckoning, including the reckoning for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, will be presented at the proper time, just as the Russian Bolsheviks finally presented a general reckoning to the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries for the baiting, calumny, imprisonment and murder of workers, soldiers, and peasants.[8]
See also [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]After four decades of dramatic progress, the public-health battle in the U.S. against the ravages of heart disease may have hit a wall.
Since 2011, the annual decline in heart-disease death rates among Americans has essentially remained flat at less than 1%, researchers said Wednesday, a contrast to some 40 years of continuous and generally much steeper annual reductions. In the decade ending in 2010, the average annual decline in heart-disease mortality was 3.7%.
The likely culprits, researchers said, are the epidemic of obesity and the resulting increase in prevalence of Type 2 diabetes, both important risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The rise in obesity first emerged across all ages in the U.S. in about 1985 and researchers believe the consequences are now beginning to turn up in mortality data.
“This is a startling observation,” Jamal S. Rana, a cardiologist and researcher at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Calif. “Things are slowing down. We need to redouble our efforts” on innovative prevention strategies “to turn the tide,” he said. Dr. Rana is senior author of the study, which was published online Wednesday in JAMA Cardiology, a journal of the American Medical Association.
Cardiovascular disease has been the leading killer of Americans for nearly a century. But since 1970, deaths from heart disease and stroke have dropped more than 70% in the U.S. and most other Western countries, a result of concerted public-health efforts and major medical advances.
Click for more from the Wall Street Journal.By Karen Cordova
Karen Cordova (see KarenCordovaPottery.com) specializes in micaceous pottery which is indigenous to Taos and Picuris Pueblos. Her work is traditionally made, hand coiled and pit fired and built from clay gathered from historic clay pits where native peoples have gathered clay for hundreds of years. The clay is soaked and strained before it can be worked then is coiled into shape.
Pots are fired in an open pit, where they are placed on a grate, then dry bark is built into a teepee shape around the pots and it is ignited from beneath. After being fired the pots are left to cool and the process is complete.
Karen’s familial roots run deep in Taos county, New Mexico, where family members have farmed for generations. Of Native American and Spanish decent, Karen lives in the small northern New Mexican Village, Llano San Juan, overlooking the Penasco Valley.
Karen has been awarded the title of New Mexico arts master potter and has participated in the master apprentice program aimed at preserving New Mexico traditional arts. Karen has been making pottery for twenty five years and has won many awards for her work.One-third of voters are less likely to vote for Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE following his criticisms of the family of a slain Muslim American soldier, according to a new poll released Wednesday.
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The Morning Consult Poll found that 34 percent of voters are less likely to vote for Trump after he ripped Khizr Khan, who delivered a powerful rebuke of the Republican presidential nominee last week at the Democratic National Convention.
Trump questioned why Khan's wife did not speak at the convention, suggesting it had something to do with her being a Muslim. He also claimed he made sacrifices in his business career and said Khan had no right to criticize him.
The poll found 14 percent of voters are more likely to support Trump after his comments, while 41 percent said his behavior has had no impact on their decision.
Of those surveyed, 28 percent of Republicans said Trump's comments made it more likely they would support him in November, while 14 percent said they are less likely to.
Meanwhile, 31 percent of Independents said they are now less likely to vote for Trump, while 9 percent said they are more likely to and the 45 percent who said their opinion hasn't changed.
And 53 percent of Democrats said they are less likely to support Trump in November, while 6 percent are more likely following his comments on the Khan family.Image caption Experts are working on better tests for prostate cancer
Prostate cancer is the poor relation when it comes to funding for research to find a cure, says a charity.
Though it is the most common male cancer, prostate cancer is 20th in the league table of research funding, says Prostate Cancer UK, which is launching a campaign to highlight the issue.
It has been said that the disease will be the UK's most common cancer by 2030.
The Department of Health said prostate cancer was a key target of its efforts to improve cancer survival rates.
Comedian Bill Bailey will front the campaign being launched by Prostate Cancer UK.
Owen Sharp, the charity's chief executive, said: "Prostate cancer is simply not on the radar in the UK. Even though it kills one man every hour - that's 10,000 men each year - most men and women don't know enough about it.
We fund the best science we can to make the greatest impact - we don't have quotas for specific types of cancer Dr Julie Sharp, Cancer Research UK
"We need to follow the lead of the successful female movement against breast cancer and create a real change for men."
According to the charity, breast cancer - the most common female cancer, which has a similar death rate to prostate cancer - received more than double the annual research spend - £853 per breast cancer case diagnosed, compared to £417 for prostate cancer.
Leukaemia got the most research funding - £3,903 per case diagnosed - charitable and government funds data for 2009 and 2011 show.
Every year in the UK, over 40,000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer. Although it is one of the more treatable types of cancer, particularly if diagnosed early, one man dies every hour from it, says Prostate Cancer UK.
Dr Julie Sharp of Cancer Research UK said: "We fund the best science we can to make the greatest impact - we don't have quotas for specific types of cancer.
"Last year, Cancer Research UK spent £332 million on research into cancers that affect both men and women, including basic research that can help improve our understanding of all cancers, and we spent nearly £20 million of this specifically on prostate cancer research.
"We want to bring closer the day when all cancers are cured and it's research that will help us to do this."
Prostate cancer rates have been rising, partly because men are living longer (cancer risk increases with age) and also because more cancers are being detected through widespread use of PSA testing.
A Department of Health spokesperson said: "As part of our commitment to improving cancer survival, including ensuring better treatments for all patients, we have invested £104 million into cancer research over the past year.
"Improving outcomes for men with cancer will be essential in meeting this aim. That is why we are investing £35 million in the biggest publicly funded clinical trial ever to take place in this country to look at the effectiveness of treatments for prostate cancer."A Palestinian youth blows fire as he demonstrates his ninja-style skills for a photographer in front of the ruins of a building, that was destroyed in the 2014 war, in the northern Gaza Strip January 29, 2016. The youths, who have been receiving...more
A Palestinian youth blows fire as he demonstrates his ninja-style skills for a photographer in front of the ruins of a building, that was destroyed in the 2014 war, in the northern Gaza Strip January 29, 2016. The youths, who have been receiving martial arts training at local clubs in Gaza for the past two years, decided to form a team to hold regular shows in the hope that the publicity generated will eventually lead to them being invited to participate in international contests. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem
CloseRedskins fans working on their ranking.
If you asked who has the drunkest fans in the NFL, Oakland and Buffalo must immediately come to mind — judging from Monday morning tailgate wrap-ups and crime reports. And while it’s been a while since we’ve seen any major dust-ups at FedEx Field, Redskins fans still place in the Top 10 when it comes to drunkenness, at least according to a site called Vinepair, which provides “delightful drops of drinking knowledge.”
Of course, it’s no secret that NFL fans often sometimes get obscenely drunk at games, and now we (sort of) have some numbers to compare where these toasted fanbases rank.
This whole thing is based on a confusing, probably unscientific smoke-and-mirrors system involving data from BACtrack, a smartphone breathalyzer, and Twitter’s map of NFL fan allegiance, which yields a magic number. Yes, this hinges on fans using a smartphone breathalyzer — and it’s not even clear how many people this poll involved. So take all of that for what it’s worth.
Regardless, according to the data, Washington fans came in ninth overall. Baltimore ranked 22nd. Several NFL cities, including St. Louis, Oakland and Jacksonville, don’t even register or have sufficient data. Buffalo, however, indeed places at the top of the list.Morning folks, ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- **Usual Disclaimers** These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get put delayed or even stopped. If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/6.24.1/img/champion/Ziggs.png ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Champs without Keystone Runes** One of the things we'll be looking at the most once pre-season goes out is whether each champ has keystones that meet their needs sufficiently. While we're confident there are multiple keystones that are useful on every champ that doesn't necessarily mean there'll be keystones that are good fits for them in the tree they want to go for a particular position. A good example of that is Nunu, who if wanting to jungle while going resolve primary may or may not have good choices. Aftershock's not available to him at all (nothing on his kit triggers it). Grasp of the Undying is available, but looking at how the mastery version of it has gone hasn't been that appealing on him historically at least. He could take Guardian, especially given BloodBoil will trigger it, though it's not yet clear if that'll be worth considering on him. Assuming there are champs, whether Nunu or others, who need some help with keystones then we'll be considering a few options: * Changing how some keystones trigger/interact to include otherwise excluded champs. A recent example of something similar is how Sudden Impact now triggers on leaving stealth as well, not just after dashes/blinks. * Adding new keystones to fill needed gaps. This approach is most likely if there are a range of champions all showing the same problems (DoT mages potentially, though the Arcane Comet changes may have met that need). * Buffing individual champs. If some champs have adequate keystone options, but don't synergize as strongly with them as others, the right fix might be to just buff them a bit. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Adjusting some champ and skin VO** We're currently looking at champs and skins that play their VO to everyone, with the aim of adjusting those that are too chatty, resulting in an annoying experience for others. We've already made some tweaks to Pulsefire Caitlyn, so if you've found the VO playing alongside or against that skin excessive in the past let us know if it's still a problem. Next up is Super Galaxy Rumble, who'll get toned down in an upcoming patch (maybe 7.23, not sure exactly yet). We'll be looking at other skins and champs after that too at some point, so let us know if there are particular ones you think are out of line. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Word Clouds** One of the ways we look champion survey data is by aggregating commonly used phrases into what are called word clouds. Examples of a few of those below, since when we've mentioned them in the past some people have expressed an interest in seeing some of them. Each word cloud is for a single champion and reflects what players tell us about them when we run surveys in the LoL client. The larger a word is the more often it was used. We've found these to be a useful tool in conveying things like: * What players see as the defining features of a champion * How wide ranging different views of a champion are (e.g. are there words that contradict each other cropping up from different groups of players frequently?) * Whether or not a champion has a well fleshed out personality (e.g. are all the large words on the cloud purely talking about how a champion's abilities work or does some of their character also come through prominently?) * Etc https://imgur.com/a/Sbl5x ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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SaveRakesh K Singh By
Express News Service
NEW DELHI: Controversial Salafist preacher Zakir Naik has shifted his radicalisation activities to Nepal following the ban on his outfits in India under the anti-terror law Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Naik’s Pakistan connection also emerged during the probe by intelligence agencies.
Naik’s cadres recently visited Kathmandu, Krishnanagar and Siraha and Birganj districts in the Terai region. They organised Street Daawah for recruitment and distributed misinterpreted Islamic literature. Street Daawah derives its origin from a similar movement in Australia a few years ago, in which its cadres joined the Islamic State. Recruits are randomly selected during Street Daawah, their phone numbers, residential and e-mail addresses are collected and they are radicalised through concocted Islamic literature and brainwashing.
Zakir Naik
Naik has also funded Nepal-based outfits Al Bayyan Islamic Centre in Birganj and Islamic Peace Research Foundation in the Terai belt. These are affiliated to International Islamic Centre, Sargodha, Pakistan. All these campaigns are being run on social networking platforms and are spearheaded by Farhat Hashmi’s Islamic International Centre. Hashmi also runs Al-Huda International in Canada, which converts Christians to Islam.
Naik helped Hashmi develop content for Al-Huda when it was being established in 1994. Hashmi is now paying back Naik.
“Following the tightening of the noose around him by agencies here, Naik was under pressure to keep his network of radicalised cadres intact. Six senior cadres visited Nepal and used SIM cards issued by Indian telecom companies,” a senior intelligence official said.
The Toronto-based outfit is likely to paint action against Naik as a human rights violation issue, intelligence sources said.
“The action by the NIA against Zakir Naik is a step towards containment of his jihadi activities in India and a severe jolt to the regional network of radicalisation being run by him,” counter-terrorism expert Rituraj Mate said.
The government has banned a number of outfits related to Naik, including Islamic Research Foundation and IRF Educational Trust. The NIA has booked him and his organisations under Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Southern Longoria (Austin Police Department)
Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Southern Longoria (Austin Police Department)
AUSTIN (KXAN) -- An Austin police officer who was working a traffic crash on Black Friday was worried he was going to get pushed into traffic by a suspect, according to an arrest affidavit.
Around 9:30 p.m., two officers responded to the minor crash along Capital of Texas Highway near Walsh Tarleton Lane in southwest Austin. As they were trying to move one of the damaged vehicles onto the grassy shoulder one of the men involved, identified as Southern Longoria, 23, "just stood there in the roadway." When the officer asked Longoria to move, he yelled back, "F--- you!" according to the affidavit.
When the officer asked him what the problem was, the officer said Longoria started yelling and charged at him as if he were "going to punch or push him into traffic." The suspect missed and ended up punching the officer's bulletproof vest.
With the help of another officer, Longoria was subdued but the court records show he was "yelling numerous profanities" while the officers were trying to "regain control of him."
Longoria is charged with attempted assault on a peace officer.Cameron MacLean, CTV Winnipeg
When Sheldon Bayer went looking online for a house to rent, he was prepared to answer questions about his income. He never expected to get questions about his race.
On Friday, Bayer was out viewing potential homes and texted a phone number for an ad listed on Kijiji. The response he got back stunned him.
“They seemed OK, the little conversation we had before, but then the question came if we were Native,” said Bayer.
At first, Bayer said he didn’t know how to respond, but the question angered him.
“I texted back, ‘Does it matter?’” he said. “And they texted back ‘Doesn’t matter.’ But they asked. And then I just said, ‘No thanks. We don’t tolerate discrimination. And yes, I am Native,’ I had to put at the end.”
The Human Rights Code prohibits discrimination in rental housing based on ancestry, nationality, religion, ethnic background sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, political beliefs, disability, or social disadvantage.
Bayer hasn’t reported the person to any authorities, because he said he wants to hear their side of things first. He thinks maybe the person has heard some misleading stereotypes, or doesn’t properly understand the rules of renting a home.
“They’re ignorant in a way that I feel bad for them. To even have thought to ask that, let alone to actually ask it, it’s definitely someone that I don’t want to deal with and I wouldn’t recommend anyone in the city to deal with.”
Bayer has lived in Winnipeg for 11 years and said this is the first time he’s encountered something like this. He wonders how common an experience this is and worries about how it could affect his children.
“It affects me and my family, and it affects so many people,” he said. “I don’t want this to be an ongoing issue living in a city that I love.”
‘IT’S NOT A BIG DEAL: LANDLORD
CTV Winnipeg reached out to the landlord. In a phone interview, he said he never denied Bayer from renting his home, but he should know who's moving in.
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current lead in Russian daily crude oil production is likely to be soon over and then decline, as the oil companies are not bringing new fields on line as fast as the old ones are running out. Saudi Arabia, as the current posts are in the process of explaining, is unlikely to increase production much beyond 10 mbd, since Ghawar, the major field on which its current production level is built, is reaching the end of its major contribution, though it will continue to produce at a lower rate into the future. The bottom line, at least to date, is that there is no evidence from the top three producers that their production will be even close, in total, to current levels by the end of the decade.
It is therefore pertinent to begin with examining where the study (which was prepared with BP assistance) anticipates that the growth in supply will come from.
That too is shown as a plot:
Figure 2. Anticipated sources of the growth in global production by 2020 (showing only the top 23 producers). ((Maugeri, Leonardo. “Oil: The Next Revolution” Discussion Paper 2012-10, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, June 2012.)
It is instructive, in reading this plot, to first recognize that it is a plot of anticipated production capacity rather than projected actual production. The reason for this can perhaps be illustrated by an example. Within the current production capacity that Saudi Arabia claims adds up to 12 mbds, is the 900 kbd that will come from Manifa as it is further developed and comes on line within the next few years. However, at that time. the increase in production will, to some degree, offset the declines in existing wells and producing fields that will become more severe as more existing horizontal wells water out. Manifa is not currently in significant production, and is unlikely to be at such a level for at least another 18 months, with production being tied to the construction of the two new refineries being built to handle the oil. It is not, therefore, a currently instantaneously available source of oil. At a relatively normal 5% per year decline in production from existing fields, Saudi Arabia will have to bring on line (and sustain) at least 500 kbd per year of new production. While it is likely that it can do this for a year or two more, betting that it will be able to do this plus raise production 2 mbd or more in 2020 is on the far side of optimistic. Just because a reserve exists does not mean that it can be brought on line without the physical facilities in place to produce it.
It is interesting, however, to note the report’s view on field declines in production:
Throughout recent history, there is empirical evidence of depletion overestimation. From 2000 on, for example, crude oil depletion rates gauged by most forecasters have ranged between 6 and 10 percent: yet even the lower end of this range would involve the almost complete loss of the world’s “old” production in 10 years (2000 crude production capacity = about 70 mbd). By converse, crude oil production capacity in 2010 was more than 80 mbd. To make up for that figure, a new production of 80 mbd or so would have come on-stream over that decade. This is clearly untrue: in 2010, 70 percent of crude oil production came from oilfields that have been producing oil for decades. As shown in Section 4, my analysis indicates that only four of the current big oil suppliers (big oil supplier = more than 1 mbd of production capacity) will face a net reduction of their production capacity by 2020: they are Norway, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Iran. Apart from these countries, I did not find evidence of a global depletion rate of crude production higher than 2-3 percent when correctly adjusted for reserve growth.
Sigh! I explained last time that with the change in well orientation from vertical to horizontal, that there was a change in the apparent decline rates. When the wells run horizontally at the top of the reservoir, they are no longer reduced in productive length each year as vertical wells are, because the driving water flood slowly fills the reservoir below the oil as it is displaced. This does not mean that because the apparent decline rate from the well has fallen that it will ultimately produce more oil.
The amount of oil in the region tapped by the well is finite, and when it is gone it is gone, whether from a vertical well that shows gradual decline with time, or from the horizontal well that holds the production level until the water hits the well and it stops. I am not sure that the author of the report understands this.
The point concerning support logistics is critical in a number of instances. The political difficulties in increasing production from the oil sands in Alberta, through constraints on pipeline construction either South or West, are at least as likely to restrict future growth of that deposit as any technical challenge.
The four countries that the report sees contributing most to future oil supplies are (in the ranked order) Iraq. the United States, Canada, and Brazil. For Iraq, he sees production possibly coming from the following fields within the next eight years.
Figure 3. Anticipated production gains in Iraq in the next eight years. (Maugeri, Leonardo. “Oil: The Next Revolution” Discussion Paper 2012-10, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, June 2012.)
I understand that one ought to show some optimism at some point over Iraq, but it has yet to reach the levels of production that it achieved before the Iran/Iraq War, and that was over some time ago. The EIA has shown that it is possible to get a total of over 13 mbd of production, but it requires investment and time, and some degree of political stability in the country. That is still somewhat lacking. Prior to that war, Iraq was producing at 3.5 mbd, the production curve since then has not been encouraging:
Figure 4. History of Iraqi Production since the start of the Iran:Iraq War. (Source: EIA)
Recognizing that the country has problems, the report still expects that there will be a growth in production of some 5.125 mbd by the end of the decade. This appears to be a guess as to being some 50% of the 10.425 mbd that the country could potentially achieve.
As for US production, this is tied to increasing production from all the oil shales in the country, which will see spurts in growth similar to that seen in the Bakken and Eagle Ford.
I estimate that additional unrestricted production from shale/tight oil might reach 6.6 mbd by 2020, or an additional adjusted production of 4.1 mbd after considering risk factors (by comparison, U.S. shale/tight oil production was about 800,000 bd in December 2011). To these figures, I added an unrestricted additional production of 1 mbd from sources other than shale oil that I reduced by 40 percent considering risks, thus obtaining a 0.6 mbd in terms of additional adjusted production by 2020. In particular, I am more confident than others on the prospects of a faster-than-expected recovery of offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010.
As I noted in my review of the Citicorp report this optimism flies in the face of the views of the DMR in North Dakota – who ought to know, since they have the data. The report further seems a little confused on how horizontal wells work in these reservoirs. As Aramco has noted, one cannot keep drilling longer and longer holes and expect the well production to double with that increase in length. Because of the need to maintain differential pressures between the reservoir and the well, there are optimal lengths for any given formation. And as I have also noted, the report flies in the face of the data on field production from the deeper wells of the Gulf of Mexico.
It seems pertinent to close with the report’s list of assumptions on which the gain in oil production from the Bakken is based:
*A price of oil (WTI) equal to or greater than $ 70 per barrel through 2020 *A constant 200 drilling rigs per week; *An estimated ultimate recovery rate of 10 percent per individual producing well (which in most cases has already been exceeded) and for the overall formation; *An OOP calculated on the basis of less than half the mean figure of Price’s 1999 assessment (413 billion barrels of OOP, 100 billion of proven reserves, including Three Forks). Consequently, I expect 300 billion barrels of OOP and 45 billion of proven oil reserves, including Three Forks; *A combined average depletion rate for each producing well of 15 percent over the first five years, followed by a 7 percent depletion rate; *A level of porosity and permeability of the Bakken/Three Forks formation derived from those experienced so far by oil companies engaged in the area. Based on these assumptions, my simulation yields an additional unrestricted oil production from the Bakken and Three Forks plays of around 2.5 mbd by 2020, leading to a total unrestricted production of more than 3 mbd by 2020.
Enough, already! There are too many unrealistic assumptions to make this worth spending more time on. To illustrate but one of the critical points - this is the graph that I have shown in earlier posts of the decline rate of a typical well in the Bakken. You can clearly see that the decline rate is much steeper than 15% in the first five years.
Figure 5. Typical Bakken well production (ND DMR)
Oh, on a related note, the Alaskan pipeline was running at an average of 571,462 bd in May.Honduras coach Luis Suarez said he was left confused by the first use of goalline technology at the World Cup as his side suffered a 3-0 loss to France.
The moment came in the 48th minute when the stadium screen showed 'No goal' when reviewing Karim Benzema's initial shot that hit the post.
It then flashed 'Goal', ruling the ball was subsequently nudged in by keeper Noel Valladares, as France went 2-0 up.
Suarez said: "The machine first said no [goal]. I do not know what to think."
"If the technology sends a clear message, then I don't understand how the system can say it's a goal first and then: 'No goal.' What is the truth?'' added Suarez, who exchanged words with opposite number Didier Deschamps on the touchline, while the Honduras fans voiced their disapproval.
The France coach was also concerned about the confusion, but was supportive of the use of the GoalControl tool at the World Cup.
"I think it is a good solution and the goal then counts," he said.
"The referee gets the signal - we were just worried that on the screen they showed an image that didn't correspond to the goal.
"It was only after the goalkeeper pushes the ball into the goal it is a goal. The image shown must be the one that justifies the decision of the referee."
The confusion in the stadium left Honduras players remonstrating with referee Sandro Ricci
Former Scotland international Pat Nevin, commentating for BBC Radio 5 live, was initially unsure the correct decision had been made.
"It was a big, big shame that it left confusion in the stadium," he said.
"People pay good money to come to the stadium and watch the game, and it needed to be clearer."
"It's definitely gone over the line, but we were here waiting for the technology," said BBC television co-commentator and ex-England international Martin Keown. "By the naked eye it didn't look like it had crossed the line at first."
BBC Sport pundit Robbie Savage added: "I don't think there is any confusion that it works.
"When the ball hits the post they have to - because the ball is on the line - say that it is a no goal.
"The crowd can boo but that shows it works perfectly in the first instance.
"In the second instance the ball is over the line so it is a goal, and it works. The question is whether they had to show the first [no goal]."
The introduction of goalline technology was approved by Fifa in July 2012.
Goalline technology ruled France striker Benzema's effort against Honduras had crossed the line
Goalline technology was approved by Fifa in July 2012
For the best of BBC Sport's in-depth content and analysis, go to our features and video page.Mar 21, 2017; Sarasota, FL, USA; Baltimore Orioles first baseman Chris Davis (19) works out prior to their spring training game against the Toronto Blue Jays at Ed Smith Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports
Baltimore Orioles’ first baseman Chris Davis is off to his best offensive start since 2013.
The Baltimore Orioles have played seven games this season, and first baseman Chris Davis if off to an excellent start. In 29 plate appearances, Davis is 10-for-26 (.385) and has hit two home runs with two doubles.
This year is Davis’ hottest start through seven games since the 2013 season. Remember, that was the year he led the majors with 53 home runs.
Through the first seven in 2013, Davis hit.417, with four home runs and three two-baggers. He also struck out four times and walked four times as well. Davis finished that season with a.286 batting average, the highest of his career.
No matter how you look at it, Chris Davis tends to have better seasons when it’s an odd-numbered year.
As far-fetched as it sounds, it’s true; Chris Davis plays better in odd numbered years. Don’t believe me? Well, the stats from 2013 are above, but what about the following seasons?
The year the Orioles won the American League East title, Chris Davis struggled. He finished that season with a.196/.300/.404 line while hitting 26 home runs, and knocking in 72 runs. His strikeout percentage shot up to 33%, and he averaged 17.3 at-bats without hitting a home run.
The next season, the 2015 season, Davis’ power production returned, and he once again led all of baseball in home runs with 47. Davis’ 12.2 at-bats per home run also led the majors, and he finished with a slash line of.262/.361/.562.
Although his power had returned, Davis was hacking at the first pitch 40.2% of the time, up by 5.7% from the previous season, which led to him leading the majors in strikeouts with 208.
Last season, Davis did manage to hit 38 home runs, but his batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage all decreased from the year prior. His slash line read.221/.332/.459, and once again he led the world in strikeouts with 219. That’s a career high, by the way. He also had 27.6% of strikes called without him swinging the bat, which is the highest of his career to date.
A trend of good offensive numbers versus postseason appearances.
Chris Davis wants to reverse a trend that has been occurring since the Orioles returned to postseason baseball. When Davis plays well offensively, the Orioles miss the postseason entirely, however, when Davis’ offensive production is down, they play October baseball.
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In 2013, the Orioles finished with an 85-77 record in third place, 12 games behind the division champion Boston Red Sox. In 2014, the Orioles won the AL East title, their first in 17 years.
Unfortunately, Davis was unable to play in the postseason. As reported by MLB.com, Davis was suspended 25 games for testing positive for amphetamines, associated with the drug Adderal.
The Orioles could not repeat success in 2015, missing the postseason again, and finishing with an 81-81 record. Following their first season of.500 baseball with Buck Showalter, the Orioles were back in the postseason in 2016, finishing 89-73 and taking on the Toronto Blue Jays in the Wildcard round.
Coincidental or not, when the Orioles play well enough to make the postseason, Davis doesn’t have the best offensive years. That is something that he is trying to change, in year number two of his seven-year deal with the Baltimore Orioles.Derrick Rose has returned to the court. The Bulls confirmed on Wednesday morning that Rose would play against the Orlando Magic at the Amway Center on Wednesday night. Rose has only played in 46 games this season and has not been on the court since February 23. Rose is expected to play 20 minutes in his first game back, in attempt to ease him into the lineup leading into the playoffs.
Chicago will have two road games this week before returning to Chicago. The average price for Magic vs Bulls tickets on Wednesday night is $111.58 with a get-in price of $32. The Bulls will then travel to Miami, currently fighting for a final playoff seed in the East, on Thursday night. The average price for Heat vs Bulls tickets on the secondary market is currently $230.67 with a get-in price of $35.
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The next home game at the United Center will come on April 11 against the Philadelphia 76ers. The game features an umbrella giveaway and is the most expensive of the two remaining home games in Chicago. The current average price for Bulls vs 76ers tickets is $254.92 with a get-in price of $62. Prices are also up 25% this week and 48.3% more expensive than the home finale for Chicago against the East’s No. 1 seed, the Atlanta Hawks on April 15. The current average price for that game is $171.83 with a get-in price of $50.
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Bulls playoff tickets are averaging closer to the 76ers game on the secondary market. The average price across Chicago’s first two home playoff games is $238.72. As the current No. 3 seed, those would be Games 1 and 2 of the first round series, likely against the Milwaukee Bucks.
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Chicago’s success in the playoff could rely on how effective Rose can be. During his time on the court this season, Rose has averaged 21.3 points and 5.8 assists per game.Owner: Ersal Ozdemir
General Manager: Peter Wilt, soon departing
Head Coach: Tim Hankinson, newly arriving
Captain: CB Colin Falvey
Stadium: Michael A. Carroll Track & Soccer Stadium (Cap. 12,111)
Predicted Starting XI: (4-2-3-1)
Notable Ins:
GK Jon Busch – The 39-year old shot stopper with years of MLS experience has impressed in preseason play. He will cede time to young GK Keith Cardona, but will be a leader when on the field or not.
CB Colin Falvey – The stout Irishman was brought in to organize and solidify Indy’s back line. Results from preseason indicate this plan is progressing well.
DF/MF Nemanja Vuković – A top defender in the USL, Vuko has transitioned well to the Eleven and projects to play as a CB, LB or DM; he has also been taking a few free kicks in preseason matches. The skilled defender could serve a key role as a defensive-utility player with offensive talents.
RB/DM Lovel Palmer – Beloved by Chicago Fire fans for his personality, Palmer has put in quiet but solid shifts this preseason. While he was outclassed at times in MLS at right back he should be up for the challenge in the NASL.
MF Nicki Paterson – Coming off of a major knee injury, Paterson has taken his first preseason with Indy Eleven slowly. In his most recent matches he has impressed with an accurate long pass. Expect him to start attacks by switching the point of attack and serving balls for Indy’s wing players to run onto.
CM Gorka Larrea – The well-traveled DM Larrea comes off a year’s hiatus. Time will tell how the break affected the 31-year old’s game; he could be NASL Best XI or simply past his prime.
CAM Siniśa Ubiparipović – “The Maestro” was brought in to unlock defenses, a player type that Indy did not have in either of their first two seasons. He did help lead the Ottawa Fury to the 2015 Fall title and NASL championship game, making “Ubi” a proven conductor.
FW Jair Reinoso – A late addition to the team, the 30-year old Colombian Forward brings an attacking flair having scored 79 goals in 185 games for clubs in South America and Asia.
FW Eamon Zayed – The well-spoken Irish/Libyan Zayed will be expected to score and score often. He has already declared his intent to win the league’s Golden Boot, given to the league’s highest scorer, in 2016.
Notable Outs:
GK Kristian Nicht – Indy’s first ever player has moved on to league rival Minnesota United where he will save as the primary backup. This is a good landing spot for our German friend.
CB Erik Norales – Norales will spend 2016 anchoring the defensive line for another NASL expansion side, Rayo OKC in Oklahoma City.
DF Kyle Hyland – Hyland will be playing in Oklahoma City as well, although he’ll be wearing the green and white of OKC Energy, a Division 3 USL side.
CM Kleberson – The Word Cup Winner Kleberson took his talent to Fort Lauderdale to join the Strikers Brazilian owners, Brazilian sponsors and the brazilion Brazilian’s on their roster.
CM Sergio Peña – Returned to his native Honduras to play for Real Sociedad, the club that loaned him to the Eleven in 2014.
MF Victor Pineda – Taking his talents to South Beach, Pineda will now be dressing for the expansion franchise Miami FC this season.
MF Dragan Stojkov – Cut less than a week before the season’s first match, Stojkov will be missed for his endurance, utility and grit. Expected to be replaced by an international player who competes for a starting spot at either left back or as a wide attacker.
FW Dane Richards – Joins Pineda at South Florida’s newest club. Miami has built a strong squad and the speedy Richards could have a big season.
Last Season: (Spring: 5th, 13 pts; Fall: 9th, 20 pts; Combined: 9th, 33 pts)
Looking back at Indy’s record and performances over the previous two seasons there are few positives. Although there were occasional stretches of impressive play, both offense and defense were among the league’s poorest performers. The Eleven attempted an in-season reboot of the team with the promotion of Tim Regan from assistant to head coach and the addition of MLS veteran Dane Richards and a few attacking midfielders, but that never had much of a chance to improve their fortune. In the offseason Indy fully entered the rebuilding phase.
Outlook:
First, the team signed veteran head coach Tim Hankinson who brings a wealth of knowledge and experience from time spent coaching on four continents, as well as a preference for a 4-2-3-1 formation. Next, the team have released or not re-signed 16 of the 26 players on the 2015 roster. Finally, Hankinson and GM Peter Wilt brought in players loaded with experience and leadership to pair with the mostly young players held over from the 2015 roster. (The average age of the 11 players newly signed is over 30. The average age of the players retained is less than 26.) They focused on building the spine of the team with vocal and accomplished players from back to front and surrounded them with fast and versatile players on the wings.
And how has that worked out for the club thus far?
Well, Coach Hankinson has lamented preseason injuries and complained to players and press about the team’s lack of possession and productivity. He does appear confident with what he has seen in the short spells that his preferred first team has been on the pitch together.
The defense is looking solid and up to the task of a long NASL season. The first-team defense did not allow more than one goal from their opponents in any pre-season match. (All goals in a 3-0 loss versus Ottawa were inflicted upon Indy’s “B” team.) While the defense seems on track to be improved and more consistent than previous seasons, Indy has struggled to coalesce on the other side of the pitch.
Offensively, the team is still learning to master the movement and passing needed within their new system to generate goal scoring opportunities. In only one preseason match was Indy able to find the net more than once. While it is reassuring that Eamon Zayed, the newly-signed striker that Indy will rely on to lead the attack, did put away three goals in his seven preseason matches there have been too many missed chances and a general lack of output from most anyone else.
Young holdovers in the offense, Wojciech Wojcik and Duke Lacroix have each had their shining moments in preseason, but both still must prove that they can sustain a high level of play over the course of 90 minutes and thirty-something matches.
Forward Justin Braun, signed to be a winger in the 4-2-3-1 has been disappointing thus far; however expecting the recent third division striker to seamlessly transition to a wider role in a higher league may be asking too much.
Dino Williams never even made a preseason match, the attacker was felled by a lingering injury that was suffered during a previous Jamaican-league season.
Indy has begun the expensive task of addressing the situation rather than letting, it linger as evidenced by the recent acquisition of Jair Reinoso and rumors that there are additional planned signings of attacking players in the queue (likely to arrive nearer to the league’s Summer break).
Newcomer To Watch:
With 11 newcomers there are plenty of shiny new objects for Indy faithful to get excited about. Each line of defense and attack features a player or two that offer intrigue. Jon Busch and Colin Falvey will organize a defense that could be the league’s best. Gorka Larrea and Nicki Paterson possess the skill and ability to challenge BYB-favorite Brad Ringo for time in central midfield. Eamon Zayed has ambitious plans of leading yet another league in goals scored. Tieing all of this together is attacking midfielder Siniša Ubiparipovič.
Tabbed by Hankinson as his on-field “maestro” Ubiparipovič will be relied on to generate goals through creative play. Indy Eleven teams of the past have been able to create goals through fast, direct and counter-attacking play and this team seems to have that capability as well. But, if Indy wants to start living near the top of the table they are going to have to be able to generate goals at a methodical tempo as well. Indy’s new playmaker helped lead Ottawa Fury to the 2015 championship game with a strong Fall season; can he combine with Zayed and Indy’s other attackers to deliver a similar production for the Boys In Blue?
Pressure Is On:
If Indy is going to make a serious push for the playoffs, the Irish-born Eamon Zayed will have to be near his stated objective of winning the league’s Golden Boot. Reliable goalscoring has been the primary problem for Indy and the striker was brought to Indy because of a very impressive one-goal-in-every-two-games strike rate across his career. Zayed has been able to turn his chances into goals this preseason, but will the combination of artificial surfaces, the North American climate and physically-imposing NASL defenses take a toll on the 32-year old?
Best Case Scenario:
A 2016 NASL Championship is the best case scenario for this team. Owner Ersal Ozdemir has opened his wallet wider for this season than ever before. General Manager Peter Wilt is halfway out the door to Chicago but desperately wants to leave Indy as a winner. Anything less than a playoff appearance will be considered a disappointment for a front office and fan base that are foaming at the mouth for success.
Worst Case Scenario:
The injury-bug struck the Eleven hard during the preseason as two new acquisitions were injured and then dropped from the team without ever playing a match in a checkered jersey. With an average age of nearly 31-years old, will Indy’s newest players start to show any wear and tear? A few more injuries at a few key positions could cause problems in the standings and at the box office. The Eleven are hoping to use a strong season on the pitch and with their supporters as a launchpad for another push at winning government approval for a stadium to call their own. A third disappointing season could place the team in another two-year holding pattern with the state legislature.
Predictions:
Spring Winners: New York Cosmos
Fall Winners: Minnesota United
Playoffs:
1. New York Cosmos
2. Minnesota United
3. Miami FC
4. Indy Eleven
Champions: Minnesota United
Golden Boot: Dario Cvitanich, Miami FC
Most Valuable Player: Lance Laing, Minnesota United
AdvertisementsLOS ANGELES -- The Los Angeles Dodgers' bullpen is a baker's dozen strong now and looking to rise to the occasion at just the right time.
A team strength all season, the relief corps started to show some vulnerability of late, but the fortuitously-timed expansion of rosters in September has the group starting to feel fresh again at 13 members.
On Tuesday night it gave four more strong innings to the cause in a 5-2 victory over the Arizona Diamondbacks, after starting the day with 488 innings on the season, second most in the National League. The victory kept the Dodgers four games ahead of the San Francisco Giants in the NL West.
A heavy workload for the bullpen means a lack of lengthy starts from the rotation. The Dodgers have done well with those relief innings, though, as their 3.39 ERA heading into play Tuesday was among the best in the NL.
Kenley Jansen completed four shutout relief innings by the Dodgers' bullpen with his 42nd save of the season. Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports
In addition, their 1.14 WHIP led the NL, and their 3.01 strikeout-to-walk ratio was a tick behind the NL-leading Washington Nationals.
"We added Joe Blanton and Louis Coleman, and we had that great stuff [before that]," said Kenley Jansen, who closed out Tuesday's victory with his 42nd save in the 400th appearance of his career. "We just have to find that consistency, and I feel that this year we have found that consistency."
But even as the impressive numbers continued to roll in, manager Dave Roberts always was leery about the moves he had been making out of necessity. It was not that long ago when a six-inning start seemed like a luxury, as five-and four-inning outings from the starters became the norm.
"Yes, you look at the numbers, our pen has been used a lot we all know that," Roberts said. "There were some nights when we had maybe nine guys in the pen. Right now we're looking forward to Clayton [Kershaw] getting back and with what Rich [Hill] has given us, Kenta [Maeda], I think we're trending the right way."
When Kershaw was one of the few Dodgers leading the charge in the early going, he was giving the Dodgers length and at least giving the bullpen a break every fifth day. When Kershaw went down on June 26, it was no surprise that the bullpen was being asked to red-line the engine. Going full-throttle every night is brutal on engine wear.
With Kershaw returning Friday and Hill set to make his third Dodgers start a day later, Roberts says he hopes to get his relievers a double-dose of rest and relaxation to go along with the group's increased numbers. Improved length from the starters had already started in advance of Kershaw's return as Maeda, Hill and rookie Jose De Leon all went six innings or more recently.
"Yeah, I think our bullpen is in a pretty good situation," Roberts said. "Obviously when you've got a bunch more arms out there it helps, but the start that Kenta gave up [Monday] was certainly big. But it's a lot easier to mix and match guys and kind of be really mindful of their usage."
Making the bullpen's run even more incredible is that Jansen is the closer and the set roles seem to stop there. Blanton has been the closest thing the team has had to a setup man, and has certainly been the group's steadiest arm outside of Jansen, but others have set up victories as well.
Blanton set up Tuesday's victory and could give Roberts some stability in the role, but the manager was not about to commit just yet.
"Joe's been great for us, he really has against right-handers and left-handers," Roberts said. "He's done some long relief early, he's pitched in the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth. He's a guy that has really solidified our bullpen, but it's not a hard-fast rule that he's going to be pitching in the eighth. I think that I used Joe in a lot of high-leverage situations and that might come in the seventh."
From the left side, what Adam Liberatore was for the Dodgers early this season with off-the-chart consistency, surprise rookie Grant Dayton has become of late. Dayton has a 1.86 ERA in 15 appearances, and has not given up an earned run over his last seven appearances (8 1/3 innings). And while J.P Howell has not been what he was in recent seasons, Julio Urias gives the club another left-handed option in relief. Urias is not one of those 13 Dodgers relievers since he has not officially been added to the bullpen just yet.
Even right-hander Pedro Baez, fired a scoreless inning Tuesday. He had struggled after recent heavy usage and returned earlier Tuesday from a short break when he was demoted but was never asked to pitch at Double-A Tulsa.
It would seem as if the Dodgers' bullpen has all it needs for crunch time ahead, except a new weapon has emerged in the season's final month. Jansen dispatched the Diamondbacks on Tuesday, throwing an effective slider to add mass confusion for hitters looking for a cut-fastball.
Turns out, it is no surprise Jansen is showing the pitch now with the stretch drive coming and a potential playoff berth ahead.
"Yeah, definitely," Jansen said. "To me it's always going to help you because I feel like hitters, no matter what -- and you can ask any hitters in here, too -- if they're going to face me, I think we all know they have to be geared up waiting for the fastball. It definitely is going to be a great out pitch for me to use."
If the Dodgers can play it just right, they can have a rested and unpredictable bullpen the rest of the way.
"It's awesome man," Jansen said about the 13-man bullpen, that could grow to as many as 15 in the coming days. "That helps a lot. When you have stuff like that, especially with our bullpen getting beat up, that will prevent people from getting hurt. It definitely helps."The Volkswagen XL1 (VW 1-litre) is a two-person limited production diesel-powered plug-in hybrid produced by Volkswagen. The XL1 car was designed to be able to travel 100 km on 1 litre of diesel fuel (280 mpg ‑imp ; 240 mpg ‑US ), while being both roadworthy and practical.[3] To achieve such economy, it is produced with lightweight materials, a streamlined body and an engine and transmission designed and tuned for economy. The concept car was modified first in 2009 as the L1[4] and again in 2011 as the XL1.[5]
A limited production of 250 units began by mid 2013 and pricing starts at €111,000 (~ US$146,000). The Volkswagen XL1 plug-in diesel-electric hybrid is available only in Europe and its 5.5 kWh lithium-ion battery delivers an all-electric range of 50 km (31 mi),[2] has a fuel economy of 0.9 l/100 km (260 mpg ‑US ; 310 mpg ‑imp ) under the NEDC cycle and produces emissions of 21 g/km of CO 2.[6] The XL1 was released to retail customers in Germany in June 2014.[2]
History [ edit ]
Prototype [ edit ]
The prototype VW 1-litre concept car was shown to the public in April 2002 when Ferdinand Piech, then Chairman of the Board of Management, drove the concept between Wolfsburg and Hamburg as part of the Volkswagen annual meeting of stockholders.
For aerodynamics, the car seats two in tandem, rather than side-by-side. There are no rear view mirrors and it instead uses cameras and electronic displays. The rear wheels are close together to allow a streamlined body. The total aerodynamic drag is minimal because both the drag coefficient and frontal area are small (see drag equation). The drag coefficient (C d ) is 0.159,[3] compared to 0.30 - 0.40 for typical cars.
The external dimensions of the car are 3.47 m (11.4 ft) long, 1.25 m (4.1 ft) wide and 1.10 m (3.6 ft) tall. There is 80 l (2.8 cu ft) of storage space. The car features an aircraft-style canopy, flat wheel covers and an underbelly cover to smooth the airflow. The engine cooling vents open only as needed.
1L Concept Replica at the AUTOVISION Tradition & Forum Museum in Germany.
For light weight, the car uses an unpainted carbon fibre skin over a magnesium-alloy subframe. Individual components have been designed to be low weight, including engine, transmission, suspension, wheels (carbon fibre), brakes (aluminium), hubs (titanium), bearings (ceramic), interior, and so on. Empty vehicle weight is 290 kg (639 lb).
The body and frame are designed with crush/crumple zones and roll-over protection, and the tandem seating means large side crush zones. Volkswagen claims protection comparable to a GT racing car. The car has anti-lock brakes, airbags with pressure sensors, and stability control.[7]
The engine is a one-cylinder 299 cm3 (18 cu in) diesel producing just 6.3 kW (8.4 hp). It drives through a six-speed transmission that combines stick-shift mechanics, weight, and drive efficiency with automatic convenience and efficiency controls. There is no clutch pedal. The gear selection (forwards, reverse or neutral) |
, saying that Dassey's confession was obtained when investigators gave the then 16-year-old "false promises."
Read: 'Making a Murderer' Brendan Dassey to Remain in Prison Pending Appeal
Related: 'Making a Murderer' Brendan Dassey's Conviction Overturned
The judge, William Duffin, also cited "Dassey’s age, intellectual deficits, and the absence of a supportive adult," in ruling the confession "involuntary."
In 2007, Dassey was convicted as a teenager along with his uncle Steven Avery of murdering Teresa Halbach two years earlier. Dassey was sentenced to life in prison. Then, last year, his story and interrogation were shown as part of the Netflix series, "Making a Murderer," which raised questions about the case.
The state appealed Duffin's ruling late last year and it was taken to federal appeals while Dassey remained in prison.
The original ruling was upheld by a three-judge panel, Dassey's lawyer Laura Nirider confirmed to ABC News.
"What better way to join Twitter than to announce some very good news: Victory in Brendan #Dassey appeal. Thank God. #MakingaMurderer," she tweeted.
Another of Dassey's lawyers, Steven A Drizin, added on social media that "7th Circuit AFFIRMS Judge Duffin in 2-1 decision. This round goes to Brendan Dassey 2-1."
THIS JUST IN. 7th Circuit AFFIRMS Judge Duffin in 2-1 decision. This round goes to Brendan Dassey 2-1 (Judge Hamilton dissenting). — Steven A Drizin (@SDrizin) June 22, 2017
"We are overjoyed for Brendan and his family, and we look forward to working to secure his release from prison as soon as possible. As of today’s date, Brendan Dassey has lost 4,132 days of his life to prison," his legal team wrote in a statement.
The state has 90 days to retry Dassey. A spokesman for Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel told ABC News that they are "evaluating" the decision.
"We anticipate seeking review by the entire 7th Circuit or the United States Supreme Court and hope that today’s erroneous decision will be reversed," the spokesman said. "We continue to send our condolences to the Halbach family as they have to suffer through another attempt by Mr. Dassey to re-litigate his guilty verdict and sentence.""We're actively pursuing several others," Mr. Tyson said, "It's not only a bad idea to disable the air bag, it's against the law. Air bags are there for a purpose, to protect you. If you have a DVD player there instead of an air bag, it's not going to protect you in a crash."
Calls to West Coast Customs, of Inglewood, Calif., were not returned. Will Castro, the proprietor of Unique Autosports, said, "I have no comment."
Mr. Castro has done customization work for stars ranging from the entertainer Jennifer Lopez to the rap artist Eminem, according to a recent news release from the Speed Channel.
Employees of West Coast Customs are regularly featured on "Pimp My Ride" performing automotive miracle work, and seven of them are profiled on MTV's Web site.
Most states have laws against watching televisions in the front seat, though many of the laws have not been updated to include DVD players and other new technologies. New York law prohibits cars from being "equipped with a television receiving set within view of the operator." But an updated California law that took effect in January bans most video functions in the front seat, including DVD players, with the exception of such technologies as navigation systems.
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Automakers often install video screens for passengers in the front seat, but only features like navigation systems or stereos can typically be operated while the car is in motion, though the proliferation of electronic controls in luxury cars is also the focus of scrutiny by safety researchers.
"We know that all kinds of distractions can be a problem, but it would be hard to think of something more distracting than watching a video while you're driving," said Anne McCartt, a vice president for research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a group financed by car insurers. "It's a really worrisome trend."
She said swapping an air bag for a video screen was even more disturbing.
"It's taking out a safety device that has proven lifesaving benefits," Ms. McCartt said, "and replacing it with something that could clearly be distracting and potentially dangerous."
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
In recent years, car customization has becoming a booming business, and TV shows chronicling cool cars and car makeovers have proliferated, including "Overhaulin"' on TLC and "Ride with Funkmaster Flex" on Spike TV. Over the last decade, annual spending on after-market car parts and accessories has doubled to $28.9 billion a year, according to the Specialty Equipment Market Association.
"Pimp My Ride" on MTV -- with its host, Alvin Joiner, a Detroit native better known as the rapper Xzibit -- is a feel-good show in which 18- to 22-year-olds are invited to submit their dilapidated cars or trucks for a major retrofit by West Coast Customs.
In one episode, for instance, a sad-looking 1989 Ford Mustang was remade to include a photo booth built into the passenger side with a camera in the visor and a printer in the center armrest.
Safety investigators, however, were drawn to West Coast Customs not by something that occurred on the MTV program but by an advertisement on the shop's Web site.
"There's nothing wrong with customization," said Mr. Tyson, of the traffic agency, "as long as you don't disable safety equipment."Police rescued an abducted woman after two teenagers called 911. Aaron Arias, 19, left, and Jamal Harris saw her mouthing "help me" from the backseat of a car. (Published Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2013)
A woman who was kidnapped and forced into her car by a gunman in downtown Dallas two weeks ago managed to get the attention of two teenagers in a nearby car by mouthing the words, "Help me," according to a dramatic 911 call released Wednesday.
The teens called police and officers rescued the woman within minutes. The 911 tape of the incident and a video recording from a sheriff's deputy's dashboard camera were released Wednesday after NBC 5 filed an open records request.
"Yes, I'm on the highway," Aaron Arias first told a Kaufman County Sheriff's Office dispatcher. "I'm witnessing a robbery; not a robbery -- a kidnapping."
Arias, a 19-year-old college student, and Jamal Harris, 17, a Seagoville high school student, noticed the woman in the back seat of a car at a stoplight in Seagoville.
"It's me and another guy, so we're checking out the girl in the backseat because, we're like, 'OK, she's kind of attractive,'" Arias said. "And then, all of the sudden, you know, the guy is turned back, looking at us."
The woman, 25, was kidnapped on Aug. 22 near Bryan Street after she left a downtown office building. About an hour later, from the backseat of her car, she drew the attention of Arias and Harris.
The woman looked panicked and was "saying, 'Help me,' or something, whispering it," Arias told the 911 operator.
The teens followed the woman's car down U.S. 175 until police caught up with them in Kaufman.
"Oh my God, I'm hoping the car behind me is a police officer," Arias said. "Nope, it's not. Oh my God."
But within seconds, officers arrived and pulled over the car with the woman and the man accused of kidnapping her.
"Thank God. You guys are awesome," Arias said. "Oh my God. Oh my God. Get him! Oh my God."
The suspect, Charles Atkins Lewis Jr., remains in jail on $50,000 bond. He is charged with aggravated kidnapping.
The woman was checked by paramedics but was unhurt.
Arias, a freshman at Texas A&M in Texarkana, ironically got a tattoo of the comic book antihero Deadpool the day before, he said in a telephone interview.
Arias said he met the woman at the scene after the rescue.
"She hugs us," he remembered. "I would describe it as the best hug I have ever gotten."
He said he hopes to stay in contact with the woman but doesn't want to interfere with the investigation or court case.
Asked whether he considered himself a hero, he said, "She says we saved her life. I guess you could say we did. But I don't want to be that person who says they're a hero."
Editor's Note: The original version of this story said the woman was kidnapped Aug. 25. The date should have read Aug. 22. We regret the error.28 Apr 2015
When the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer’s Network Trials Unit (DIAN-TU) convened its nine-company pharma consortium in Washington, D.C., earlier this month, it was clear the meeting was more than a regular checkup on DIAN-TU’s many ongoing projects. Even while the observational cohort study, and the first secondary prevention trial that grew out of it, are humming along and generating data, this latest gathering was squarely about preparing for the next phase. Where to go from here was the question of the day. If the DIAN-TU scientists led by Randy Bateman of Washington University, St. Louis, can persuade their consortium, the second trial aimed at preventing clinical symptoms in carriers of autosomal-dominant Alzheimer’s disease (ADAD) mutations will become significantly more aggressive. Now that it has been established that therapy trials in this far-flung, middle-aged population can indeed be done, the goal for the next trial is to shoot for a much larger biomarker and therapeutic effect. This DIAN-TU NexGen trial is to start in 2016.
Nine biopharma companies currently participate in the DIAN-Trials Unit Pharma Consortium. They are funding planning meetings and lending their scientists’ expertise in hopes of seeing their own investigational drugs tested in largely asymptomatic mutation carriers as a bridge to an indication in all AD. Elan, Mithridion, Novartis, and Pfizer are former founding members.
Part of the motivation to reach for a larger effect is personal. “The DIAN families participate enthusiastically in the cohort study and the first trial, but they are asking: ‘Why are you being so conservative? Why can’t we do more?’” Bateman told the pharma researchers. Part of the motivation is scientific. Recent data have shown that carriers of autosomal-dominant Alzheimer’s mutations overproduce Aβ and may need stronger intervention to hit the therapeutic target. The certainty that they will develop this disease makes the families, as well as the regulators, more willing to accept the risks inherent in taking investigational drugs. Finally, part of the motivation is a cautiously growing confidence around safety. The first trial in this population was shaped by concerns around giving such medications to asymptomatic people; however, experience since then has shown that the DIAN population tolerates at least the current regimen well.
What form would more aggressive treatment take? The DIAN-TU scientists want to achieve three things for the NexGen Trial: They want to push the dose of the investigational drugs to maximal effectiveness, they want to combine investigational drugs, and they want to make the trials flexible by adapting more frequently. Each of these goals departs from the conventional way of doing things in Alzheimer’s therapy development. To achieve them, the DIAN-TU leaders have started a conversation with their academic and industry colleagues. Below is a summary of the issues at play.
But first, a quick update on where current DIAN projects stand. After all, they are the foundation for the NexGen trials. The observational cohort study is fully enrolled, at 416 participants from families with a known pathogenic APP or presenilin mutation. It has entered its longitudinal phase with a second, five-year grant cycle, for an 11-year funded study. The study is adding brain imaging with the tau PET tracer T807/AV1451. FDG-PET, a measure of neuronal glucose metabolism, is being phased out to reduce both cost and burden, because it is less specific to AD than imaging the disease’s core molecular pathologies. The observational cohort study is beginning to analyze longitudinal data on its original set of clinical and biomarkers. Its ongoing ancillary studies include exome chip genotyping and generating fibroblast-derived iPSC lines for differentiation into cortical neurons.
The DIAN Expanded Registry has become an active outreach tool. It has brought in nearly 220 people with a known ADAD mutation in their family. Of those, 175 have been referred to trial sites. Of the 813 registry members, 130 are physicians, and all tend to be highly interested in research participation, Bateman said. When someone with a family history first registers, they can obtain exploratory genetic testing to establish whether that history is due to an ADAD mutation; this has led to the discovery of 24 new families, Bateman told the consortium scientists. More generally, the advent of the trial has stimulated a groundswell of interest in genetic counseling and predictive testing among asymptomatic relatives, Bateman noted. “Fifteen percent chose this option when the observational cohort started in 2008, but with the trial there was a surge of requests, and by now we are up to 35 percent,” he said.
Current and future sites of the DIAN observational study and DIAN-TU trials. [Image courtesy of DIAN-TU.]
DIAN is adding sites both for the observational study and clinical trials. New centers are coming online in Argentina, Korea, and Japan, which is planning a national four-site DIAN project. Beyond these, some 30 clinical sites worldwide collectively know about 3,000 more potential participants (see table). The DIAN team is supportive of a separate effort to fund a European extension of the global DIAN through the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 program. Enrolling a total of 1,000 DIAN and DIAN-TU participants worldwide within the next two years is realistic, Bateman said.
The connection between DIAN’s observational and trial components is key, Bateman said at the meeting. Nine of the current treatment trial’s 26 active sites were original DIAN observational sites. Being an observational site is the most efficient way to become a therapeutic site, Bateman said. Much of the infrastructure is in place, as are motivated and informed participants who pass the trial’s screening procedures quickly and stay with the trial. Recent therapeutic trials in early stage Alzheimer’s disease have had screen failure rates of 80 percent; for the DIAN-TU trial, that number is below 10 percent, Bateman said. To tighten the link between the observation study and therapy trials, the DIAN observational study will add the CogState test battery, and it will conduct its clinical and cognitive assessments according to International Committee on Harmonization (ICH) guidelines for good clinical practice. When administered in this way, the data can carry over from the observation study into any treatment trial a DIAN participant may decide to join. This helps the observational study transition interested participants into future therapy trials, and provides run-in data to better evaluate if the tested drug made a dent in the participant’s cognitive trajectory.
The current DIAN-TU treatment trial evaluates the ability of solanezumab or gantenerumab to change a biomarker readout. This trial is two-thirds enrolled, and a first look at the data will come in 2016.
In the interim, the challenge at hand is to plan ahead for larger registration trials based on a cognitive endpoint. Ideally, such trials should be designed to evaluate more drugs more quickly. This is where the NexGen goals of ramping up the dose, combining drugs, and adapting more frequently come in. First, about dose. Because mutation carriers overproduce Aβ42 from an early age, higher doses of Aβ-reducing agents may be necessary to make a difference on both pathology and symptoms. Tantalizingly, Phase 1, 2, and 3 results with aducanumab, crenezumab, and solanezumab, respectively, have not only shown robust target engagement, but also hinted that a cognitive signal could be had with higher doses. Upping the dose always raises safety questions but here, too, the ground has shifted. The first trial was strongly guided by the Hippocratic obligation of doing no harm to outwardly healthy middle-aged people; however, since 2012, exposure in 100 participants randomized to treatment thus far has not generated safety concerns. Hence the stance has evolved to, “We should do more in people we know are destined to die young of this disease.”
At the meeting, academic and industry researchers discussed how to go about dosing. One option is to design a trial with individualized titration. There, each patient takes successively higher doses until they show the first side effect, at which point the trial backs off and continues at the highest dose the participant tolerates well. Another is to start a whole treatment group off on a high dose and to dial it down if needed. Typically, drug-development programs try to find what is called the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) for a drug early in the clinic, in Phase 1. In D.C., the DIAN-TU group considered using healthy volunteers to find the MTD for candidate drugs, so as not to use the limited DIAN-TU population for both safety and efficacy evaluation of the same medication.
A conversation about dosing cannot get very far without discussing specific drugs. The pharma consortium discusses drug classes, but not a company’s individual proprietary drugs. For example, with a BACE inhibitor, the consensus was that no one yet knows which dose might score a cognitive effect. On the other hand, several such compounds have extensive pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics biomarker data that allow a trial design team to choose a maximum dose based on a desired percentage of CSF Aβ reduction.
From the perspective of the patient, “maximum tolerated dose” is an important concept in the private risk-benefit calculation. One pharma scientist put it this way: “If I was 45 and knew I’d start losing my memory at 50 but taking this drug for the next five years could stave it off, I’d be interested. But if I also knew I was going to wake up nauseous every morning during those five years and my memory loss would start at 51 instead, I’d be less sure.” Both a person’s tolerance for discomfort and the regulators’ tolerance for risk may rise the closer a mutation carrier gets to his or her family’s average age at onset, the scientists agreed.
Combination therapy is the second goal on which DIAN-TU researchers have set their sights for their NexGen trial. The idea here is to test two or more investigational drugs together in the same patient as a way of reaching for a bigger, and perhaps faster, effect than each therapy achieves on its own. Combination therapy has become the norm in other illnesses, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and AIDS, but most drugs were first developed and approved on their own. In Alzheimer’s, researchers broadly agree that the current approach of mono-therapy parallel group trials puts the field on too slow a track to clinch large effects within the 2025 timeline of the National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease.
Repeated calls to conduct combination trials in Alzheimer’s disease before mono-therapies are approved are beginning to gain traction throughout the field. Groups ranging from ACT-AD to the New York Academy of Sciences have hosted discussion of the topic (see Feb 2013 conference series; Mar 2014 conference news). Stakeholder groups have weighed in (Stephenson et al., 2014; Perry et al. 2015). The FDA has issued guidance, and Rusty Katz, formerly of the FDA, has appealed to the field to tackle combination therapy as a way of obtaining truly large treatment effects (see Dec 2014 conference news). On April 12, 2015, Maria Carrillo of the Alzheimer’s Association hosted a meeting to prepare a consensus paper among academic and industry leaders on how to get combination trials on the road.
In the DIAN-TU population, combination therapy could initially involve an anti-Aβ antibody plus a BACE inhibitor in asymptomatic carriers who are years away from expected onset, or an anti-amyloid plus an anti-tau therapy in carriers who are close to onset or mildly symptomatic. That said, the DIAN-TU Pharma consortium scientists emphasized the importance of articulating both a scientific rationale and a larger framework for combination therapy that would support future types of combination as new mono-therapies enter clinical trials (see Alzforum Therapeutics database). Some preclinical data showing additive effects of combining a BACE inhibitor and an anti-Aβ antibody have started to appear (see Apr 2013 conference news on Jacobsen et al., 2014; Jul 2014 conference news on DeMattos et al., 2014). Even so, the DIAN-TU researchers discussed the need for more preclinical studies. They agreed that dosing for combinations should be settled in Phase 1 and proof of concept in Phase 2 before attempting a Phase 3 trial. One relatively straightforward option for the 2016 NexGen trial might be to test two drugs as both mono-therapy and combination in a form of 2x2 factorial design.
At the DIAN-TU planning meeting, scientists signaled openness to testing drugs in combination, but an inherent disincentive also hung in the air. The Food and Drug Administration has never required a minimum effect size, and indeed all approved AD drugs have small effects. This, then, is enough for a company to bring a product to market. From a business perspective, shooting for a large effect might be seen as adding more risk than benefit. While the DIAN-TU scientists see the scientific rationale and perhaps a moral incentive, they have to persuade their upper management to go along.
Will DIAN-TU test combinations of drugs from different companies? In theory, the pharma consortium as a group is positioned to do that. The companies already work together to support the same initiative. Roche and Lilly each have given an active investigational drug into the same trial against a shared placebo group. But joining what companies call their “asset” with that of a competing company in the same patient at the same time—or even in the same mouse at the same time? That prospect did seem a bit like asking them to share toothbrushes. Even if pharma scientists were willing, it was not their decision to make that day. “It would take 1½ years to get the contract for that in place,” said one researcher. “Outside of this room, we are competitors,” said another.
Thus far, sharing trial-design and other types of expertise has fit comfortably under the precompetitive mantle of this consortium. Sharing drugs is harder, but the sense in the room was that it is not out of the question. Of the current pharma consortium members, only Lilly/AstraZeneca and Eisai/Biogen may have enough “assets” far enough in the clinic to launch a combination trial by 2016; other combinations would require cooperation between two competing companies. Even so, the group agreed to get to work on this issue, perhaps by engaging the Alzheimer’s Association to help facilitate preclinical studies of drugs from different companies conducted by an outside contract research organization.
The third proposed pillar for the DIAN-TU NexGen trial is to make it “frequently adaptive.” This means that the trial would look sooner at predefined interim outcomes—for example, a target engagement biomarker that is known to respond to the chosen drug within weeks or a few months. This enables a faster decision on whether to continue to a cognitive outcome or eliminate the drug. Even for the current, ongoing trial, the original two-year biomarker readout has been moved up. Instead, there will now be three interim assessments: one when everyone has been enrolled for one year, one when half have been enrolled for two years, and a final one when everyone has been in the trial for two years. The NexGen trials could follow a similar scheme of interim looks, but start them at six months.
Frequently adaptive also means shrinking the time between ending evaluation of one drug and starting another, or adding an additional drug arm. This becomes possible because swapping a drug or adding an arm will not require a wholly separate trial, but merely represent adaptations within an existing trial infrastructure and standing placebo pool. The European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Project (EPAD) is pursuing a similar approach in its ongoing planning phase.
In this first NexGen discussion in D.C., the industry scientists were open to the proposal of a frequently adaptive NexGen trial. That said, they made clear that the amount of upfront work to plan such an undertaking is formidable. What’s the threshold for biomarker decisions? Will the trial adapt based on an individual person’s or a group’s responses? Can it use a person’s longitudinal cognitive assessments to estimate their cognitive benefit, if any? How to model all this statistically? How to avoid Type 1 error? Questions abounded. Overall, however, the tenor was that adaptive trial platforms are well suited for a small patient population such as in DIAN.
Indeed, adaptive trial designs may be up and coming more broadly in late-onset AD therapy development. One such trial is already underway (see Nov 2012 conference news; Alzforum Therapeutics database). To some, this trial signifies an attempt to reinstate Phase 2 proof-of-concept studies at a time when some drug developers have chosen to largely skip Phase 2 and leap from Phase 1b directly to Phase 2/3 pivotal trials.—Gabrielle StrobelThe tide of humanity has indeed passed a crucial point by now, and as these surges of energetic information keep washing over you, you will find yourself seeing the density of yesterday with a sharper eye than before. Let us explain. Again, what you see is not an accurate representation of what you are truly getting, and even if this is not news to any of you, we will still maintain the need to remind you of it. For as you still see reality very much through the eyes of a human, you will also continue to overlook the truth that lies beneath this veil of confusion. It is not hidden from view, rather, it is kept from your perception by your insistence to focus on the overlaying layers of intrusion and confusion. And so, what is there in full view will seem as if hidden in a mist, a mist of much speculation, frustration and indeed anger at times, for you will feel as if pushing and pushing on an impenetrable wall of light that resists to let you enter. Well, that is not the case, but again this is all in the eye of the beholder, and as long as the beholder has chosen to maintain a distance to the layers within, so the veil will seem to thicken instead of opening up. And so, what is there to discover will seem to become more and more elusive as those thin layers obscuring them all will seem to grow thicker and more miasmic by the day.
Again, we speak in convoluted terms, and again, we seem to be repeating the same message. But again, the truth is very simple, and it is attainable for all, but as yet, circumstances seem to separate more than unite. But that is not the case, for even if you think you are constantly stumbling over roadblocks and bumping into blind corners, you are in fact moving in the right direction. But the problem is, you think you are not, and so you keep closing your eyes to the obvious, and you think the darkness is gathering momentum. Nothing could be further from the truth, for what is actually going on, is that you have come so close to the Source of all light, the brightness of it will make you screw your eyes shut to protect them from the glare.
That is understandable indeed, as you are still very much accustomed to living within a much dimmer environment, and as the magnitude of the light keeps increasing, your brain will react by trying to close down any apertures admitting the light so as to keep the old and much more familiar levels intact. Again, this is understandable, for it is an instinctive reaction, so in this, it takes a bit of an effort on your part to allow all of this light to shine all the way in. For you need not go around half blinded by this light, not if you allow yourself to give up the idea of the need to control it in any way. Remember, this incoming rush of information is enough to make the sturdiest amongst you to falter a bit, and so, you will try to steady yourself in any way you can, and so, you will try to filter out at least some of the incoming light. And the outcome of this, will be a growing sense of unease and imbalance, and a sense of bewilderment. For you will think it is more difficult than ever to discern which way to go next, and so, it will be as if you are stumbling over your own feet in order to find the right way. But again, all you have to do, is to simply let yourself go with this heavenly flow of loving light, for it will take you there, to that place you have been searching for, seemingly forever. You see, you cannot see the way ahead clearly, for this is in fact not an orderly road, paved and marked out for you to follow. That is not how this works. For you have followed that straight and narrow road for lifetimes now, and that is why you ended up where you are today. But now, you must let all the old charts and navigational systems you have been so well trained to obey fall at the wayside, and now, you must allow yourself to be taken out of the old comfort zone of predictability and let yourself be free to roam wherever this incoming flux of light will take you. For it may take you far and wide, not necessarily in the physical sense, more as in the sense of breaking down any last barriers remaining within you.
For now, it is truly time for you to allow yourself to take to the wings and set off into worlds unknown, worlds that are awaiting you, far, far closer than you think. You have a concept you call armchair travelling, and in many ways, this is exactly what we are referring to. For you need to allow yourself to be taken on a tour of the unknown that lies within you, to the wealth of undiscovered territory that lies there, beckoning you to come and visit it. For that is where the true adventures lie, but that is also where you think the dragons reside, just like on the old maps delineating the borders between the known and the unknown. For even if you are all more than eager to leave this version of reality behind, there are still some mechanisms of fear within you holding you back from taking this plunge to pluck up the courage and simply lose yourself in the well of possibilities that awaits you within. Again, that is easy to understand, for you have been trained well to think that this will entail so much danger, as you will be apt to simply lose yourself completely in the labyrinthine recesses of your inner being, so the safest tip will be to stay on the surface, where you can still see the light from the entrance. Well, that may be the case for the so-called normal version of a human being, but remember, you have already come a long, long way from that old version of you, and for you, it is about time you volunteered to venture even further in. For there you will find that the light is actually increasing, not dimming down, but again, this abrupt increase in light will have many of you turning back from it because you fear the exposure to so much light will perhaps be detrimental in some ways.
Nothing could be further from the truth, but just like a timid child, seeking comfort in the familiar will seem to be the natural thing to do when something so powerful suddenly manifests itself into your life. And even if this is something that is happening in order to help you finally see the real truth hiding behind the facade of your humanity, it can seem to be so overpowering at first that you need to step back and leave it for later. We know that many of you have had some deep forages within already, and for some of you, the effect of meeting up with this intensity has been just as we have described above, while for others, they have no recollection at all at even reaching that kind of depths within. But that does not mean that any of you are still stuck in those shallow waters of yesterday, for this is a process that all of you are going through at the moment. For this is indeed an unavoidable part of the process of true reconnection with the core, for it entails full exposure to the full potential of All of creation, and in this, there is no way around it.
So that is why we are here, to remind you all that this path ahead, no matter how daunting it will seem, and no matter how difficult it may seem to navigate, this way forward is perhaps the easiest part of it all. For the way forward is as simple as to stop thinking and simply allow it to happen. You need no compass, you need no detailed descriptions as to where, how and when to do it. For the light will guide to there, it will scoop you up in its loving arms and carry you all the way to Source – if you allow it do to so. And remember, there is nothing there that can hurt you in any way, no matter how strong the glare from this light will seem to be on your eyes. For this is where you came from originally, so this is simply you in your primary form, and this is where you will return to. It will not be the first time, for this is the place you go whenever you leave the current physical vehicle you inhabit. For as you transit from one life to another, you take a detour back to Source before you once again start a new tour of humanity in another human form, but this time, it is different. For this time, you will return to Source still within that physical frame, still living as a human being, and you will go back to Source in order to regain all of your inherent faculties for then to return back in that same physical vehicle, but this time, you go back armed with your full potential as a lighted being within that human container.
In other words, that instinct of flinching back you experience whenever you venture close enough to this brilliant source of light you all carry within is the natural instinct of fearing death. For as you have all passed through this door of light so many times before, you all know so well that going in through that light means leaving your physical life behind. For that door has been seen as the final exit from your Earthly sojourn, and so, you will balk at the thought of venturing in through that door at this moment in time. Again, this is understandable, but this time, it will not be an exit, it will simply be like a revolving door, one that will bring you into the light for the briefest of moments for then to send you back into your world again as the same person inhabiting that same physical body but fully immersed in the brilliance that can only be obtained by being fully connected to this same Source.
We know these words may leave your head spinning faster than any revolving door, so we will leave it at that for now. Let us simply sum this up in this way: you are all fast approaching that final revealing of the true light within, but as you have all become programmed with the idea that passing through this stage means exiting life, it will take some effort on your part to keep going forwards this time. For as the light increases, you will think that your hold on this Earthly sojourn is slipping away, and you will feel as if you are losing it all. You are not, you will in fact gain everything there is to know. But even if you know this beforehand, you will still have some issues with the urge to control it all. But the urge to control comes from those last remnants of fear you still harbour within, as the fear of dying have been so deeply ingrained within you all, so shying away from this brilliant light comes instinctively.
Again, we do not say this to berate you, neither should you harbour any such thoughts for yourself, for this is simply a natural reaction. But that is why we are here to gently guide you ever onwards, ever inwards, closer and closer to this immense light that is waiting to welcome you in. And remember, you will not be swallowed up by it. Rather, you will be filled up by it in such a way, you will be able to literally fill the entire world with this light as soon as you step back out again. And step back out again you will, for that is why you are here, to drink your fill as often as needed for then to return into your world and help quench the thirst of everyone around you. For remember, this light is not your light, this light cannot be contained, for this light is for ALL, and through you, it will finally become available to all.
AdvertisementsMollie Hemingway laid out how the media is ignoring all the good works Jeff Sessions did while trying to smear him as a racist.
Watch below:
I mean really if you’re gonna smear a guy as a racist you better have better evidence against him.
Some on Twitter mocked the media and liberals for trying this tactic for the millionth time:
"Jeff Sessions is a racist."
"You've called everybody a racist for 8 years now."
"No but this time we really mean it." — Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) November 19, 2016
With all the freak out, you'd think Senator Sessions called black males "super predators" or something. — Josh Earnst (@NotJoshEarnest) November 19, 2016
Media love to use Jeff Sessions' middle name, Beauregard, whenever they want to focus on race. NYT used it today for first time in 7 years. — Byron York (@ByronYork) November 18, 2016
Consider this: Jeff Sessions desegregated schools, broke the KKK in AL, and killed its leader–and Democrats are still calling him a racist. — Andrew Klavan (@andrewklavan) November 18, 2016
Kinda silly. And I think Trump’s election is proving that America is sick and tired of this kind of smear.In one case, a teenage student now in their 20s -who studied at private |
great action at the screen. Anyone claiming this one looks like TV will be, frankly, full of shit. Still, it’s the character stuff that works the best - especially when that character stuff informs a fight, like the enormous and destructive Iron Man vs Hulk tussle..
Looking back on the film it isn’t the action that I remember, or if it is, it’s little moments in the action, like Thor slamming Mjolnir into Cap’s shield to make a sound burst that knocks out a squad of men. Most of what I think about are the small scenes - Hawkeye’s low key domesticity, Black Widow calming down the Hulk, Cap and Iron Man arguing ideology while chopping wood, The Vision and Ultron’s final confrontation, which is mostly verbal, or The Vision, newly conscious, discovering the lights of New York City outside of Avengers Tower. These bits - and a thousand others, scattered throughout - don’t make for great trailer moments, but they make Avengers: Age of Ultron a great movie, a movie about character and emotion… and a few angry robots.
And because it’s about character and emotion, the stakes couldn’t be higher. We all know The Avengers will defeat Ultron. We all know he won’t wipe out humanity. But the stakes are about how these characters we like will win, and what it will cost them as people. Whedon understands that these are the only stakes that ever truly matter in a movie.Multiple federal investigations are probing the $2 billion Obamacare co-op loan program at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, The Washington Examiner has learned.
Investigators from two separate offices within HHS's Office of Inspector General are looking closely at the co-op program being fast-tracked under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
The Obamacare co-op program is also the focus of examinations by the House Energy and Commerce and Oversight and Government Reform committees headed, respectively, by Rep. Fred Upton, R-MI, and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-CA.
Twenty-four newly established Obamacare co-ops in 25 states hope to begin selling health insurance coverage to the public October 1 in competition with private sector firms.
Each of the new co-ops was selected by HHS to receive start-up loans of varying amounts that are supposed to be repaid in the future.
Because co-ops are relatively untested vehicles for selling and managing health insurance programs, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget has predicted that as many as 43 percent of the new groups will go bankrupt within a few years.
Investigators are focusing on the co-op program's lack of transparency, high likelihood of multiple defaults, and recurring charges of political favoritism in the selection process for choosing funding recipients.
One of the IG probes is focusing on the process used by the Obama administration to choose the 24 co-ops to be funded, which critics argue is flawed by favoritism. The IG's Office of Audit Services, its largest division, is carrying out that investigation.
The IG's Office of Evaluation and Inspections is carrying out a second investigation. Auditors are determining whether the new startups will be able to avoid insolvency or default, a major worry among insurance experts.
In Congress, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-TN, said an insider deal between the Vermont Health CO-OP and one of its founding senior executives "smells and reeks to high heaven of cronyism."
Blackburn, who is vice-chairman of the energy and commerce panel, added that "what we would like to see are the applications and find out what this [HHS] vetting process was."
Vermont's state insurance commissioner recently rejected the co-op's application for a license to sell health insurance in part due to the insider deal, calling it "illegal."
Vermont Health CO-OP CEO Christine Oliver has claimed that HHS knew of and approved the deal. The company will not be able to begin operations on Oct. 1 unless the Vermont Supreme Court reverses the commissioner's decision.
A spokesman for HHS did not return a reporter's multiple calls and emails seeking confirmation of Oliver's claim that federal officials approved of the controversial deal.
Issa told The Washington Examiner that his panel's primary concern is with the lack of transparency in the $2 billion Obamacare program.
"Almost $2 billion taxpayer dollars are on the line, yet we still know very little about why and how these companies were selected for taxpayer-backed loans," he said. "The viability of the Vermont Health CO-OP deepens my concerns that the selection process was both opaque and flawed."
Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project On Government Oversight, a non-profit watchdog group, also expressed concern about the Vermont co-op's insider deal.
"You know it really causes great concern when it was a sole-source contract that wasn't announced [and was done] without a hint of competition," Amey said.
"I think the federal government has the duty to weigh in because this is federal money that's being spent," he said.
The Vermont insider deal also troubled Elizabeth Abbott, a consumer advocate for Health Access California, a health reform group. "I think it sounds hugely problematic to me," she told The Washington Examiner.
She warned a federal advisory panel overseeing the co-op program in January 2011 that it should "be very mindful of those kind of things."
Abbott is a former regional director of the Medicare program on the West Coast.
The National Alliance of State Health Cooperatives, the co-op's trade association, also refused to comment on the ethical issues surrounding the Vermont co-op.
Richard Pollock is a member of The Washington Examiner's Watchdog reporting team. He can be reached at rpollock@washingtonexaminer.com.When it comes to comprehending size, humans have a hard time with extremes, both small and large. If something is described as the size of two school busses, that is relatively easy to understand and appreciate. Describing something as the size of 50 Earths is tricky, because that is not a scale we are familiar with. In that case, it’s easier just to use a visual.
The moon has a radius of 1,737 km (1080 mi), which is roughly the driving distance from New York City to Memphis. It orbits the Earth at an average distance of 384,400 km (238,900 mi). Disregarding gravity for the most part, what would it look like if other planetary bodies orbited Earth with the same center point as the moon?
Filmmaker Brad Goodpeed created this amazing visual to show us what our night sky might look like if the moon were replaced:
Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo.Dear reader, After this post was published it has come to our attention that the book we used, “Untamed Billionaire, Undressed Virgin” has been under copyright since 2008 and not, in fact, in the public domain. The offending website where we found the full text pirated the book illegally and, as everyone knows, two wrongs don’t make a right so we are also at fault. We’d like to apologize to the book’s author, Ms. Cleary, and her publisher for our error in judgment. Her book is available on Amazon if you’re looking for a romantic jaunt. We really did enjoy her work and wholeheartedly recommend it to interested readers. Additionally, commenting on this post has been disabled because the unfortunate copyright infringement detracted from our original intention. This isn’t meant to be a solution to the problem, just a knee-jerk reaction to a situation we created. We’re sorry to all that have been offended by the lapse in judgment. Onwards,
The Hustle Updated July 22, 2015
This month’s theme for The Hustle is people who game the system. This is the second part of the weekly series. Click here and enter your email to follow along.
I’m not a great writer. I’m also out of touch with my emotional side. Yet somehow I’m a #1 best-selling Kindle author who, in 5 days, sold over 1,800 copies of a romance novel that took me only 1 week to create.
So how did I do it?
Maybe crafting love stories is the hidden gift I’ve taken 28 years to discover.
Or maybe it’s because I ripped off a free book that I found online, made up a middle-aged author from Ohio, and then played Amazon like a fuckin’ vintage banjo to become the #1 ranked book in not one, but two separate categories.
Yeah, it’s probably the second reason.
The Backstory
Last week, we published an article on the sleazy, underground world of publishing Kindle books. In the article, an anonymous 26 year-old successful “author”, who makes over $150k/year slinging self-help Kindle ebooks, told us exactly how he does it. He’s what we like to call a Kindle Gold Rusher.
To summarize, our insider self-publishes a few books a month, many of which rank #1 in their categories and sell thousands of copies. But there’s a catch: not only does our insider know very little about the topics he’s writing on… he isn’t even doing the writing. Instead, he outsources to a ghostwriter in the Philippines for $150 a pop.
We, along with most of our readers, had strong emotions about the article. The overwhelming feeling was that of disgust. But — and this is a BIG “but” — we’d be lying if we said there wasn’t a small part of us that wanted in on a successful scheme like this.
Mythbusters + Jackass = Me
Rather than pass immediate judgment, I set out to answer the question everyone was thinking: Is becoming a best-selling author really that easy?
So, because this was too good to pass up, I decided to see if I could go from having no idea to creating a #1 ranking Kindle book in one week, using (most of) the instructions outlined in the previous post.
And not just any type of book, but a full blown Fabio-on-the-cover romance novel.
My goal was simple: follow the method outlined in our last post and publish a best-selling book on Amazon — meaning it’s the #1 most popular book in its category — in only 7 days. The only rule was any profits had to be donated to charity because, as you’ll see, we were pretty much ripping people off.
Alright, enough backstory. Hold onto your butts. Time to get in it.
Writing the Book, Without Actually Writing
Why a romance novel, you ask? Three reasons. First, romance is one of the most popular Kindle categories, so I knew the market size was big. Second, our insider told us it’s an easy category to game. Third, and most important, I thought it was funny.
I never planned on doing much actual writing. Our insider didn’t, so neither would I. My goal was 20,000 words (insider’s suggestion) and my brain doesn’t work anywhere near that level. Plus, most Kindle Gold Rushers use ghostwriters, which take longer than a week to find. I’m definitely not above cutting corners. Startup nerds call it an MVP; I say it’s practicality.
My first attempt was artfully combining a public domain romance novel from 1909 with a modern-day erotica. That came to an end fast when the story started jumping from feeding the family livestock to getting handjobs under high school bleachers. The plot didn’t make any sense. I wanted a cohesive storyline so if strangers downloaded the book they’d at least be entertained enough to give a 5-star review.
Plan B was more straightforward: find a romance novel in the public domain, make sure it reads well enough, change the character names, and repackage it. In other words, shameless plagiarism for the sake of science with little to no remorse. Thankfully, the internet exists. It took only 10 minutes of searching to find my golden goose: “Untamed Billionaire, Undressed Virgin” by Anna Cleary.
According to our insider, the most popular romance novels involve billionaires, military men, or jungle fever. This book hit one of those, plus taking someone’s virginity.
It only took a couple hours to copy and paste the 60,000 words into a 160 page Microsoft Word document. Reading the damn thing took the longest time but, I wasn’t complaining… it was actually pretty good. Seriously, don’t diss it ‘til you try it.
To hit one more popular romance theme, I changed all the characters’ names and made the male protagonist black for a little jungle fever action. As soon as Connor O’Brien became Carter Voss we were in business. I was ready to move on to the title and cover image.
It took 9 years to write Atlas Shrugged. I wrote my best seller in 3 hours. Get on my level, Ayn Rand.
Creating the Cover and Description
They say not to judge a book by its cover but, in the case of writing and selling shitty Kindle books, the cover is all that matters. People tend to buy Kindle books based on the eye-catchiness of the cover, and the book’s description. The actual insides are an afterthought, so I really had to nail the facade. That meant a mix between script and bold sans-serif font, a shirtless six-pack, photo filters for color correction, and a suggestive look that’ll make you wanna bend over and recite the fifty states.
Our boy on the inside gets his covers made on Fivver for $5, but I know how to use Photoshop, so I made my own. It took me about an hour to create and cost $20 for iStock photos. The image size is surprisingly large and I was on the hunt for a specific look.
Note: Here’s a decent guide that tells you what elements to look for in a cheesy romance novel cover. My first thought was to combine all of them but, as you can imagine, it looked ridiculous. I wanted believable.
What do you think? Did I nail it?
Publishing on Amazon
Uploading the book was a breeze following simple instructions. Then it was just a few hours to wait for approval.
Speaking of approval, I totally got caught plagiarizing. Shortly after my submission, Amazon sent me the following email explaining that they found some content in my book that was freely available on the web.
…No shit.
I was busted, and this whole thing was over. Surely I can’t publish something they know is plagiarized, right?
Wrong.
Amazon gave me 5 days to either resubmit, to confirm that the book is in the public domain, or to remove the book from submission. I resubmitted as soon as I got the email and 10 hours later “Captivating Claire: A First-Time Billionaire Romance” was up and running in the Kindle store (we’ve since unpublished).
Now it was time to create Amber Ward’s author page. This is through a separate Amazon service called Author Pages where people can claim their own work. It’s tied to an email address so you can’t claim other people’s shit.
My pen name came from the suggestion to use a sexy female stripper name like Kendra, Nikki, or Crystal. Amber Ward was made it up on the spot because I thought it looked believable.
Writing Amber’s bio was my favorite part:
A 2015 AMSR® finalist, Amber Ward is a proud indie author who grew up traveling, earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and briefly worked in the business world. With three older brothers, Amber escaped to romance novels at an early age and has been hooked ever since. She’s always been fascinated with clocks, refuses to eat anything green, and loves a glass of chardonnay at sunset. Amber lives in Ohio with her husband, two daughters, and their spirited Yorkie, Boots.
I wanted readers to identify with her passion for romance. For inspiration, I took the real bio pages of five authors, took a sentence from each, and changed the wording to match Amber’s fake persona. The picture came from googling “middle aged woman” and picking the top result.
The AMSR® award is fake. The Yorkie is fake. Literally every single thing on the author page was pulled out of thin air. Really makes you question some of the shit you see out there.
And of course, no best-seller is complete without a few testimonials. Please note that JH Book Reviews is just my initials, and Pacific Weekly and BookWrm are made up names that sound real. Simple.
Promotion
So the goal of this experiment was to be #1 in our category, mostly to see if gaming Amazon was possible, but also because I’ve always wanted to put “best-seller” on my LinkedIn. I didn’t care if people liked the book (like many Kindle Gold Rushers), I just wanted them to hit the buy button. Because of that, the most important tactic, according to our insider, is to seed the book with tons of fake reviews.
Amazon makes fake reviews super easy. Publishers are given a promotion period of up to five days where the book is free to download. Many authors use this time to solicit reviews from their friends, family, and fake reviewers so they can get the love without the cost. It’s a big ask for people so, to lube up the process, I made a spreadsheet of 60 reviews, which our insider told us was common practice. Most of the reviews were yanked from other books. They all say the same things and reading through them convinced me that they were fake to begin with. Somehow using fake reviews to create more fake reviews doesn’t seem that bad.
I sent the book to 50 friends. After downloading, they copied/pasted with a review I provided. This worked super well and, after a couple days, we had 45 reviews with an average rating of 4.8 (to look authentic, I asked a few buds to give 3 stars). It was strange asking my buds to review a romance novel by the great Amber Ward, but they’ll understand now. This part only took two days.
At one point, I accidentally had two different friends use the same review. Thankfully, neither were flagged.
For people who don’t have 50 friends to ask, there are dozens of services you can use. Our insider had a team of reviewers he found on Craigslist. I ended up paying $2.50 for 5 reviews on Fivver. Google999, the user on Fiverr we used, was able to provide up to 60 reviews within a few hours.
Another trick to boost downloads is to put the book in categories that aren’t competitive, so it’s easy to rise to the top. The book was ranked #6 in African-American Romance, a very competitive category, within two days of starting. By the third day though, it looked like it was too crowded to hit #1 with only a few days of planning.
So, with our insider’s assistance, I sent Amazon an email and asked them to switch the book to more favorable categories: African-American Historical Romance and Ancient World Romance. Once the switch was made, it didn’t take long to jump to #1 in both.
The Results
After a day of “writing” and 3 days of marketing, my goal was reached. When I saw the #1 next to my book, I felt like a proud father of a beautiful — but sleazy — baby girl.
The book was downloaded 1,815 times during the promotional period and had 9 sales. 50 of the downloads came from our friends. The rest were organic.
Success!
I was the #1 selling author in the free section in Ancient World Historical Romance and African American Historical Fiction. Did I give a shit that these categories had essentially nothing to do with the book’s content? Not at all. I made the grade and hit it big time in only a week. I’m ready to start speaking at conferences.
Gaming Amazon is Plausible
It should be noted that my rise to stardom happened in the free section of the Kindle store. We wanted to run this experiment in a limited amount of time and, up to this point, most of the book’s existence has been during free promotional periods (I actually got Amazon to give us 2 more free days after we switched categories. Just email them.). We’ll have to wait to see what happens in the long run. Follow us on Facebook to get periodic updates on the sales.
But here’s the point — there’s a whopping $9.96 with my name on it. You know, the first buck you make in the literary world really makes scamming innocent people totally worth it. Chedda heavy.
I did this test because I wanted to see how easy it was to game Amazon, similar to the author of last week’s article. Although I personally saw our insider’s Amazon account and know he had earned north of $13k in June and was on track to top that in July, I still had doubts whether it was possible to replicate. And I wasn’t alone – 50% of the comments on that post doubted whether it was legit.
Even though I only sold around 9 copies of the novel, I was able to claim the honor of authoring a bestseller by gaming Amazon’s process, which is common practice amongst Kindle Gold Rushers. Think of all the authors using a similar method and calling themselves “bestsellers” and “experts”. Although this was a small test with a low number of sales, this experiment proved that this method can be a successful way to claim credibility.
So here’s my personal conclusion: Even though I didn’t make much money, if I kept at this full time for another 5 months or so, I believe this strategy could bring in a comfy salary (as long as Amazon doesn’t change the rules).
Now, whether I’d feel comfortable doing that is another story.
Gut Reaction
Gaming Amazon is a tough issue. On one hand, readers are sometimes duped into buying books that come from less-than-reputable sources who have little expertise. Although my book has yet to make thousands of dollars like our insider, I did make a fake book and author look very real, and realistically could have made a lot of money if I had more time. And even worse, anecdotal research showed that many of the Kindle Gold Rushers prey on vulnerable readers in the self-help section.
On the other hand, does it really matter? The information age brushed away our internal filters and skepticism to the point where we take most things at face value. Shouldn’t we be used to this by now?
Essentially, we pay authors to do research on a topic and write about their findings and there’s always the chance they’re wrong or wacko. Whose responsibility is it to enforce fact-finding and overall legitimacy? If someone wants to buy and believe these books, let them! Plus, don’t you remember seeing cheesy paperbacks with Fabio on the cover at the grocery store check out? How’s this different?
The biggest issue here isn’t that scammers are raking in cash from low-quality content, it’s that Amazon is allowing this to happen. Google had the same problem with content farms gaming search, but they fixed it. It’s shocking that I was not only caught plagiarizing and was still allowed to post my book, but that I could realistically profit big time from stealing other people’s work and deceiving my buyers. Hell, some people use Wikipedia articles as a book (RIP Gigaom) and profit big time. If Amazon wants to live up to its core value of putting the customer first, this needs to change.
Call me a skeptic now, but until Amazon fixes the process and standards, I won’t be buying any self-published books (other than for entertainment purposes, of course). My life’s too short to waste reading content from busch-league “experts” so New York Times and Reddit, you have my attention. That said, stay tuned for Amber Ward’s highly anticipated next novel. Critics are already raving.
Note #1: Amazon recently : Amazon recently changed how it pays authors for books enrolled in its Kindle Unlimited. This may be the answer to my concerns, but it’s too early to say. Note #2: Some commenters from our last article didn’t believe the results from Kindle gold rushing were legit. If you fall into that camp, do a quick Google search and I’m sure you’ll find others with similar stories as well as more than a few courses on the topic.Netflix announced this morning that it is finally ready to roll out multiple profiles on user accounts so families can more efficiently share one account.
After 19 months of promising a feature that will allow for multiple profiles, Netflix is finally delivering on this promise starting today. The feature will roll out over the next few days to users on the Web and PS3 interfaces that will allow them to set up the profiles, and they will then be able to access those profiles on iPad, iPhone, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Apple TV, and newer Smart TV’s and Blu-Ray players. Support will also eventually roll out for the Nintendo Wii, Android devices and more.
The advantage of these profiles is that each user will finally be able to get personal recommendations as opposed to one jumbled mess combined from kids, teens and parents, all with varying tastes.
It was a long time coming, but at least this feature has finally arrived.I was a bit depressed for a few days, so I did this image for taking this depression away.For this image I've had two inspirations:1. The people talking about the Season 4 like it was a masterpiece. It was good (I loved episodes like Rarity Takes Manehattan, Inspiration Manifestation and that one with Sweetie Belle and Luna), but it has some things I really can't stand: The screams of Pinkie Pie (Since Season 3), Flutterbat (the most passive character in the entire show), the fact that the only new details were in the episodes Princess Twilight Sparkle and Twilight's Kingdom, the episode Pinkie Pride used A friend in Deed as an example... Don't get me wrong, the Season 4 was a good season, but, judging for the reaction of all the fans, it's so overrated. And some people recommended me the movie Rainbow Rocks. I saw it and it was freakin terrible. It has a horrible script and there's no song I really liked (except Shine Like Rainbows). Many poeple said Rainbow Rocks was better than Equestria Girls. I don't agree.2. This song kicks ass: Ruled by fate, by Among the Herd: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVQ1rf… The Season 4 is where My Little Pony seems to be more distant from the Season 1 & 2 and gravitate away what I originally loved about the Tv Show. When Lauren Faust runs away from Hasbro, we have Twilight alicorn (although I kinda liked the episode from the Season 3), the crown, the princess thing, two movies with the artistic design of Monster High, the design of Rainbow Power (one of the few things I really don't like about Twilight's Kingdom)...I want to see the Season 5. But what's next, with the exception of a third movie of Equestria Girls?I miss Lauren so much, but I know she doesn't want to return.The Portland Trail Blazers are 9-7 – they have gotten off to a slow start this season.
The Blazers have lost a couple of bad games this season, including a home loss to the Brooklyn Nets. They seem to be lacking that player to take them to the next level. Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum are the only ones really providing consistent play. Jusuf Nurkic has been solid, but nothing like last season.
The Blazers have four guys whose contract expires at the end of the season, but the Blazers own the rights to them and will have first crack at signing them back. Those guys are: Shabazz Napier, Pat Connaughton, Noah Vonleh and Jusuf Nurkic.
Those type of contracts are very valuable to teams that are rebuilding, especially as these players are all still young. The Blazers seem to be in win-now mode and should look to trade some of those guys for a player that can help them now. Or get a guy they can get off their books at the end of the season. The Blazers need to make a move and everyone should be available for trade besides Dame and CJ.
How about a trade with the Clippers?
The Clippers are 5-10 and three of their main players are hurt. They are in their first season without Chris Paul and may look to blow their team up even more with continuous losses. They have a star in Blake Griffin and make look to build around him for the future.
The Blazers could either be in win-now mode looking for a trade or decide to change things up and shed contracts to bring in some new players.
Here’s a possible trade to help both teams
Blazers get: DeAndre Jordan, 2019 second round pick
Clippers get: Evan Turner, Jusuf Nurkic
Why the Blazers do it
The Blazers get one of the best centers, if not the best defensive center in the league, DeAndre Jordan. A career 9.2 points,10.8 rebounds and 1.8 blocks and has proved dominant for the past five years. He has two more years on his deal, including a player option after this season.
If he’s allowed to walk after one, the Blazers have some cap space to make moves. They were additionally relieved of Evan Turner’s hefty contract. If he opts into his deal, the Blazers would be a handful in the West.
He then will only have one year of his deal left.. Jordan gives the Blazers a great rim protector, rebounder, and shot blocker. He can set big screens on pick and rolls as well as catch high lobs for highlight dunks.
He doesn’t give the Blazers a great low-post threat like Nurkic does, but they have other post presences for now. Jordan is an elite center and would thrive playing with Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum. The Blazers also get a second round pick just for insurance if Jordan leaves. It wouldn’t be a surprise if they tried to get a first round pick from the Clippers instead of a second.
Why the Clippers do it
Jusuf Nurkic is young and certainly hasn’t reached his full potential. He has played strongly since arriving in Portland. The Clippers are rebuilding and could use a guy like Nurkic to help rebuild.
He has good post skills and has been showing an ability to shoot the three-point shot as well. Nurkic can be a good shot blocker at times and moves well for his big size. The Clippers would have control of his contract and can resign him. Jordan could easily walk and they would lose him for nothing.
To get a young talent like Nurkic, the Clippers have to take on a big contract like Evan Turner. Turner has been a Swiss army knife for the Blazers this season and his trade value may never be higher. He can handle the ball, play-make for others, defend strongly and knock down the midrange shot.
He has three more years left on his contract including this year.
Neil Olshey was the past GM for the Clippers and probably has a good connections inside the organization. It would make sense if Neil made a trade with his old team.
Its a long season and anything can happen
If this trade happens, it would go down around the trade deadline. It’s still early in the season and the Clippers could put a good streak of wins together, encouraging them to keep Jordan. Same goes for the Blazers – they may figure it out and “Nurk Fever” could return in Rip City.For the first time this season, the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series is headed to the “Monster Mile,” as drivers are set to compete in Sunday’s AAA 400 Drive for Autism at Dover International Speedway.
Just one mile long, Dover is one of the most challenging tracks on the circuit. Passing can be particularly tough, as is always the case on NASCAR’s shorter tracks.
Jimmie Johnson has to be the favorite, as he’s won at Dover 10 times, half of which have come in this race. He’ll face stiff challenges from drivers such as Matt Kenseth and Kyle Busch, who always run well at this track.
Here’s how to watch the Dover spring race online:
When: Sunday, June 4, at 1 p.m. ET
Live Stream: FOX Sports Go
Thumbnail photo via Matthew O’Haren/USA TODAY Sports ImagesThe t2k17 hackathon reports keep trickling in. Here's the one from Ian Sutton, who writes:
I was able to convince kettenis@ to allow me to commit my amdisplay(4)/nxptda(4) drivers which support unaccelerated video output on the BeagleBone Black, one of our armv7 platforms. This is the first instance of such video support on our ARM platforms and I hope to write similar drivers for other boards and eventually work my way up to writing acceleration support.
Finally, I dedicated just a little time to furthering a cool idea I've been hacking at for a while, something I hope will be a powerful debugging/development tool for us hardware people. Most of the ARM boards I work with have a tiny, obscure set of five or six pads curiously unlabeled on the silkscreen: JTAG interfaces! These are used for testing the behaviour/performance/conformance of individual devices on the board. Soldering a header to these pads and connecting them to a multipurpose JTAG debugger (e.g. busblaster, bus pirate, etc) allows for a much more robust debugging interface than software debuggers can provide. You can start/stop CPUs and other processors arbitrarily, gate/ungate clocks, print memory maps & register sets, set breakpoints, and do all of the above through a scripted interface. Wow! The debugger boards connect to a host machine over USB and expose a generic serial port (FTDI) which userspace software, specifically OpenOCD, opens & controls, using libusb to provide a machine-independent USB interface.
Here, things break on OpenBSD with libusb reporting tricky, misleading errors. An "unsupported" debug message lead me to believe the breakage was due to the lack of asynchronous support in the USB stack to which my solution was to finalize and import async support written during a GSoC project -- a solution that necessitates a high degree of skill and familiarity with our USB stack, and let me tell you, USB is one of those protocols you could easily fill a bookshelf with with texts comprehensively describing it. At the hackathon, I sat down with mpi@ and worked through what I wanted to accomplish & what was breaking, and through careful, slow, and sober analysis, discovered the real issue which has nothing to do with async support and is a simple race condition in libusb. D'oh!
This situation really embodies the value of hackathons, at least in my neophyte eyes. When you sit down next to someone and really /work/ with them, watch their fingers hit keys, see their workflow and see which reactions are prompted by certain situations & etc, you really pick up on their good habits and come to understand how to solve problems in a way that goes beyond the nitty-gritty-bitty sides of things. I learned an enormous amount in Toronto and very little of it had to do with technical things, and I think that is something you can only accomplish working in close physical proximity of one another.
The OpenBSD developer community plays excellently into this model; I tried to meet as many devs as I could manage (me being one of the new folks and all) and every single one, without exaggeration, was gregariously friendly, preposterously intelligent motivated, completely unconceited and more than happy to help me with whatever. Toronto really reminded me why I love this project and why OpenBSD will continue to succeed in the years to come.VICTORIA — B.C.’s new NDP government has referred the largest construction project in the province’s history, the Site C dam, to an independent review to see whether it should continue, be paused or completely cancelled.
Energy Minister Michelle Mungall made the announcement at the legislature Wednesday. The review will start on Aug. 9.
“Rather than questioning whether or not the project should have started, the review will focus on looking forward,” Mungall said.
The NDP had promised during the May election campaign to send the $8.8-billion project, under construction on the Peace River in northeast B.C., to a review by the independent B.C. Utilities Commission.
The BCUC will be asked to produce a preliminary report by Sept. 20 and a final report by Nov. 1.
“Once we have the final report, government will consider the advice from the B.C. Utilities Commission, along with other environmental and First Nations considerations, and make a final decision on the future of Site C,” said Mungall.
In the meantime, the approximately 2,200 people working at the site will remain on the job, said Mungall. However, B.C. Hydro will not tender any major contracts during the three-month review, she said.
The BCUC review will look at whether B.C. Hydro can complete the project on budget and on time by 2024. But it will also ask the commission to provide advice on the costs and implications of various scenarios, including proceeding as planned, suspending the project but keeping the option open to resume construction until 2024, or cancelling the project altogether and proceeding with other projects that could provide energy for a lower cost than Site C.
Environmental and First Nations issues aren’t part of the terms of reference, because the Utilities Commission will need to focus on the economics of the project, said Mungall.
That idea of suspending Site C but keeping open possible future construction to 2024 — which Mungall called the “mothballing” proposal — is a new idea that drew criticism from Green Leader Andrew Weaver.
“I suspect the option about delaying and stalling is going to be the kind of kick-the-can decision that will be made,” he said. “I don’t think that’s the right decision. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see that as the decision, because it’s a way of trying have your cake and eat it too, which we’ve seen a lot of in B.C. politics.”
Overall, however, Weaver said he’s pleased at the NDP’s terms of reference for the review. The Greens provided suggestions that were listened to, said Weaver. The NDP and Greens have a power-sharing agreement that props up the NDP government. Weaver said it would not be threatened if the NDP were ultimately to conclude, after the BCUC review, that Site C should continue.
“If they decided to proceed based on what I can only guess will be the economics, I think it will be crazy, and I think it will be fiscally foolish and I suspect they would have troubles within their own caucus if they proceeded,” Weaver said of the NDP.
The Site C dam project, which was started under the Liberals in 2014, has been defended by B.C. Hydro as a necessary way to provide clean, reliable power for the province’s future needs. The NDP and Greens have called it a costly boondoggle when alternative wind, solar and geothermal power sources were not properly investigated.
Hydro has since spent $1.75 billion in |
replied Mook, who was one of the first Democrats to accuse the Russian government of being behind the July 2016 email hack of the DNC.
A memo written by Steele that same month cites a Russian source who said that the Kremlin was behind the hack. It’s unclear whether Mook had been briefed on Steele’s findings when he made his comments.
In his dossier, Steele alleges that members of the Trump campaign colluded with Kremlin agents to hack Democrats’ emails and release them to the public.
Though that allegation remains unverified, Mook stood by the dossier, and sloughed off the suggestion that it could be full of disinformation given to Steele by his Russian sources.
“Well, look, they chose what to put in that dossier, so I can’t speak to that,” Mook said, seemingly referring to Steele.
“I’m proud that we were able to assemble some of the research that has brought this to light,” he added.
“And I’m just glad that it’s coming out now. I’m glad that there was research there.”
In his interview, Mook also circulated the false Democratic talking point that a Republican donor initially funded the dossier.
“My understanding is that dossier is a product of not just research that was funded by our campaign, but also by Republican donors and that they put that altogether and gave that to the press,” he said.
The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website funded by billionaire Republican donor Paul Singer, first hired Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research on Trump in Oct. 2015. But the Free Beacon asked Fusion to end the Trump project in May 2016. The site, which continued working on non-Trump projects until this January, insists that none of the information gathered on its behalf by Fusion GPS was included in the dossier.
WATCH:
Follow Chuck on TwitterWhen a somber President Obama spoke Thursday about the mass shooting in Charleston, he said, "I've had to make statements like this too many times." He added: "Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun."
Indeed, when he spoke about the issue last year, he went even further — calling a lack of action on guns the single biggest disappointment of his presidency. He made the remarks in a Q&A with the CEO of Tumblr:
OBAMA: People often ask me how has it been being President, and what am I proudest of and what are my biggest disappointments. And I've got two and a half years left. My biggest frustration so far is the fact that this society has not been willing to take some basic steps to keep guns out of the hands of people who can do just unbelievable damage.
His choice of gun control last year was particularly interesting given Obama's history on the issue. He deliberately downplayed the gun issue during his first presidential campaign, not wanting to alienate rural or swing voters. And once he was sworn in, he continued with that basic approach — many Senate Democrats were from red states with strong gun rights cultures, and Obama needed their votes for his health-care and financial reform legislation. Even after the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) in January 2011, Obama didn't do very much.
"20 six-year-olds were gunned down in the most violent fashion possible, and this town couldn't do anything"
But once Adam Lanza murdered 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Obama was shaken — tearing up in a public statement. He decided to make a push for tougher gun laws a central part of his second-term agenda.
Yet the Democrats' proposals — reinstating the ban on assault weapons, expanding background checks, and limiting high-capacity magazines — ended up filibustered by Senate Republicans, and never even got a vote in the GOP-controlled House. Any congressional action on the issue now appears unlikely, particularly after the GOP takeover of the Senate.
"I have been in Washington for a while now, and most things don't surprise me," Obama said in the Q&A, but "the fact that 20 six-year-olds were gunned down in the most violent fashion possible and this town couldn't do anything about it was stunning to me." He continued, "The country has to do some soul searching about this. This is becoming the norm, and we take it for granted in ways that, as a parent, are terrifying." But because of the power of organized interest groups like the NRA, he said, "until there's a fundamental shift in public opinion… not much is going to change."Vegan Checks Record Insert for Dairy
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Vegan punk Tony Larson has taken his lifestyle choice to the next level by ensuring that even the songs he consumes do not contain traces of meat or dairy hidden within the lyrics.
Staff at Scratchtone Records looked on helplessly as Larson grew increasingly impatient with the lack of clear labeling of lyrical content, describing the situation as an insult to the ethical consumer.
“Take this Agnostic Front EP — there needs to be proper clarification of what’s in this ‘United Blood,’ because it sounds to me like some sort of sick cocktail of everything in the animal kingdom,” Larson said incredulously.
Larson, a self-professed “born again” vegan, reportedly did not stop there on his quest to ensure he did not take home any record which contained lyrics propagated on the suffering of animals. “I mean, how fucking hard is it to write a record that doesn’t exploit innocent animals for personal gain?” said Larson, angrily throwing to the floor albums by Gorilla Biscuits and Rattus. “That’s why I always rip open the plastic seal and tear out the lyric insert before buying my records. You never know where suffering might be hiding.”
Scratchtone staff worked feverishly to clean up the growing pile of unacceptable records amid Larson’s heated lecturing. “Most people don’t know that Echo and the Bunnymen’s ‘Lips Like Sugar’ was processed through animal bone char. Wake me when it’s ‘Lips Like Pure Agave,’” said Larson, throwing the record over his shoulder.
“I have to make sure that all the jams I buy do not contain gelatin, get it?” said Larson with a wry smile.
Related:
Having made his point frustratingly unclear, Larson eventually made his way to the counter with a handful of lyrically unobjectionable records, including yet another copy of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, among others.
“I was a little surprised to find that these Dead Milkmen and Swingin’ Utters albums checked out, too. But I don’t actually have the money to buy them today, so I am going to put them on hold for now,” said Larson.
Article by Jack Padurariu @jpeltura.This post is the first in a series briefly looking at feminism and disability, analysing the impact of disability on gendered pay gaps and domestic abuse. Trigger warning: discuses violence against women.
There are more disabled women than men in the UK. In 2010/11, there were 6.1 million disabled women (20%) and 5.4 million men (18%). 6.1 million women, 20%. And yet, to listen to mainstream UK feminism, you would hardly know it.
This post is the first in a series briefly looking at feminism and disability. It will focus on 2 key statistics that are frequently used by feminist campaigners:
that 1/4-1/6 women will experience abuse in her lifetime
that women earn 85p for men’s £1
What we find when we look at disabled women’s experiences (again, that’s 20% of women in the UK) is that these figures are gross underestimations of both the prevalence of violence against disabled women and the wage gap forced upon us.
VAWG and disability
“Research consistently shows that women with disabilities regardless of age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or class, are assaulted, raped, and abused at a rate two times greater than women without disabilities. (Sobsey, 1994; Cusitar, 1994)” – ref
“The risk of being physically assaulted for an adult with developmental disabilities is 4-10 times higher than for other adults. (Sobsey, 1994; Cusitar 1994.)” ref
“Some people with disabilities have other experiences which put them at more risk to be exploited, e.g., the culture of institutionalisation. Often, the disability service system does not offer those who need support the choice of where and with whom one lives, the freedom to come and go at will, or the opportunity to make simple decisions over one’s bodily functions, such as when to eat or bathe.” ref
Women’s aid outlines particular ways in which disabled women are vulnerable to physical, sexual, psychological and financial abuse – and makes the point that “Getting away from abuse is often harder for disabled women because access to help and support is often controlled by the abuser.”
Despite this, according to a Women’s Aid study of local domestic violence services (2008) – (the summary of which – first link – is only 8 pages long and well worth a read.)
only “38% of organisations offered some form of specific services to disabled women.”
“Only three [of 133] projects had disabled staff in post.
“27% of domestic violence organisations made attempts to reach disabled women through publicity, talks or local partnership working with organisations for disabled people.”
“Some projects had specially adapted accommodation or facilities and a few offered fully accessible housing, but many were not accessible at all.”
“There was a tendency for organisations to interpret disability access solely in terms of wheelchair access, whereas services need to be accessible to all women (including those with sensory impairments).”
“94% were aware of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and were making attempts to make properties accessible, although 76% stated that they were not yet compliant.”
The disability wage gap and gender
According to the Fawcett Society, for every £1 a man takes home, a woman takes home 85p – 14.9% less than men.
However, “recent research has found that when compared to non disabled men, disabled men have a pay gap of 11%, and disabled women of 22%.”
Which you can see in the table below showing pay gap on the basis of gender and disability. (from here)
According to poverty.org (2011):
In term of proportions, one in five female employees – and one in ten male employees – were paid less than £7 per hour. Quote:
(see graph below)
But:
For both full-time and part-time work, the proportion of employees with a work-limiting disability who are low paid (earning less than £7 per hour) is higher than that for employees without a work-limiting disability, by around five percentage points for full-timers and ten percentage points for part-timers. Quote:
In the graph below, disabled women (excluding part-time employment) represent the group with the highest proportion of employees earning less than £7 an hour for full-time employment, at over 20%. There is a clearly demonstrated wage gap between men and women and disabled and non-disabled, with disabled women in full-time employment being twice as likely as non-disabled men in full-time employment to be earning less than £7 an hour.
Moreover, as demonstrated in the graph below, the lower the level of qualification, the greater the gap between disabled and non-disabled workers.
So disabled women are twice as likely to be abused in their lifetime and earn nearly 7p less per £1 than non-disabled women. And yet we never hear about these statistics. Why?
Originally posted at Zedkat's blog.As you may have heard, U.S. Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) has placed a hold on all Obama Administration nominees, effectively holding every Obama appointment hostage to the Senate's filibuster rule.
So what's Shelby's ransom? Basically, he wants the Pentagon contract for aerial refueling tankers to be awarded to Airbus, the European aerospace firm, instead of Boeing, the domestic aerospace giant. Why does Shelby want to award a key military contract to a foreign company? Because portions of the Airbus-built tankers would be assembled in Alabama.
Marcy Wheeler explains:
The key issue is that Shelby wants the Air Force to tweak an RFP for refueling tankers so that Airbus (partnered with Northrup Grumman) would win the bid again over Boeing. The contract had been awarded in 2008, but the GAO found that the Air Force had erred in calculating the award. After the Air Force wrote a new RFP in preparation to rebid the contract, Airbus calculated that it would not win the new bid, and started complaining. Now, Airbus is threatening to withdraw from the competition unless the specs in the RFP are revised. Essentially, then, Shelby’s threat is primarily about gaming this bidding process to make sure Airbus–and not Boeing–wins the contract (there’s a smaller program he’s complaining about, too, but this is the truly huge potential bounty for his state).
As Wheeler argues, the bottom-line is that Richard Shelby -- a top Senate Republican -- is preparing to shut down the United States Senate to award a key military contract to a foreign company. That is a staggering fact, and Democrats should pummel him and his GOP enablers for heading down this path.
Join the discussion in calchala's recommended diary, UPDATE: GIBBS BLASTS SHELBY OVER HOLD.The Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday charged a California man and his Florida-based group of companies with running a $1.2 billion investment scheme targeting vulnerable clients.
Robert Shapiro allegedly used his Woodbridge Group of Companies to operate a scheme in which he promised customers consistent high returns on investments in small business loans, according to the SEC complaint.
The SEC alleges that Shapiro promised more than 8,400 investors 5 to 10 percent interest annually on money he claimed his company would issue as loans. Shapiro allegedly promised the investors their money would go to loans issued to commercial property owners paying 11 to 15 percent interest rates.
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But the SEC alleges that Shapiro simply lent the money to other companies he owned, which paid no interest on the loans. He allegedly used the money to pay sales agents roughly $64 million in commissions, reimbursed some investors to keep the scheme going, and diverted $21 million for luxurious purchases.
Shapiro allegedly used the part of the $1.2 billion from defrauded customers, many of which were seniors, to “charter planes, pay country club fees, and buy luxury vehicles and jewelry,” according to the SEC complaint. The scheme allegedly folded in December, when Shapiro stopped paying investors and his companies filed for bankruptcy.
Judge Marcia Cooke of the U.S. District Court for Southern Florida ordered an asset freeze on Shapiro and his companies and demanded they provide a full accounting of their investment activities. The SEC is asking the court to order Shapiro to reimburse the allegedly defrauded investors.Today is International Men’s Day. Are you celebrating? And if so, how?
Well, what exactly are we celebrating? Is it “men”, just as they are? “Men” in opposition to women, who already have their International Women’s Day on 8 March? “Men” embracing new ways to be men?
It’s hard to tell because the politics of International Men’s Day (IMD) are somewhat murkier than those of International Women’s Day. That day’s origins are decidedly political, linking women’s struggles with the labour movement and a larger socialist movement. Globally, it’s a day to celebrate women’s achievement and renew the struggle for equal rights around the world (except in the US where its political roots have been obscured and the day is barely noticed at all).
But what about International Men’s Day? Is this some form of political tit-for-tat: since they have their day, we men need ours? Really? After all, International Women’s Day acknowledges women’s exclusion and asks for a greater commitment to gender equality. From that perspective, we actually have International Men’s Day the other 364 days of the year. Here in the US, February is Black History Month. Do we need a separate White History Month – or don’t the other 11 months suffice?
And yet there is one strain of IMD celebrants who claim just that. Men’s rights activists assert that IMD should be a day devoted to recognising the various ways men are oppressed.
The origins of IMD are better-intentioned, but confused – and confusing. Begun originally in Trinidad and Tobago in 1999, today more than 60 countries proclaim its objectives of improving men’s lives, which, organisers tell us, is about focusing on men’s health issues, boys’ development, family activities, and promoting greater gender equality. (Interestingly, this last commitment to promoting gender equality has increased over the past few years, perhaps as an official response to the efforts of the men’s rights groups to hijack the day.)
I think the title of International Men’s Day is so laden with the possibility for such confusion – is it for or against gender equality? Inspired by feminism or opposed to it? – that it is a too much of a political minefield to be navigated easily. Maybe it needs to be rethought.
I have a proposal for an annual event that might accomplish the same things more clearly. Want to improve men’s lives and health, engage boys, and promote equality? Here’s how: For decades, the Ms Foundation in the United States has sponsored what was called Take Our Daughters to Work Day. The idea was to demystify the workplace for girls, so that they could envision their lives as workers. Parents (both mothers and fathers) would bring their daughters to their workplaces, where activities were often organised. And corporations would line up to sponsor and support these efforts.
Complaints followed that this was unnecessarily excluding boys, who felt left out of the day’s events. So the day is now Take our Daughters and Sons to Work Day.
OK, but does the workplace have to be “demystified” for boys? Do they really need encouragement and support to envision their future lives in careers?
Perhaps we can replace International Men’s Day with something slightly different – and tailored especially for men and boys. A friend proposed calling it International Son Day. On one Sunday, every year, fathers can invite their sons into their own homes, so that they can learn how to clean, cook, vacuum, do laundry and childcare – skills that these boys will inevitably need. Just as we demystify the workplace for girls, let’s demystify the home for boys, so that they can grow up into the men that they say they want to be: autonomous and capable of living on their own, and also involved family men, in egalitarian marriages and relationships, active and energetically engaged fathers, who use their domestic skills.
I know what you’re thinking: “Who is going to teach the fathers how to do those things?” Point taken. I’m certain that there are shelves of books and thousands of websites for the DIY kind of guy to learn such skills. What a potential father-son bonding moment – both learning how to do the basic household tasks that grown-ups need to know how to do. All hail Ironing John!
I realise that International Son Day, thus conceived, might exclude the fatherless or the son-less among us. But I’m sure we can find some community activities that men can engage in to promote greater equality at home and at work. Organise a toy drive for children whose mothers are in shelters for battered women. Cook and serve food for the homeless.
Perhaps not. Perhaps too ambitious. Still, without the explicit focus of IMD to engage men to further support gender equality, at home and at work, the day feels too reactive, too amorphous, too ripe for innocent misinterpretation or deliberate manipulation. I think I’ll sit it out.
On second thoughts, I’ll wait for my 15-year-old son to come home from school. I have a great lasagne recipe we can cook together.Hacker News was down all last night. The problem was not due to the new server. In fact the cause was embarrassingly stupid. On a comment thread, a new user had posted some replies as siblings instead of children. I posted a comment explaining how HN worked. But then I decided to just fix it for him by doing some surgery in the repl. Unfortunately I used the wrong id for one of the comments and created a loop in the comment tree; I caused an item to be its own grandchild. After which, when anyone tried to view the thread, the server would try to generate an infinitely long page. The story in question was on the frontpage, so this happened a lot. For some reason I didn't check the comments after the surgery to see if they were in the right place. I must have been distracted by something. So I didn't notice anything was wrong till a bit later when the server seemed to be swamped. When I tailed the logs to see what was going on, the pattern looked a lot like what happens when HN runs short of memory and starts GCing too much. Whether it was that or something else, such problems can usually be fixed by restarting HN. So that's what I did. But first, since I had been writing code that day, I pushed the latest version to the server. As long as I was going to have to restart HN, I might as well get a fresh version. After I restarted HN, the problem was still there. So I guessed the problem must be due to something in the code I'd written that day, and tried reverting to the previous version, and restarting the server again. But the problem was still there. Then we (because by this point I'd managed to get hold of Nick Sivo, YC's hacker in residence) tried reverting to the version of HN that was on the old server, and that didn't work either. We knew that code had worked fine, so we figured the problem must be with the new server. So we tried to switch back to the old server. I don't know if Nick succeeded, because in the middle of this I gave up and went to bed. When I woke up this morning, Rtm had HN running on the new server. The bad thread was still there, but it had been pushed off the frontpage by newer stuff. So HN as a whole wasn't dying, but there were still signs something was amiss, e.g. that /threads?id=pg didn't work, because of the comment I made on the thread with the loop in it. Eventually Rtm noticed that the problem seemed to be related to a certain item id. When I looked at the item on disk I realized what must have happened. So I did some more surgery in the repl, this time more carefully, and everything seems fine now. Sorry about that.A twin brother and sister who were found dead at the bottom of the Dover cliffs on New Year’s Day may have fallen off the edge while scattering the ashes of their mother.
Police named the pair as Muriel and Bernard Burgess, 59, from the village of Elton in Cheshire, were discovered at the foot of Langdon Cliffs in Kent, during a search for another man’s body.
Neighbours said the pair were both single and lived with their parents all their lives and were apparently discovered with the ashes of their mum.
One neighbour is quoted by The Daily Star as saying: “I heard the twins were found with her ashes.
“It’s not clear whether they slipped and fell as they tried to scatter them or if they jumped holding them – just wanting to be all together at the end.”
Search: The body of Scott Enion was found on the same day as the twins (SWNS) More
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Police have appealed for help in tracing the pair’s final movements and are speaking to owners of guest houses, B&Bs, hotels, pubs and taxi drivers.
The twins were wearing dark-coloured wet weather clothing and may have been spotted at the top of the cliffs between Boxing Day and New Year’s Day, according to Kent Police.
Investigators have also revealed the identity of the man who sparked the search as 45-year-old Scott Enion, from Manchester.
His body was found on the same day and winched from the scene by rescue helicopter.
The bodies of the Burgess twins were then found later, between half a mile to a mile from his body.
None of the three deaths are being treated as suspicious and they are not being linked.
Anyone with information about the Burgess twins’ last movements is asked to call Kent Police Detective Sergeant Stuart Ward on 01843 222289, quoting incident number 01-980.
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The cyclist involved in a crash with a car near Manchester city centre during this morning’s rush hour has died.
Artur Piotr Ruszel, 45, suffered a serious head injury when his bike and a Honda Jazz collided on Upper Brook Street in Manchester city centre at around 7.36am.
A police officer and paramedics performed CPR at the scene until an ambulance arrived to take him to Manchester Royal Infirmary, but he lost his fight for life a few hours later.
Police have broken the tragic news to Artur’s family and are now appealing for any witnesses to the accident to come forward.
Sergeant Paul Higgins, of GMP’s serious collision investigation unit, said: “Our thoughts are with Artur’s family at this desperately sad time.
“We have specially trained officers working with his family, who will be on hand to provide the support they need during this process.
“We need the public’s help in ascertaining the exact circumstances of this collision.
“Given this was during a busy time when lots of people were travelling to work, I hope that some people will be able to contact us with details of what they saw.”
Artur was cycling towards the junction with Brunswick Street when his bike collided with the Honda, which had been travelling in the same direction in the lane next to him.
The accident happened near the Thai Pan restaurant.
Anyone with information is asked to call police on 0161 856 4745 or Crimestoppers, anonymously on 0800 555 111.More than 12,000 dams populate the Great Lakes Basin, estimates the U.S. Geological Survey. Some produce energy or provide recreation. But most don't.
In fact, the only function many now maintain is fracturing the vast network of waterways that flow to the Great Lakes. With the oldest of these dams having stood for more than a century, dam removal is growing in popularity so that fish routes can be restored and they can be removed before they fail and cause harm.
Since 1912, more than 1,384 dams have been removed. In just Michigan alone, 63 have been removed since 1990, said Byron Lane, the water resources unit supervisor with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.
But which ones should be removed first? A recent study on barriers in the Great Lakes Basin looked to answer that question with a new tool called Fishwerks. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison developed an online application to help decide which removal project is the best removal project.
"This was an unusual paper because it wasn't hypothesis-driven or question-driven. It's about a tool for managers to make decisions," said Allison Moody, a post-doctoral student at UW-Madison and the lead researcher on the study.
Fishwerks Fishwerks is a new online tool that helps people prioritize dams to be removed.
Accessible at greatlakesconnectivity.org, the tool offers anyone the option to find any barrier in the basin that's been logged in the database. Isolated by filters, like the barrier type, watershed location and removal cost, they help users decide which barriers should be removed first.
Filters have even been built to accommodate variables unique to the region. In states like Michigan, where sea lamprey pose a serious danger to the ecosystem, a filter can be turned on to highlight where dams usefully impede their progress.
There are many reasons for removing a barrier, Moody said. They include restoring migratory fish routes and removing structures that could see potential breaches. But one dwarfs them all.
"The basic premise we're looking at is, for a given budget, what is the maximum amount of stream length opened up per dollar," Moody said.
When dam owners are faced with what to do with aging dams, they have two options: remove or repair. Because the remove option is a one-time cost, it carries more incentive.
The dollar is the driver. Jessie Thomas-Blate, a contributing writer and member of American Rivers, a national river conservation organization focused on protecting America's rivers, echoes a similar sentiment as Moody.
"The biggest impetus for dam owners to remove them comes down to the dollars," she said. "The momentum that's been building around the country as people begin to realize that dams are aging comes from how problematic they can become."
Feb. 7 shined a spotlight on that problem when the Oroville Dam in northern California displaced more than 188,000 people.
The structure had been around for almost 50 years. Last updated in 1970, the dam hadn't been improved to account for increased rainfall and flooding due to climate change. When widespread rainfall damaged the main spillway, evacuation of the surrounding area ensued. That failure is emblematic of how prevalent the age problem has become for dams.
"A lot of dams in North Carolina where I work are over 50 years old, which is a similar story across the country," said Erin McCombs, another member and contributor for American Rivers.
"So when you have outdated dams on the landscape that are no longer serving any purpose, the benefits to public safety, the benefits of recreation and of course the benefits to river health, removal becomes a very smart idea," she added
"Back when these were built, they were built as mills for generating power or grinding grain or creating energy for a factory," Lane said.
"Of course, now you have a large distribution of nuclear power plants and coal-fired power plants," he said. "So the percentage of Michigan's energy generated by hydropower is pretty small these days. A lot of these dams that were built for power production or milling no longer serve that purpose."
Most of the dams that have been removed were taken down in the past 20 years, McCombs said.
In fact, 2016 tied with 2014 for most dams removed nationwide in a single year at 72, as listed in an American Rivers database. And the number likely will only grow as the necessity for removal becomes more prevalent.
"When you have situations like Oroville where people are getting evacuated, property is endangered, people are endangered, awareness is going to increase because we're only going to start to see more and more of these situations." Thomas-Bates said.
Which brings this issue back to Moody's study that used what is called the Decision Support Tool. For the researchers' part of the study, they're already on their way to improving the application to incorporate more filters like individual fish species routes.
"The basic premise is that the tools will add more information about different kinds of barriers," Moody said. "We're going to add the possibility to model each individual fish species."
Editor's note: This article was originally published on May 10, 2017 by Great Lakes Echo, which covers issues related to the environment of the Great Lakes watershed and is produced by the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University. The report is part of a multi-part series about dams in the Great Lakes region.St Petersburg city lawmaker Vitaly Milonov, known as the main sponsor of the Russian law banning gay propaganda to minors, has proposed that the Turkish city of Istanbul be renamed Constantinople on all Russian maps and in state-approved textbooks.
In a letter to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Milonov called the renaming “the return of Istanbul’s historical name,” adding that the name Constantinople was used in Tsarist Russia.
READ MORE: Putin signs 'gay propaganda' ban and law criminalizing insult of religious feelings
“Many residents of our country still connect the city of Istanbul only with the history of Byzantium. Before the Bolshevik revolution, this city was not named other than Constantinople in our country. Today, many Orthodox Christian nations, for example, Greece, maintain this tradition,” Milonov wrote in his letter as quoted by RIA Novosti.
“The return of the city’s historical name would symbolize that our country and our people keep the tragic fate of Byzantium in its memory,” Milonov wrote. “We do not reject the modern name but also keep our right for historical justice even though it is contained in the form of a symbol.”
The name Constantinople was officially used by all countries, including the Ottoman Empire, for Istanbul until 1930. It was only officially changed after Turkey declared itself a republic.
Milonov is a veteran of Russian politics but he gained nationwide and international fame as the main sponsor of the 2013 nationwide legislative ban on gay propaganda to minors. Over the past few years he has continued to dwell on the topic, proposing many more restrictions, such as an entry ban on the openly gay CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, and fines for walking topless in public. His other initiatives have included a bill outlawing child beauty pageants, the forced resettlement of homeless people to rural areas, a campaign against fake accounts in social networks, and many more.
READ MORE: Call for anti-gay crusader Milonov to be investigated for extremism
In September 2015, Milonov announced that he was launching an international human rights association “Volunteers of Freedom” with the target of redressing the balance in favor of traditional values.The Artesian Range. Credit:Nick Moir The north-west Kimberley is now the only area of mainland Australia where no mammal, and quite possibly no plant, has become extinct since white settlement. The local inhabitants are not all that makes the region remarkable. For two decades, it has become a refuge for almost all northern Australia's small mammals that have been pushed out of native habitats across the top of the continent. This lost world, largely inaccessible to humans without a helicopter, has become a modern-day Noah's Ark on a landscape with the world's worst animal extinction rate. While the region's remoteness means the populations of many species remain abundant, the broader Kimberley faces a variety of threats.
Feisty - but under threat... a quoll encountered by the team surveying the region's rare species. Credit:Nick Moir Fire, feral cats and wild herbivores will push up to eight kinds of mammals to extinction in the next 20 years if business as usual continues. And the populations of a dozen or more species will continue their steep decline. Feral cats are by far the biggest threat to the Kimberley's biodiversity. There are at least 100,000, eating a million-plus native animals each day. They have a more direct impact than wild herbivores such as donkeys. And the impact of fire is far greater because it allows cats to hunt down small species more easily. Pressure from tourism and mining could take its toll on the region, one of the continent's 15 biodiversity hotspots, if left uncontrolled. A giant cave gecko. Credit:Nick Moir Despite Canberra's decision to place vast tracts of the west Kimberley on the National Heritage List, the scale of the problem has grown too large for governments to manage alone. It is this predicament that convinced the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, a non-profit conservation organisation, to take over the management of 150,000 hectares of wilderness in a narrow corridor of the north-west Kimberley.
Just under half the property is a mix of grassland savannahs and rolling basalt hills, bounded to the north by the mighty Charnley River. The rest of the reserve comprises the Artesian Range, from which the sanctuary takes its name; a network of sandstone ranges and dramatic escarpments carved by deep, rainforest-filled gorges. It is here that Dr Smith and his colleagues have been for the past two weeks surveying the native species. "That is a pretty rat,'' laughs Dr Sarah Legge, the AWC's national conservation and science manager. She has just arrived by helicopter to join her team and is handed a Kimberley rock at, a small native rodent endemic to the region. ''I think she's preggers,'' Legge says, examining the animal's engorged teats. Ecologist Dr Katherine Tuft weighs, measures and releases the rodent before the conversation turns to the other species the team have caught or spotted on the trip. So far they have seen many northern quolls (now regionally extinct in the Northern Territory), monjons (small rock wallabies), and a few scaly tailed possums, called wyuldas.
Around the campsite, the deep red dirt, rich with iron oxide, is pockmarked with bandicoot and rodent diggings. ''You come to a place like this and it's what the rest of northern Australia should be like,'' says Legge. While eating dinner on their first night the team had even spotted an elusive golden-backed tree rat, whose habitat has shrunk from most of northern Australia to a tiny fringe around the Artesian Range. ''We were just eating papadams and James heard a noise,'' Tuft says. ''We looked up and it was a golden-backed tree rat.'' The rodents are so rare, Legge has not seen one. She hopes they'll catch one now she has arrived. The contraction of the rat's range is symbolic of more than half of northern Australia's small mammals, whose populations over the last two decades have crashed. In the iconic World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park, 75 per cent of small mammals have vanished in the past 15 years, despite an annual conservation investment of $18 million. To ensure they do not disappear from the Artesian Range, the AWC will conduct annual animal inventories. ''We need to know what is here, where it is and in what density,'' Legge says.
Each evening for the past two weeks the team have set close to 200 traps with mammal-style delicacies of peanut butter and oat balls laced with honey, fish oil and tuna to give them a distinct, pungent odour. The Artesian Range is rugged and unruly. There are no boarded walkways or paths to follow. To inspect the traps early the next day (sunrise is at 4:30) the scientists clamber over fractured sandstone ridges, whose size and jagged edges would pose a death trap to most people, while pushing past spiky pandanas palms and clumps of waist-high spinifex. The fine hairs on the branches of the native hibiscus are also best avoided. ''Watch those, you'll spend the rest of the day pulling them out of your hands,'' Tuft warns. The rich and abundant biodiversity of the Range has remained intact largely because of the terrain. The region's characteristic fractured rock structures, which formed when sandstone laid down some 1.8 billion years ago folded and crumpled under the pressure of several periods of tectonic plate shifting, provide considerable |
50/50 than 70/30 like we initially suspected.Regarding Stan Broselow’s Friday letter to the editor, headlined “Our military spending is out of control”: After spending 52 years in Defense Department jobs at almost every level I have a few opinions.
First, the U.S. “defense” is tied to the “revolving door,” where members of Congress, their staff, Defense Department civil servants and ranking military officers serve their time working for the government and then take jobs with contractors — the revolving door. Officials lobby for defense contracts for their new employers — often for programs that are expensive and wasteful, including contracts that now privatize war. Those officials being lobbied often have standing job offers when they leave office — an inherent conflict of interest.
Moreover, corrupt politicians accept large campaign contributions from defense contractors before taking employment with them. The bottom line is that defense contractors use their power and money for corporate profit at taxpayer expense. Recently, 27 Republican senators defended this practice in a letter to President Barack Obama, noting the “First Amendment rights of individuals to contribute to political causes or candidates of their choice.” They will stop at nothing to pauperize the middle class!
Excessive military expenditure is based upon a corrupt system that hurts the U.S. economy and leads to the use of these weapons of war — “putting kinetic energy on targets.” Let’s put true national defense back into the Defense Department and cut the military budget to levels we can afford. Let’s put some kinetic energy on corruption.Something many visitors to Japan notice is the abundance of overhead power lines. Whether you’re in the suburbs, city center, or even rural communities, it’s rare to look up at the sky or towards the horizon without the view being crisscrossed by thick, black cables.
So why does Japan have so many above-ground power grids when so many other countries have gone subterranean? The easy answer is cost, but there’re also some purported advantages to stringing cables up on poles, and the country hasn’t quite reached a consensus on which is the better option.
Starting with the budgetary side of things, subterranean systems are a lot more expensive. With the added expenses of digging the ditches and properly installing the lines and conduits, the cost can balloon to ten times that of a comparably sized network of above-ground poles.
Still, some contend that, economic advantages aside, this isn’t the place to cut corners. Since the mid-1980s, the Japanese government has been enacting initiatives to replace existing poles with underground lines. Not only do such moves please those who’re tired of power lines marring the scenery, there are even safety and durability benefits, as below-ground power grids are less exposed to the elements, making them resilient against wind and snow that can damage above-ground equipment.
A further safety benefit has been observed during earthquakes, according to the NPO Non-Pole Community. The organization says that during the Hanshin Earthquake that struck Kobe in 1995, neighborhoods with above-ground power lines were much more extensively damaged. Non-Pole Community’s Secretary Toshikazu Inoue also referred to toppled poles blocking roads and preventing emergency vehicles from swiftly reaching victims in the disaster’s aftermath.
Still, the majority of Japan’s power grid remains above ground. One argument against subterranean systems has been put forward by the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO. While the company itself has publicized the superior aesthetics and durability against wind and snow mentioned above, it also acknowledges certain advantages to the more common above-ground system. “In the events of flooding or landslides, it’s harder to isolate damaged areas of a subterranean system,” the company points out. “That can increase the amount of time necessary to restore power to damaged areas.”
▼ While not as common in Japan as earthquakes, landslides, like the one which occurred earlier this month in Hiroshima, can be devastating.
TEPCO also mentions other, simpler roles performed by power poles, such as providing housing for street lights and posting space for maps or address markers, which can be extremely helpful in navigating towns in Japan, where only a minuscule fraction of streets have names.
▼ This pole in Saitama City informs passersby that they’re in Hori no Uchi Cho, and also gives the block address of 1-77.
Reflecting the respective pros and cons of the two systems, Japanese Internet users are also unable to come to a consensus.
“No matter how much money it takes, we should be taking down power lines! Let’s get started and keep on going!”
“There’re places where they don’t look nice, but I think there’s a sort of rustic appeal to countryside towns with power line running above the buildings.”
Regardless of how things go in the future, though, with only about 7 percent of Tokyo’s central 23 wards currently having subterranean power networks, and even less of Osaka, power lines, like vending machines and ramen joints, are going to be part of the Japanese urban landscape for some time to come.
Sources: Ameba News, Jin
Top image: Kato Sign
Insert images: Wikipedia/NOAA, RocketNews24, OCN (edited by RocketNews24)We understand that Microsoft will release the OneNote for Mac app for free, and the company is also planning to make the Windows desktop version available at no extra cost. This marks a significant change in the way Microsoft manages OneNote, unbundling it fully from the cost of Office. We’re told part of this free approach is targeted at competitors like Evernote, but Microsoft is also adding additional features to entice people away from the competition.
Microsoft is working on a version of OneNote for the Mac that will debut later this month, claims The Verge. This release will expand the note-taking software beyond its roots as a paid desktop app for Windows users and will complement the mobile apps that exist on iOS and Android.According to The Verge's report, Microsoft will drop the price on the note-taking app and release it for free to both OS X and Windows owners. The latest version of OneNote also may include companion web-clipper extensions that plug into popular browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. These plug-ins will make it easy for people to grab snippets from web pages and immediately share them with the OneNote app.Microsoft hopes the price drop along with new web-clipping feature will make OneNote attractive to customers who currently use competing note-taking apps such as Evernote.The launch of OneNote is part of a larger push by Microsoft into the Apple ecosystem. The company is rumored to be working on a new version of Office for the Mac that may debut later this year as well as Office for the iPad that allegedly is coming soonThe day she left to join the Islamic State, Jaelyn Young took a floral backpack with clothes, craft supplies, and a scrapbook. Muhammad Dakhlalla, whose friends call him Moe, packed a bar of soap, gray sweats, and a pack of Starburst minis. She was organized: Her wallet held bank cards and insurance cards, plus a Sonic receipt tucked inside. He loved video games: His only t-shirt featured the robots of Portal 2. On that hot August day, they were headed to Turkey, on their way to Syria. Listen to the audio version of this article: Feature stories, read aloud: download the Audm app for your iPhone.
Moe, 22, had graduated from Mississippi State University in Starkville a few months earlier, in the spring of 2015, and had been accepted into a psychology master’s program there for the fall. He has a friendly, slightly dorky demeanor in conversation, ever the goofy baby brother of an expressive Muslim family. Jaelyn, just turned 20, was a sophomore in chemistry, working in a lab on nanoparticles. High-school friends describe the tiny Vicksburg native as a “spunky, smart robotics chick” from a strict black family, with a Navy veteran and police officer for a father and a school superintendent for a mother. The two started dating in November 2014; she converted just a few months later. By June, they had wed in an Islamic ceremony, although they never obtained a marriage license. Moe and Jaelyn were both academically talented, but neither planned to return to school. God willing, Jaelyn allegedly told their online recruiter, they would be overseas by summer’s end. The weeks dragged on. They applied for passports, waiting impatiently for them to arrive by mail. Moe wondered whether they’d be assigned a city or could pick one. She wanted to be a medic. He yearned to be a fighter. They asked questions about religion classes and wondered if they would be tested on their knowledge of Islam. She was nervous about traveling, she allegedly told her recruiter—she had never been outside the United States. He asked about basic training and whether ISIS follows Islamic law. “I am not familiar with sharia,” he allegedly told the recruiter. “I am excited about coming … but I feel I won’t know what all I will be doing.”
Finally, it was time to leave. They used her mom’s credit card to buy tickets on Delta, with a connection in Amsterdam. She carried $367.50, more than enough for a taxi or train to the famous Blue Mosque in Istanbul, where they planned to meet their recruiter. They would stand out, she wrote, because of her “big bushy curly hair,” but she asked the recruiter to bring a head scarf for her to wear during the rest of their journey; she was ashamed to go uncovered but scared to wear a hijab while traveling for fear of drawing attention to herself. Early on a Saturday morning, they drove about half an hour to Columbus, Mississippi, expecting little security trouble at their small regional airport as they departed for their new life. They were arrested while preparing to board their flight. Jaelyn and Moe weren’t actually talking to ISIS recruiters. Their contacts had been undercover FBI employees the whole time. Extremist ideas have never been easier to access. Propaganda videos, like the ones Jaelyn and Moe were watching around the spring of 2015, are on YouTube. Extremist communities can be found through Twitter and Facebook; pseudonymous accounts can be opened with just a few clicks. The vast majority of people who watch and read propaganda never act on it. But some begin to believe that the American media offer only a “thick cloud of falsehood” about ISIS, as Jaelyn put it. Related Story The American Climbing the Ranks of ISIS In the past three years, the FBI has invested significant resources in tracking and arresting these ISIS sympathizers in the United States. Between March 2014 and April 2017, 125 people have been charged with ISIS-related crimes. But in February 2015, FBI Director James Comey said there were terrorism investigations happening in all 50 states, and later that year, he said more than 900 were open. ISIS, said Comey, is “putting out a siren song through their slick propaganda, through social media, that goes like this: ‘Troubled soul, come to the caliphate. You will live a life of glory; these are the apocalyptic end times. You will find a life of meaning here, fighting for our so-called caliphate. And if you can’t come, kill somebody where you are.’”
The FBI closely monitors online communities that discuss ISIS, at times running so many undercover accounts that agents end up investigating one another: An FBI policy guide, obtained and published by The Intercept, notes that online investigations have “previously resulted in resources being wasted by investigating or collecting on FBI online identities,” or employees working undercover. The Bureau also takes tips from a network of sources—from security firms to random vigilantes—who monitor these communities. The small group of people who have been arrested on ISIS-related charges are an idiosyncratic bunch—they come from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds, and each case is distinctive. But many do share important traits with Moe and Jaelyn. According to the Center on National Security at Fordham University’s School of Law, their median age is 25. Three-quarters are American citizens. Nine out of 10 are male. Over one-third are converts to Islam. Although roughly a quarter of cases have involved people of Arab descent like Moe, whose father is Palestinian, most come from other ethnic backgrounds, including African Americans like Jaelyn. Few have criminal backgrounds. Many live with their parents. And roughly 90 percent of cases involve social media, sometimes including online conversation with a recruiter, either real or undercover. A recent court case shows that activity on Twitter may now be all it takes to get arrested on ISIS-related charges. In February 2016, for example, a Missouri woman was arrested for allegedly retweeting pro-ISIS solicitations of violence against U.S. government personnel. She was charged with making threats across state lines—a novel approach to prosecution in terrorism cases. But the plurality of prosecutions are brought and closed on one charge: conspiracy to provide material support to ISIS. These are cases of people caught on the verge of action, like Jaelyn and Moe—at the airport, or with plane tickets ready in hand. While a handful of cases have involved weapons charges, most don’t. These lonely, isolated admirers of the caliphate hope to join their allies abroad.
The most remarkable thing about Jaelyn and Moe is that theirs was a largely straightforward case. ISIS sympathizers pose a terrifying dilemma for law-enforcement officials, who have to sift through droves of online aliases engaged with propaganda—whose owners might live in America or abroad—to identify people who credibly wish to harm the United States. The accounts may not be accessible because of encryption, the FBI agents working the Mississippi case told me, and leads can go dark. Americans expect their government to prevent violence before it happens: Their shared national nightmare is the plot that goes undiscovered before an attack or the known sympathizer who gets away. Faced with such high stakes and uncertainty, the FBI is left to teeter between catching people before they act and walking along with them until they violate the law. The most remarkable thing about Jaelyn and Moe is that theirs was a largely straightforward case. In less than three months, the FBI had crafted a powerful indictment against them. Theoretically, when the Bureau comes across two kids like Jaelyn and Moe—lost, in love, and grasping toward a dark future—agents could try to set them on another path, reaching out to their families and communities. In reality, though, that’s not what the country has asked them to do. Jaelyn was good at everything in high school. Yearbook photos show her in cheerleading, robotics, and a competitive singing group; she was nerdy enough to join the National Honor Society and Mu Alpha Theta, the math club, but cool enough to be on the homecoming court twice. The “jolliest junior” of Vicksburg’s Warren Central High School was widely liked and friends with everyone from the band kids to the choir kids to the “redneck country kids,” said her classmate Katie Martin.
Even now, teachers speak about Jaelyn in the shorthand of a glowing report card. “Talk about a wonderful student—she stands out in my mind as one of the top students I’ve ever taught,” said Teri Vollor, who teaches chemistry and history. “She was one of those charismatic, outgoing, fun-loving, cheerleader-types—with a brain. That’s a very unusual combination.” Jaelyn attended Triumph Church, where her mom, Benita, teaches Sunday School. The pastor, Mike Fields, remembers her as a “precious, well-mannered” girl. (Jaelyn declined a request for an interview, and although I spoke with her parents in person, they did not respond to requests for help with fact-checking.) Coverage of Jaelyn’s case focused on her cheerleading and popularity, but she was most involved with robotics. Her small group, Team 456, would meet at a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers facility, spending hours tinkering with their machines. They attended major competitions, where they met famous astronauts and engineers. Jaelyn even met Phil Bryant, the Mississippi governor, at a competition once. (“He crashed our robot into a pillar,” Will Ballard, one of Jaelyn’s teammates, said.) Although Jaelyn had a lot of friends, “I don’t really remember a lot of people going over to her house, ever,” said Cory Schweitzer, another robotics teammate. Her parents were strict, he said: early curfews, frequent phone calls, no offering rides to other kids. Jaelyn floated among friend groups, never really landing with one. “A lot of times, she seemed almost lonely,” Schweitzer said.
While Jaelyn and her sister, Kaylin, were growing up, Benita was often the only one at home. Their dad, Leonce, is a police officer in Vicksburg who served as a petty officer in the Navy. He did more than a dozen tours of duty abroad, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gone for months at a time, he missed Jaelyn’s first days of school, special events, and high-school graduation. “She begged me not to go,” Leonce said of Jaelyn in court. “But I had a moral obligation to my country.” Benita seemed to regret being so tough on her daughters. It was “just me and my two girls,” she testified. “I had to grow some pretty thick skin to be that strong person because Dad wasn’t there.” The girls argued a lot. “I’m sorry most of our years were spent fighting and yelling/cursing at one another,” Jaelyn wrote in a letter to her sister. “We were both very strong characters. The things we thought we disliked in each other were only things we disliked in ourselves.” Jaelyn was in junior high the first time Benita noticed the cuts—five or six razor scars visible on her legs. Benita recalled in court that she scolded Jaelyn because they “looked intentional,” but she didn’t press the issue. Time went on, and Benita thought everything was fine. But looking back, she said, she saw that moment as an early sign that Jaelyn was struggling. “Jaelyn used to be one of the sweetest [girls] I know. Friendly and kind.”
Jaelyn quit the cheer squad her senior year. Leonce told me she was focusing on academics, and Benita testified in court that Jaelyn had been bullied by other girls. By that time, Jaelyn only had one real, close friend, Benita said—likely referring to Kimberly Melton, the daughter of one of the robotics coaches. That September, Kimberly died accidentally after taking cold meds, one of the other robotics coaches wrote on a team message board. She aspirated her own vomit, he wrote, and developed a lung infection. After that, Jaelyn felt like even more of a loner, her mom said in court. Everyone else saw her as charmed, but “she thought a lot of people disliked her.” Jaelyn graduated from Warren Central in 2013 and headed three hours north to Mississippi State University. Like a lot of college freshmen, she slowly fell out of touch with people back home. According to friends, Jaelyn started hanging out with a group of largely Asian American and international students. “Jaelyn used to be one of the sweetest [girls] I know,” said one of those friends, Inho Yoon, a Korean student two years above her at MSU. “Friendly and kind.” The second half of Jaelyn’s freshman year brought big changes. She expressed interest in finding a religion that fit her, a friend told me, and started researching Hinduism and Buddhism. At the end of the semester, she got an apartment, but Ballard said she kept it a secret from her parents. That spring, she also started dating Matthew, a mechanical-engineering student a few years older than her from the Mississippi Delta. They had a rocky relationship and took a break over the summer when he left the country to travel in Asia. But when she came back to school that August, she spent a lot of time hanging out with Matthew and his friends—including Moe.
The Dakhlalla family is well-known and well-liked in Starkville, where they’ve lived for nearly two decades. Their small house sits on Herbert Street across from the Islamic center, and Oda Dakhlalla, Moe’s dad, led prayers there for many years. Lisa, Moe’s mom, used to be known as the town “hummus lady” in honor of the spreads she sold at the farmer’s market and at the family’s restaurant, Shaherazad’s. Oda came to the United States as a teenager and ended up at Ole Miss for grad school. Lisa grew up in New Jersey in a white, Christian family. She converted to Islam after she met Oda, and brought her son from a previous marriage, Donovan, to live with them. Oda and Lisa had three kids together—Salah, the oldest, just finished medical school, and Abdullah, the middle brother, earned his doctorate from Mississippi State. Moe is the youngest. The Starkville native practiced tae kwon do and graduated high school with a 4.0 GPA. He also helped his parents out—Jane Harmon, a family friend, said she spent long hours with Moe painting and decorating Shaherazad's when he was a kid. He never complained, said Sami Austin, Harmon’s sister. His manner was always “peaceful.” Moe started college in the fall of 2011, where he studied computer engineering and psychology. He fell in with a nerdy crew who liked to play board games and video games. He participated in the Muslim Students Association, although not as actively as his brothers. Moe would volunteer from time to time, said the faculty adviser, Rani Sullivan, and “if there was food, Moe was going to be there.” Moe’s brothers would study the Koran; they prayed regularly and fasted. But while Moe went through the motions of religious ritual, he told me in a letter, he was not particularly devout. “I was taking things for granted,” he wrote, “blindly following the faith.”
Oda, however, pushed the boys to be more religious. He was disappointed with their level of devotion to Islam—“they were praying but not focusing, maybe, in their prayers,” he told me—and he could get particularly aggressive with Moe, friends and family said. One by one, the Dakhlalla brothers moved out of the house, leaving Moe alone with his parents. Moe felt pressure to please Oda, who wanted him to get married and get into grad school, he told me: “I was the only one at home, trying to take care of my parents and go through college.” Lisa and Oda fought a lot; family friends said the couple had grown distant and often yelled at each other. Moe describes himself as a “momma’s boy,” but his mother was sometimes checked out, family friends said. She was also a bit of a prepper, distrustful of mainstream media and terrified that the economy would fail and society would fall apart. She kept a month's supply of food on hand, for example, and wanted to have gallon jugs stored in case something happened to the water supply. Moe is the kind of guy who’s awkward and shy around girls. At the start of his senior year in the fall of 2014, he told friends he had a crush on someone he knew from the gym, but he gave up after a few weeks of fruitless flirting. And that’s when he started spending more time with Jaelyn.
Jing Li
Matthew’s friends thought Jaelyn was bad news. They said she was manipulative, demanding, and pushy, but Moe didn’t think they were being fair. As the weather got colder, and she and Matthew started fighting, Moe was there to listen. They started hanging out, first in groups, then one on one. When Matthew found out they were spending so much time together, he was shocked and betrayed. He and Jaelyn broke up, and in November 2014, she and Moe started dating.
From the beginning, Moe and Jaelyn were isolated. Moe’s friends disapproved of the way the two got together and became less eager to hang out. Friends say Moe had to ask Jaelyn’s permission to go out and see people, and she would get mad when he stayed out late without telling her. When the couple would hang out with Moe’s brother, Abdullah, “They would be to themselves, sitting in a corner,” said Jonathan Dobbs, one of Abdullah’s close friends. “Moe would be on his laptop playing games. ” Meanwhile, Jaelyn started getting interested in Islam. During her sentencing hearing, Jaelyn claimed Moe introduced her to the religion, although prosecutors alleged elsewhere that she had been interested in converting before they started dating. She said the shahada—the Muslim profession of faith—around March 2015, at Moe’s parents’ house. He taught her what he knew: how to pray, how to recite the Koran in Arabic. She traded shorts and tank tops for modest skirts and dresses. She started covering her head, first with cloth in rich purple and green, and later, only in black. Moe was happy she had converted to Islam, he told friends. Oda also really wanted him to marry a Muslim. When Jaelyn converted, Oda told me, he cried with joy. Despite their apparent happiness, Jaelyn and Moe each felt under pressure. She was working in a chemistry lab and planning to take the MCAT. “Mom, I just don’t think I can do it,” Jaelyn said during a phone call one night with Benita. “It’s too much.” She had been anxious, she testified in court, and often contemplated suicide. Benita, thinking she was just going through a normal college experience, didn’t have a lot of sympathy. “Tough up, Jaelyn,” she thought.
Meanwhile, Moe felt lost. He was about to graduate and had the option of getting a master’s in psychology at Mississippi State. But he didn’t really want to pursue it. Friends observed that Moe gained weight and appeared tired and depressed. Moe told me he felt “guilty for making mistakes” in his love life—“no more letting someone run my life by telling what’s right and wrong,” he said. He asked family for advice on how to make Jaelyn happy and keep the relationship going. “It was all a bit fishy, and Abdullah and many of the other brothers at the masjid,” or mosque, “knew it.” Many were surprised when they married in early June of 2015. Oda had been hoping to pick Moe’s bride himself, dreaming of someone tall—while he thought Jaelyn was too short for Moe, he told me, he eventually let up and consented to the match. Members of the Starkville Muslim community were invited to their nikah at Oda’s house, but many declined. “It was all a bit fishy, and Abdullah and many of the other brothers at the masjid,” or mosque, “knew it,” said Dobbs. Most folks in the community didn’t know who Jaelyn was: She had rarely attended Muslim Student Association events at school, let alone prayers at the mosque. “There was no contract, no clergy, no agreement of witnesses,” Dobbs said. “We were told the day of and that it would be a potluck dinner.” But the couple’s closest friends and family didn’t understand what was really going on in their relationship: Over the course of roughly three months, they had slowly become fascinated by ISIS. That spring—it’s not clear exactly when or why—Jaelyn started watching videos featuring Anjem Choudary, the British extremist imprisoned in 2016 for swearing an oath of allegiance to the Islamic State. Friends say she started asking questions about Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, and circulated an article claiming Muslims were supposed to pledge allegiance to the caliphate. She downloaded at least one issue of Dabiq, ISIS's online propaganda magazine. Moe joined in: He allegedly downloaded the organization’s guide to making the trip overseas and started watching the videos with Jaelyn. In one clip the couple viewed, ISIS threw a man, presumed to be gay, from the roof of a building.
Jaelyn’s online presence transformed—gone was the short-skirted cheerleader of her high-school yearbook photos. Her Facebook profile showed two women in hijabs. Her Twitter page allegedly referred to the handle @1_Modest_Woman, perhaps her or her recruiter; “I just want to be there :( #IS,” she wrote. Online, Moe allegedly referred to her by an Arabic name presumably adopted as a nom de guerre—Aaminah, meaning “trustworthy.” Jaelyn began avoiding calls and texts from her family and later took down “posters of my favorite shows and music artists,” she testified. The Mississippi teen had always loved heavy metal. On May 13, around the time of Moe’s college graduation, the FBI made its first publicly known contact with Jaelyn online. A person using her account had “expressed a desire to travel to ISIL territory,” the FBI noted, using the government’s term for the Islamic State, and had “tweeted and retweeted links to ISIL propaganda.” Over the next 13 weeks, at least two undercover employees exchanged frequent messages with Jaelyn and Moe on social media. Details from court documents submitted by the FBI allege Jaelyn and Moe talked about ISIS in disturbingly casual ways—a sign either that they were fully aware of what they were getting themselves into, or that they were living in a total state of unreality. Some of Jaelyn’s comments sound like a sorority girl planning her dream home rather than a terrorist plotting destruction. God willing, she told an undercover FBI employee, she would soon be overseas where she could “raise little Dawlah cubs.”
As innocent and maternal as that may sound, it may also reveal the extent of her commitment: ISIS propaganda has featured children executing prisoners in the style of a video game, and refers to boys groomed to be fighters as “cubs.” There were signs that Jaelyn understood the horrific violence of the group she longed to join. After a sailor and four Marines were murdered in July in Chattanooga, Tennessee, she celebrated. Praise be to God, she said, “the numbers of supporters are growing.” In fact, the pair seemed frustrated about the way ISIS was portrayed in the United States, including stories about ISIS taking sex slaves. “I cannot wait to get to Dawlah so I can be amongst my brothers and sisters under the protection of Allah,” Jaelyn allegedly said. Moe said he wanted to be a mujahid, or soldier engaged in jihad. “I am willing to fight,” he allegedly wrote. “I want to be taught what it really means to have a heart in battle!” In letters written to their families before they left, Jaelyn and Moe didn’t mention anything about ISIS, distrust of American media, or elation about the slaughter of Marines. Instead, they talked about hopelessness. “It was all my planning... I am guilty of what you soon will find out.” “I feel I was not going to make anything life changing in the future,” Moe wrote to his parents. “Making changes here in America feels pointless to me as people in my [academic] field hate change.” He never signed his offer letter from MSU’s grad program, he said: “I did not want you to be responsible for any financial debt after I had left.” He drew a little heart next to his signature, scrawled in sideways, boyish letters.
“I couldn’t cut it here,” Jaelyn wrote in neat cursive to her parents and sister. “I have failed you and I can’t handle the shame. Please forget me. I am not coming back, I couldn’t if I wanted to.” She claimed to have been planning her escape “for almost a year—ever since things went south.” It’s unclear what she was referring to—perhaps family trouble, or academic stress. In a separate letter, Jaelyn encouraged her sister, Kaylin, to go on mission trips and protect the environment. “Don’t wait until you start to lose hope and begin to think there is no point in helping anyone at all like I did,” Jaelyn wrote. “That was a dark place and I never want that for you.” She asked her sister to treat their parents well. “When you [realize] what they gave up so that we could have food in our mouths and clothes on [our] backs you would feel just as ashamed as I do,” she wrote. “I would do anything to take back any grief I had given them and to just hug them again.” Jaelyn and Moe both confessed in their letters and after the FBI arrested them at the airport. Both instructed their families not to look for them, but seemed aware that their parents might contact law enforcement anyways. Jaelyn emphasized that their parents weren’t involved, as though to preempt any charges of complicity. They likely expected their families would find the notes after they were long gone, but the FBI arrested the pair at the airport early in the morning.
In the letter to her family, Jaelyn confessed: “It was all my planning—I found the contacts, made arrangements, planned the departure,” she said. “I am guilty of what you soon will find out.” She never talked about Moe as a husband or boyfriend. His mom and dad had taken her in and acted as her “Starkville parents,” she said, so she repaid them “by allowing their son to come with me.” (“He wanted to,” she added.) As she told the authorities in a separate letter, she left home “fully aware of the consequences of my actions, should I be caught.” It’s difficult to establish how, exactly, the FBI identifies terrorism suspects. “One [way] could be that [they] have a source,” said Jeffrey Ringel, a 21-year veteran of the Bureau now with the Soufan Group, a security-focused consulting firm. When they find potential targets online, they give the information to the FBI: “‘Hey, somebody new just came onto this website, this is their Twitter handle, this is their email address,’” Ringel said. Alternatively, agents might monitor social media or known recruiting sites themselves. In this case, the FBI says, Twitter was the way in. “Jaelyn was making open, public comments on social media about her support and willingness” to join ISIS, said Christopher Freeze, the special agent in charge of the Jackson, Mississippi, division of the FBI. “It’s not as if we are trolling, or out there just looking for people to open cases on.” Even non-law-enforcement were tracking her. “We watched her account for quite a while,” said Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “She popped up on our radar pretty easily.”
As the FBI talked to Jaelyn and Moe, they would have been looking for a few specific signs of action, Hughes said. “Assume for a second [Jaelyn] doesn’t get to the airport or doesn’t buy the tickets. Then, the FBI is in a bit of a predicament about what to do next,” he said. “What tripped her up was the overt act of trying to travel.” Many ISIS-related cases in the United States involve people who want to go overseas and only get as far as the airport. But some don’t even manage that: They are arrested for facilitating others’ travel or simply purchasing a plane ticket. The Youngs and the Dakhlallas first realized their children were in serious trouble when the FBI came knocking. Oda thought the agents were “pulling my foot,” he said. He had been asleep, and Lisa was at the local farmer’s market. He went to the door groggy, but brightened when he saw who it was: He had befriended a handful of FBI agents over the years, and he and his wife cooked for a couple of these men often enough that they would request certain lamb dishes. “I’m glad you are here, man! Come on!” he said. But the officers had only come as a courtesy to break the news of the case: “Oda, we are on an official visit,” they replied. Oda eventually came to feel that it “was nice of them [to] come along with these FBI agents that I did not know,” he told me. But initially, he felt betrayed. Three hours west in Vicksburg, agents paid the Youngs a similar visit. “They came here for 35, 40 minutes, told us she was being charged with conspiring to be a medic or something, and they left,” Leonce told me. He claims he didn’t get any help from the Navy or the Vicksburg police department, where he works: “They don’t care,” he said.
As Jaelyn’s and Moe’s parents tried to process what was happening, they faced an enormous challenge: finding and affording a defense attorney capable of representing a client facing terrorism charges. Across the United States, just over 500 al-Qaeda and ISIS cases have been brought since 9/11. Over time, the federal prosecutors who work terrorism cases have gotten good at it, in part because the government has dedicated substantial resources to developing their skills—the Department of Justice even created a division for sharing best practices. But defense attorneys experienced in ISIS cases are hard to come by, especially in Mississippi. Moe’s case was handled by Greg Park, a court-appointed assistant federal public defender with a quiet, deep voice. He said the attorneys in his office have been trained on how to handle these kinds of charges, but he also sought help. “I did reach out to other attorneys throughout the country who have handled similar cases and discussed their approach and the results they received,” he said. “And I did an abundance of research on my own.” Meanwhile, Jaelyn switched attorneys a few weeks into her case. She went through the initial stages with a court-appointed attorney, Ken Coghlan, who runs a private practice in Oxford. But soon, her father approached Dennis C. Sweet III, a high-profile lawyer in Jackson. Sweet implied in court that he took the case as a favor to Leonce. (Sweet did not return multiple requests for an interview for this story.) Jaelyn’s father now seems to feel they were at a disadvantage. “If I had money,” Leonce told me, “she wouldn’t have gotten 12 years.”
“I single-handedly screwed up everything that could possibly go wrong.” Early in March 2016, Moe entered a guilty plea. Prosecutors dropped all charges besides conspiracy to provide material support to ISIS. Since his arrest, Moe had cooperated with them, including giving them Jaelyn’s letters—hundreds of pages of correspondence she had sent to Moe during their time in jail. Even after planning her trip meticulously, going to the airport, and discovering that the government had been watching her for months, Jaelyn still believed they were in it together. Calling Moe “my habibi,” using the Arabic word for “my sweetheart,” Jaelyn wondered whether he was thinking about cooperating with prosecutors, “to please non-Muslims who are offended that we |
. So let’s add some data to it!
To add it, we’ll first need some data. We can load it from a file:
createdFile, err := driveService.Files.Create(&myFile).Do() if err!= nil { fmt.Fprintf(w, "Couldn't create file ", err) } myImage, err := os.Open("/tmp/image.png") if err!= nil { fmt.Fprintln(w, err) }
Now we have to create the updated file metadata:
myImage, err := os.Open("/tmp/image.png") if err!= nil { fmt.Fprintln(w, err) } updatedFile := drive.File{Name: "catsUpdated.png"}
We have to construct an update request:
driveService.Files.Update(createdFile.Id, &updatedFile)
Here we specify the Id of the file to modify, and the new metadata. We’ll now add the data to the update request, and Do() it, checking for errors and ignoring the result.
_, err = driveService.Files.Update(createdFile.Id, &updatedFile).Media(myImage).Do() if err!= nil { fmt.Fprintln(w, err) } fmt.Fprintln(w, createdFile.Id)
In the end we send the new file id to the user.
Hint
You could add the Media option already to the create request if you wanted.
Conclusion
I suppose this was a good short introduction into the structure of the Google API. After learning these, you should have few to no problems using the other API’s.
Have fun integrating it into your app!Eagles cornerback Byron Maxwell's interception of Flacco's pass late in the first quarter not only cost them Hurst, but running back Lorenzo Taliaferro as well. Taliaferro ended up underneath Maxwell and Hurst on the sideline tackle, and got up slowly after the play.
The team said Taliaferro was being evaluated in the locker room for a knee injury. He did not return to the game.
Before the injury, the second-year running back carried the ball four times for 8 yards, including a fourth-down conversion on the game's opening drive. He was the primary rusher on the second drive of the game, carrying twice for 5 yards on that series before the injury.
Taliaferro is locked in a battle with rookie Buck Allen for snaps behind starter Justin Forsett.
Short day for Forsett again
Gone are the days when Forsett, who ran for more than 1,200 yards last season, needs every preseason carry available to him to make his team's Week 1 roster. Now Forsett uses his limited time on the field to “knock the rust off” while resting for the regular season.
“For seven years now, I've been playing every quarter, basically, in the preseason,” Forsett said last week. “It's been nice to be able to go in and get some work in and be able to let other guys get some work in, too.”
Forsett went on a 14-yard run on the opening play of the game, the first of three runs behind Yanda and Hurst, who created big running lanes. Forsett carried the ball five times for 29 yards, plus had one catch for 4 yards before giving way to Taliaferro and Allen.
End zone
Rookie wide receiver DeAndre Carter muffed his second kick return in two games late in the first half, and didn't get another opportunity. Carter had taken over for cornerback Asa Jackson, and was replaced by wide receiver Tom Nelson as the kick returner. … First-round draft pick Breshad Perriman was on the field several hours before the game with tight end Dennis Pitta (hip), catching passes from quarterback Bryn Renner. Perriman didn't do more than walk, but caught several passes.... Maia Chaka, a female college football official trying out for the NFL, was a member of the officiating crew Saturday night.
Pictures from the Ravens' preseason football game against the Eagles in Philadelphia.
jmeoli@baltsun.com
twitter.com/JonMeoliIt’s not a coincidence. At about the same time that Christian Ströbele, a Green party parliamentarian, was visiting Edward Snowden in Moscow, it was revealed by Professor Johannes Tuchel, the director of the German Resistance Center in Berlin, that Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, a commanding officer of Adolf Eichmann and a member of the 1942 Wannsee conference which codified the decision to carry out the Holocaust, is buried in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin. The coincidence is worth reflecting upon. It reveals something very specific about Germany, a speciality that is perhaps not unique to it but nevertheless a highly developed practice.
This is a somewhat roundabout way of saying that slipping into the role of the victim has a long tradition in Germany. The special sensitivity, for example, that the Germans are displaying in the NSA spying affair on Angela Merkel in particular and the country generally is often explained as a direct product of the historical experience of the Germans in two dictatorships. The shadows cast by the memories of the Gestapo and Stasi, we are told, have made the Germans particularly neuralgic to the megalomaniac tendencies of the secret services—as though it wasn’t the Germans themselves who were carrying out the spying.
This, of course, is a beloved German theme ever since the end of World War II, which is to say that whenever they can Germans stylize themselves as victims rather than perpetrators, the objects rather than subjects of history. Today the rhetoric is correspondingly radical. The talk is of a “United Stasi of America,” the grasp for digital world hegemony, even of “cyber-fascism.” Then what would left-wing anti-fascism be without fascism—antifa, as it is known in Germany without the “fa”? Suddenly Edward Snowden is not merely a whistleblower—no, he is a resistance fighter following in the footsteps of Carl von Ossietzky, the publisher of the “Weltbuhne,” whom the Nazis imprisoned in a concentration camp.
In this narrative the Germans are the victims of America. The logical consequence of this “never again!” would be a critical question about the work of our own secret services. Do they hold themselves—in Pakistan or Afghanistan—to the letter of the law? Do they respect human rights, data gathering and the private sphere everywhere? This could become interesting. Out of the German “never do anything bad again” something else has evolved—a comfortable “never experience anything bad again.” This, in turn, has led to a grotesque identity change in which members of the Left party—the successor to the former East German Socialist Unity Party—is now gleefully decrying the “terrible practices of the Stasi” in order to attack the NSA even more fiercely. No doubts Erich Honecker, the old head of East Germany, who ruled it like his private fiefdom until he and his chums were toppled from power in 1989, would claim, if he were still alive, that he, too is a victim of the American intelligence services spying after the motto: this reminds me of the East German prison Bautzen. Meanwhile Heinrich Müller rests in a Jewish cemetery.
What do the real victims of the Gestapo think about the spy affair? In Israel there are warnings about European hyperventilation. There is pride in the Mossad. Everyone is hopeful that the Mossad is always clever enough to detect atomic plants in Syria and Iran and to foil the Mullahs with computer viruses.
In Germany itself Anetta Kahane, the head of the Amadeu-Antonio foundation, writes in the Judische Allgemeine, a Jewish newspaper, that many Jews are following the way Snowden is discussed with concern.: “There is a tone that is familiar from postwar history: America is an occupier about which there is no more to say. And, suddenly, the Germans are again shamefully defeated and in no way liberated. Jews have reason for concern at this tone since anti-Semitism is only a few thoughts away.”
Still, the widespread feeling of having been humiliated by Americans is understandable. Seldom before have the Germans been more drastically deprived of their innocence. “We have been unbelievably quashed” is the complaint. Thus the smug complacency that Ströbele’s meeting with Snowden—Americans number one foe!—elicited. A sense of revenge earned and a restoration of national honor. And the debate about asylum for Snowden in Germany serves above all to slap America in order to be able to look in the mirror again.
As a grand coalition develops in Germany out of cyber opponents, big data apocalyptic thinkers and annoyed national conservatives, it is Vladimir Putin who can enjoy the spectacle. His dream of dividing the West is actually becoming true.
Malte Lehming is senior editor of Der Tagesspiel, a daily newspaper in Berlin. This is a translation of a piece that ran in Der Tagesspiel on November 4.
Image: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1989-1204-023 / CC-BY-SA.This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Kirk Wiebe, if you could talk about that, and also if you would share with us your own story, you yourself subjected—well, your whole family subjected to a daylong armed raid by federal authorities. But respond on that issue of metadata, as a former intelligence—
KIRK WIEBE: Well, yes, Amy, Ben captured it very nicely. It is true that in terms of speed and comprehension, comprehensiveness, if you will, metadata provides an opportunity to assess the activities of a targeted person or entity much more rapidly, and therefore—and because it’s machinable. The world operates on metadata. It is exactly how data is moved. When you dial a phone number—we say dial—when we punch up a phone number, instantly almost, the other end is ringing the person intended to receive the call. This is true of email: In seconds, it arrives at the person’s inbox—when things are working right. So, the speed—the opportunity for speed and comprehension of what a targeted entity is doing is enormous.
And especially if you watch it daily over time, you can actually then begin to paint a picture of a person’s lifestyle, where they are, because it’s not just phone calls. It’s bank deposits. It’s credit card swipes at the gas station, at the flower shop, when a man’s on the way home and buys flowers for his wife. It’s the E-ZPass transponder that measures or knows what ramp you got on a toll road. You amass this data. You have time hacks of every place an individual is when they do those things. So every time that you touch an electronic system, there’s droppings left. There’s a record that can be exploited.
AMY GOODMAN: And your own story, Kirk Wiebe?
KIRK WIEBE: Yes. You know, I have mixed emotions about it, because my job is not to destroy NSA, by any means. I was a member of a proud agency, that’s had some black marks on its path in terms of spying on Americans, but we had been assured that was never going to happen again after the Church Committee. And we had guidelines under USSID-18, which said, “Thou shalt not spy on Americans,” except upon probable cause shown to a judge that there’s evidence of wrongdoing, criminality, terrorism or whatever. So, everything seemed to be copacetic, congruent with the Constitution, and it was a fun place to work, on true targets of concern. In the latter part of my career, when I met up with Bill Binney, Ed Loomis, ultimately Tom Drake, and of course Diane Roark from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, that had been my experience, one that was very positive. And I was awarded for my work.
But then we began to see the agency’s intent on exploiting the digital age. And the digital age takes various forms. We talk about Facebook. We talk about the Internet, telephone, personal devices of every kind, iPods that can communicate now. So there’s a plethora of means of communication, all important to sort out for national intelligence purposes, but focused on foreign threats—and domestic, if there’s evidence that they exist. And that was the philosophy. That was the approach. And that’s what we built our original prototype system to work against in terms of analyzing big data. There needed to be a way to look into big data quickly for assessment purposes and be able to, as quickly as possible, home in on that fertile territory, that data connected with legitimate terrorist criminality and so forth.
When we found out that the NSA was directing resources against Americans without probable cause, this was late in 2001 just prior to, surrounding the events of 9/11, which happened concurrently as this technology was blooming. Nine-eleven really served as a marker that we had failed as an agency. We had been trying to get the NSA to lean forward, if you will, in its digital seat to get in—to get tools into the fight, with all this digital data, and find terrorism and so forth. And we had an opportunity to put it out there nine months before 9/11. Bad culture inside the building and bad process, that managers are supposed to ensure does not happen, defeated the small successful prototype in approach that embodied the principles of the Fourth Amendment in it. And it was eliminated in favor of Trailblazer.
Well, when 9/11 happened and we failed and the project that we had been developing called ThinThread was not adopted, we felt we had no other things to do at NSA. And since three of us were eligible for retirement, we retired, formed a small company and tried to bring the concepts of ThinThread to other agencies in the government. We succeeded in demonstrating its capabilities in a government contract with Boeing Company in 2004, but a high executive in the agency that that contract serves said, “We have to stop these guys. They’re going to embarrass NSA,” because we had found things in a set of data, that two agencies had, that NSA had not, and that was embarrassing. So that contract was stopped.
We then found another contract at Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Patrol. We found some news-breaking data there about an operation involving Iranian businesses importing electronics to support the building of triggering devices for IEDs. And we found that—and this is not classified. This data, this fact, was actually broadcast publicly by the Department of Commerce to U.S. businesses, putting them on alert that certain people, individuals and businesses were trying to import electronics to build triggering devices for IEDs to be used against our troops abroad and coalition forces. We simply, Bill Binney and I, sat down, used Google at home, on our spare time, to formulate a profile of these businesses, where they were, how they were functioning, and it turned out they were all false fronts to cover up the import operation. We put all the—we connected the dots for the government, reported it to Customs and Border Patrol, where we were working. They took the data and briefed it up the line. And within two weeks, we were let go from our contract. I guess we had embarrassed too many people.
Long story short, two years later, seven gentlemen—I shouldn’t call them gentlemen—seven people are arrested in Florida by the FBI associated with this import operation. We were pleased that we could contribute, even if not officially in an official position for the government. But as far as NSA was concerned, we launched an IG complaint in 2002 talking about gross mismanagement and fraud—not so much fraud, but more about gross mismanagement.
AMY GOODMAN: That was an inspector general report.
KIRK WIEBE: Yes, it was.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, what happened—we’ve had Bill Binney on, and he talked about the federal authorities coming in, raiding his home. He’s got a gun up against his head as he’s in the shower. His kid and his wife, they’re all under the gun. What about you, Kirk Wiebe?
KIRK WIEBE: Right. Well, as Bill told you, we were raided in 2007. In fact, it was July 26th at 9:00 a.m., in a coordinated strike against me, Bill Binney, Diane Roark of—the HIPSC staffer, and Ed Loomis.
AMY GOODMAN: House Intelligence.
KIRK WIEBE: Right. And they came to my home. I was actually sitting at my computer looking out the window, and I noticed about a dozen or so FBI agents coming across my yard in the dark blue uniforms with the gold letters ”FBI” on their backs. And immediately, a chill went up my spine. I said, “Uh-oh,” to myself, and I ran to the front door, because I didn’t want them to break in the door—not that they had an intention to, but I didn’t know that at the time.
So I opened the door. The lead agent showed me his badge to identify himself, and a search warrant. They asked me who else was in the house. My mother-in-law was, along with my eldest daughter. They were still up sleeping. And they asked me to get them downstairs and have them sit on the couch in the front room. They asked me if I had any pets. I said, “Yes, I have two dogs.” They asked me to lock those in the bathroom. My youngest daughter and wife had already left the house on an errand and didn’t know any of this was happening at the time.
And they entered, and they asked me—they didn’t ask me. They escorted me to the outside deck—this was July, it wasn’t cold—and babysat me there for the next seven-and-a-half hours while this group of about 12 or so agents went through the house documenting everything they found, rummaging through papers, taking computers, anything with a digital memory, gathering it up, putting it into—they had about five or six vans, unmarked white vans, out in my driveway—piled all that stuff in the vans, took printers, a whole bunch of stuff, and left.
Now, while this was going on, my wife comes home with my youngest daughter. They see all these vans lined up in the driveway. I have a 400-foot driveway because my home is on a flag lot. It actually sits behind other homes that are streetside. So, it’s a long driveway, and that was lined with vehicles, FBI vehicles. They were worried something had happened to me, maybe medical or whatever. The FBI explained what had happened and took them and sat them on the couch, at the same time.
Now, they did not have guns drawn. And people—you know, I’ve thought about why were they drawn when they went to Bill Binney’s house, and the only difference I can think of is the fact that Bill had at one time been a registered owner of firearms. He doesn’t have them anymore, but he was at one point. And probably the FBI does a check on the database to see if the person they’re targeting for a raid has weapons in the house or not—is my guess—and it’s a safety procedure for those teams. But that’s kind of what happened.
AMY GOODMAN: You were never charged?
KIRK WIEBE: No, never charged.
AMY GOODMAN: Juan?
KIRK WIEBE: No, not at all.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I wanted to go to Ben about the—another question, key question, I had about the report. Encryption—supposedly encryption is a safeguard for ordinary Americans, businesses and others, who might want to protect their privacy on the Internet. This report basically urges the government not to continue to undermine encryption or to—and to instead seek to strengthen it. Your sense of the report’s recommendations on the encryption issue?
BEN WIZNER: This is really important. This comes out of an important article that The New York Times published about an NSA program called Bullrun, where we learned that the NSA, even as part of its mission is to secure the Internet, secure communications, protect us from cyber-attacks by strengthening encryption, was simultaneously undermining, systematically, encryption standards around the world so that its spies could break into these communications. The problem is, a backdoor for the NSA is a backdoor for everyone else, too. It’s a backdoor for hackers. It’s a backdoor for China. It’s a backdoor for criminals. There’s a fundamental tension between this cybersecurity mission, which is to defend the country and the safety of communications, and the aggressive spying mission. And the NSA had fundamentally favored the spying and surveillance mission over the security mission in a way that put all Americans’ and really all the world’s communications at risk. So if this recommendation is adopted, I think it’s a very important one.
AMY GOODMAN: In its report, the NSA review panel suggested the NSA is engaging in cyber-attacks on financial systems or accounts. The panel recommended, quote, “Governments should not use surveillance to steal industry secrets to advantage their domestic industry; (2) Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise manipulate the financial systems.” Ben Wizner, can you explain?
BEN WIZNER: I don’t know what to say, except I guess what I would—you know, this is a—this is a response to everyone who says that all of these programs are about terrorism. Look, there are not a lot of terrorists. There’s not enough terrorism in the world to justify these tens of billions of dollars that are being spent to build these massive systems that don’t target people, but sweep up all of the world’s communications. Clearly, there has been mission creep in what the NSA is doing. They’re collecting the information because they can. They are allowing their capabilities to drive their policy, instead of our laws and values to constrain our capabilities.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Edward Snowden in his own words. In his interview with The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, Snowden said he knew the risks he faced when he became a whistleblower.
EDWARD SNOWDEN: You can’t come forward against the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk, because they’re such powerful adversaries that no one can meaningfully oppose them. If they want to get you, they’ll get you, in time.
But at the same time, you have to make a determination about what it is that’s important to you. And if living—living unfreely but comfortably is something you’re willing to accept—and I think many of us are; it’s the human nature—you can get up every day, you can go to work, you can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest and go to sleep at night after watching your shows. But if you realize that that’s the world that you helped create and it’s going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation, who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk, and it doesn’t matter what the outcome is, so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that’s applied.
AMY GOODMAN: Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Kirk Wiebe worked for the NSA for 32 years. Did he have—once he realized—once Edward Snowden realized what was going on, what were his options? And what protections, Kirk, did he have? You wrote a piece, “Who Broke the Law, Snowden or the NSA?” Was Edward Snowden protected as a NSA contractor?
KIRK WIEBE: No, not at all. First—
AMY GOODMAN: Ooh, we seem to just have lost Kirk Wiebe on satellite. But let me then go—
BEN WIZNER: Sure.
AMY GOODMAN: —to Ben Wizner and ask—oh, wait, I think we have Kirk back. Kirk, are you there?
KIRK WIEBE: Yes, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Yes. Did he have another option?
KIRK WIEBE: No, he did not. It’s important to realize first that there are no formal whistleblower protections for members of the United States intelligence community—not just NSA, but DIA, CIA, all of the components of intelligence in the government structure. None of those employees have formal whistleblower rights.
Now, are there any logical paths one could take? Yes, the inspector general. There’s one at the NSA. But if you believe the director of NSA is at least in part a culprit in the wrongdoing, that IG works for him. So if you really want to put the director of NSA on report as having made high-level decisions playing in this whole privacy issue, you must then go above the director of NSA, which is the IG resident with the U.S. Department of Defense—
AMY GOODMAN: Inspector general.
KIRK WIEBE: —since NSA is an agency subordinate to the DOD. And that’s what we did. We did the 2002 complaint to DOD IG, even though that report was heavily classified and really very few people saw it. It was designed to be buried, because it was very embarrassing to the NSA. So, it didn’t—the IG function really was no function. So, if you think Snowden had a path through the IG, he didn’t. These things are there. They’re almost cosmetic. There are investigations, lots of reports written, but they’re buried, hidden from public view, when they don’t come out favorably.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ben Wizner, the little time we have left, on Ed Snowden’s request for a permanent asylum in Brazil and his options right now, could you talk about that?
BEN WIZNER: Well, I think the press got a little carried away in interpreting that letter to Brazil. And let me give a little context for it. Snowden has been getting requests from Brazilian senators, and in fact members of parliaments from around the world, to provide direct assistance with their investigations of the NSA’s spying and their own countries’ spying. What he meant to communicate with that letter is: “I support your reform efforts. You need to understand that I’m living under a temporary grant of asylum halfway around the world right now. If I get permanent humanitarian status, in Brazil or elsewhere, I’ll be in a better position to assist with those reform efforts, to the extent that it’s lawful and appropriate.” No one should think that he would cooperate in those investigations any way differently than he has cooperated with journalists. He will only provide information that is in the public interest. He’s not trying to tear down systems altogether; he’s trying to reform them.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about the debate within the Obama administration now about whether to grant an amnesty? Talk about who’s on what side.
BEN WIZNER: Isn’t that interesting? You know, I watched the same 60 Minutes report that you’re talking about, where you had two top NSA officials, one of them saying, “We need to sit down with this guy and have a conversation, that might include amnesty in exchange for his cooperation,” and then his boss saying, “No way. We can’t negotiate with hostage takers,” although—
AMY GOODMAN: Keith Alexander is opposed. He’s the head of the NSA.
BEN WIZNER: Keith Alexander—although—sure, although, of course, the government negotiates with hostage takers all the time. But leaving that aside, I do think that there are camps within the government, those who recognize that Snowden is not out to tear down the United States, that he actually could be useful for reform, that conversations with him could improve everyone’s situation. And I hope that the events of this week—the judge’s ruling that the program is unconstitutional, the president’s panel coming back and saying that sweeping changes are necessary—will strengthen the people in the administration who want to treat Edward Snowden as something other than a felon.
AMY GOODMAN: And Richard Ledgett, explain who he is, the significance of him saying that he actually would support amnesty, that the United States, the government, doesn’t even know what Edward Snowden has—a grave concern to the U.S.
BEN WIZNER: So they say. Richard Ledgett, who is a senior NSA official and who is in charge of the task force that is trying to assess what Snowden took or how much or the harm, he threw out the figure that there might be 1.7 million documents that were taken. It’s incredible that on the one hand they can say that a contractor walked out the door with 1.7 million documents, and on the other hand their audit systems are so effective that no one can commit abuses. Those two things simply don’t compute. But the fact that he was floating this balloon that maybe we should have a different kind of conversation with Snowden, I will just say in response—I don’t think a lot of members of the intelligence community watch your show, Amy—that if they’re listening, they know where to find us, and they know that we’re willing to have a useful and productive conversation with them.
AMY GOODMAN: I guess the question is for everyone, whether you’re broadcasting or you’re at home, is: Are they listening?
BEN WIZNER: That’s exactly right.
AMY GOODMAN: Ben Wizner, I want to thank you for being with us, Edward Snowden’s legal adviser, ACLU attorney, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. And also I want to thank Kirk Wiebe, retired from the National Security Agency, where he worked for more than 32 years. What a story he told us about himself, about what happened to his family when he raised deep concerns about issues of privacy.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’re going to Cairo, Egypt, Mohamed Morsi facing charges of terrorism and treason. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Stevie Wonder performing last night at the U.N. Correspondents Association Dinner here in New York. Stevie Wonder is the U.N. messenger of peace for advocacy for persons with disabilities. He received the UNCA Global Advocate of the Year award. UNCA is the U.N. Correspondents Association.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And congratulations, Amy, are in order for the U.N. Correspondents Association giving Democracy Now! an award for its coverage of climate change.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, congratulations to the whole team for the years of remarkable coverage, as we went from one global summit to another, and of course continue to cover that issue, and to our listeners and viewers and readers all over the world for being there to encourage Democracy Now!, that this is a such a critical issue. You can go to democracynow.org to see our coverage of the issue of climate change for all the years that Democracy Now! has been broadcasting."Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment" is the 18th episode of The Simpsons' eighth season. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on March 16, 1997.[2] Prohibition is enacted in Springfield and Homer helps fight it by illegally supplying alcohol to the town. It was written by John Swartzwelder, and directed by Bob Anderson.[2] Dave Thomas guest stars as Rex Banner and Joe Mantegna returns as Fat Tony.[2]
Plot [ edit ]
During St. Patricks day, the town gathers in downtown for events and activities. A prohibitionist movement emerges in Springfield after Bart is accidentally intoxicated during the St. Patrick's Day celebration. The municipal government, wanting to keep the voters during election season, agrees to consider a ban. They discover that alcohol has actually been banned in Springfield for two centuries, and moves to enforce the law, prompting Moe to disguise his bar as a pet shop. However alcohol still continues to flow into the town due to the mob and with their bribery of the local law enforcers. With the town becoming impatient with the police's incompetence, Chief Wiggum is replaced by Rex Banner, an officer of the U.S. Treasury Department. Rex Banner sets up blockages on the city entrance bridges and buries all of the alcohol in a mass grave at the city dumps.
In the meantime, Homer figures out a way to keep Moe's bar operating, by becoming a bootlegger. One night, he and Bart sneak out to the city dump to reclaim the beer that was disposed of when the Prohibition law was enacted, escaping Rex Banner in the process. He then sets up shop in his basement pouring the beer into the finger holes of bowling balls. Using an intricate set of pipes under the Bowl-A-Rama, he bowls the balls into Moe's. Upon discovering it, Marge actually finds it a very good idea (since Homer is actually using his intellectual faculties and that he's making enough money to support the family). The media realizes someone's allowing Springfield's underground alcohol trade to flourish, and they give the still-unknown Homer the nickname "Beer Baron".
When his supply of liquor runs out, Homer begins to distill his own homemade liquor. However, his stills start to explode, due to Homer not knowing how to properly make his own alcohol. He is then confronted by a desperate ex-Chief Wiggum who is going through his garbage. Wiggum tells Homer about his distaste for Rex Banner. In an attempt to rekindle Wiggum's career, Homer allows the former Police Chief to turn him in, hoping that Wiggum will become police chief by doing what Rex Banner couldn't. After confessing to his crimes in public, Homer believes he is now a free man. Homer is told that he is to be punished, with Wiggum thinking he will just get a "slap to the wrist." The punishment that awaits him is expulsion from the town (and presumably death) by an archaic catapult, showing how anachronistic the law really was. Marge tells everyone that this law and punishment make no sense and it's meaningless to punish Homer, especially for their freedom to drink. Rex Banner steps up to lecture the town on the reasons why the law must be upheld. While he lectures the assembled Springfield citizens, Rex Banner accidentally steps on the catapult. Wiggum then has him catapulted and gets his job back. The town clerk then finds out that the Prohibition law was actually repealed a year after it was put in place, and so Homer is released. The mayor then asks if Homer can become the Beer Baron again and supply the town with alcohol, but Homer tells him that he is retired. Within five minutes Fat Tony is only too happy to oblige when Mayor Quimby asks him to flood the town with alcohol once more, and Springfield salutes its qualities as Homer proclaims his undying love of alcohol by saying, "To alcohol! The cause of... and solution to... all of life's problems." The entire town cheer Homer with beers in hands.
Production [ edit ]
The main plot of the episode is based on the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, in which alcohol was banned in the United States.[3] As The Simpsons has many episodes that have stories and jokes related to alcohol, the writers thought it was strange that they had never done an episode related to Prohibition, and that the idea seemed "perfect."[3] The episode features a vast amount of Irish stereotyping at the St. Patrick's Day celebration. This was a reference to when Conan O'Brien was a writer for the show and was of Irish descent, and his use of Irish stereotypes.[3] Various writers were very concerned about Bart getting drunk. This was why he drank the beer through a horn, to show that it was only accidental.[3] This was a toned down version of what was in John Swartzwelder's original script.[4] Originally Chief Wiggum's first line was "They're either drunk or on the cocaine", but it was deemed too old-fashioned.[5] The discovery of "more lines on the parchment" was a simple deus ex machina to get Homer freed and to end the episode.[3]
When Homer first enters Moe's "Pet Shop" the man that tips his hat to him outside was a background character used in the early seasons.[5] The riot at the beginning of the episode was taken from footage from the end of the season 6 episode "Lisa on Ice" and updated.[6] The line "To alcohol! The cause of... and solution to... all of life's problems," was originally the act break line at the end of act two, but was moved to the very end of the episode.[7]
Censorship [ edit ]
During the riot, a scene where an Irish mob blows up a British chip shop named "John Bull's Fish & Chips" was censored on British television and the rest of Europe.[8] The episode first aired while the conflict in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles was ongoing and four years after the Shankill Road bombing in which ten people were killed by a Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb which exploded prematurely in a fish shop.
Cultural references [ edit ]
The episode parodies the series The Untouchables, with the character of Rex Banner based on Robert Stack's portrayal of Eliot Ness,[1][9] and the voice of the narrator being based on that of Walter Winchell.[5] Barney leaving flowers outside the Duff brewery is, according to show runner Josh Weinstein, a reference to people leaving flowers at the grave sites of various Hollywood figures, with him specifically citing Rudolph Valentino and Marilyn Monroe as examples of this trend.[3] It may also be a direct reference to the Poe Toaster. The shot of the diner is a reference to Edward Hopper's Nighthawks painting.[3] A sign in Moe's Bar says "No Irish Need Apply" a reference to Anti-Irish sentiment.[10]
Reception [ edit ]
In its original broadcast, "Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment" finished 39th in ratings for the week of March 10–26, 1997, with a Nielsen rating of 8.9, equivalent to approximately 8.6 million viewing households. It was the second highest-rated show on the Fox network that week, following The X-Files.[11]
The authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, called it "A nice episode in which Homer actually devises a clever plan to keep the beer flowing."[1] The Toronto Star described the episode as one of Bob Anderson's "classics."[12] The Daily Telegraph also characterized the episode as one of "The 10 Best Simpsons TV Episodes."[13] Robert Canning gave the episode 9.8/10 calling it his favorite episode of the series.[14]
Homer's line "To alcohol! The cause of... and solution to... all of life's problems" was described by Josh Weinstein as "one of the best, most truthful Simpsons statements ever."[3] In 2008, Entertainment Weekly included it in their list of "24 Endlessly Quotable TV Quips".[15]How can industrial hemp benefit Northern Colorado?
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with the harmonious and hopeful energy of the time, turning it into an artifact.
Activation Edit
After the war, the artifact went dormant and passed through several hands before it was eventually bought by a business man named Larry Newley for his daughter Kallie. While happy with the gift, Kallie was still sad because her father had become obsessed with work. While Kallie was helping decorate the house, she wished that her father could be like he used to be. Her wish awoke the artifact, which decided to grant her wish. Using a picture of Kallie and her father, the artifact created a "Santa Larry" as a manifestation of the ideal father that Kalie wished for.
The duplicate went around doing good and charitable deeds to correct the wrongs Larry had committed. Theduplicate also tried to scare Larry into changing his ways since the man continued to ignore his family the closer Christmas came and the artifact had developed an attachment to Kallie and badly wanted to grant her wish.
The Santa Larry eventually caught the attention of the Warehouse, and Pete and Myka were sent to investigate. Since it was a child who had made a wish the artifact had become increasingly frustrated that Larry had not changed his ways and the duplicate began to try and steal Larry's life-force so that it could become the "Dad Kallie deserves". While the agents where successful in driving the Santa Larry off the first few times it managed to grab Larry the third time since the artifact was getting stronger the closer it came to Christmas. The duplicate told the agents it had given Larry enough chances to change his ways and it had lost patience. When midnight came it would drain all of Larry's life force and replace him.
After finding the Artifact in the house on the tree, the agents learned of Kalie's wish to make her family wholeagain. They also determined where the Santa Larry had gone, to the first mall Larry had opened before he started to focus on money. Arriving at the mall the agents found the duplicate in the middle of berating a confused Larry as it drained his life-force. Larry was still insistent that he had been working to give Kallie a better life. The agents tried to neutralize the artifact, but it was now at the height of its strength and was determined to grant Kallie's wish so that the Neutralizer had no effect. However, Kallie, who had been watching the entire exchange, revealed that she would rather have a bad father than no father at all.
She told the duplicate to stop and leav her father alone since it was her fault. Larry, seeing his daughter's sadness, told her it was not her fault and it was his. Being watched by the duplicate, he started to understand the wrong he had done to his daughter. Larry told his daughter that he realized he had to be there for her and stop missing out on her life and he should be the father she remembered. At Myka's insisting Kallie then ran to give her father a hug and while hugging him, she was joined by Mrs. Newman. Observing this, Santa Larry vanished, now that its task was done and Kallie had been given the family she wanted.
How It Works Edit
Since it came from a time of harmony in war, the artifact had a strong desire to make things better. The artifact was activated when someone in its vicinity made a wish and the wish was one for good. The closer it got to Christmas, the more powerful the artifact became.
The artifact has been shown to create spectral duplicates of people that can interact with the world around them. These duplicates possess the ability to travel as a ball of light, animate objects, and drain the life-force of their physical counterparts (human contact will reverse this effect).
The artifact had an apparent fondness for children. When Kallie wished that she could have her family back again, the artifact was awoken by the wish. Using its power, it created a duplicate of her father who would try to get her father to change his ways and even try to replace him. The artifact, despite being aggressive to adults, would not harm children.
The artifact is unique in that it will work even when doused in Neutralizer. However, it appears that if the original wish that activated the artifact comes true, such as when Kallie forgave her dad and he understood what she was trying to tell him, then the artifact automatically deactivates.As “Girls” enters its final season on HBO, the cast is ready to share some of the drama that went on behind the scenes.
During an interview conducted by the show’s co-showrunner Jenni Konner with Lena Dunham, Jemima Kirke, Allison William and Zosia Mamet for Glamour, Dunham remembered the time Kirke wanted to quit the show.
Konner role-played an employer conducting an exit interview and asked the four what they would change about the job. Kirke responded, “Ugh I think season two.”
“That was the season where you said I had to get out of your dressing room or you were gonna punch me, Jem,” Dunham said adding, “I think it’s time for us to disclose to the world that, like, three days before season two, Jemima tried to quit.”
Kirke responded, “Yeah. My sense of who I was and what I wanted was really thin. I really wasn’t sure what the f— I was doing.”
Dunham then recalled the moment it happened.
“I remember being in a cab,” she said. “And Jemima called me. She was like, ‘I have to tell you something. It’s not a big deal. I don’t want you to freak out. I want to quit the show.'”
Although the interview captured mostly positive feelings about working on the show, Dunham returned later to remember more second season drama.
“I thought, at a certain point in the second season, I was gonna have to sit you girls down and be like, ‘Listen, b—. You’re lucky to have a job. So get it together and cut out this behavior!’ Like, ‘If you’re spotted out with Jared Leto one more time, this is done.’ And then everyone was just nice.”
She added, “Jemima and I fought sometimes because we’ve been close since we were 11, and that’s one of the things you do when you’re family.”
When asked if they would return to make more “Girls,” Kirke responded, “That’s like if someone asked me, ‘Would you like to go back to college?’ Of course I would. ‘Cause I would finally do it right. So yes, I would do it all over again.”
Read the full interview on Glamour.For other people named Ruth Gordon, see Ruth Gordon (disambiguation)
Ruth Gordon Jones (October 30, 1896 – August 28, 1985) was an American film, stage, and television actress, as well as a screenwriter and playwright. Gordon began her career performing on Broadway at age nineteen. Known for her nasal voice and distinctive personality, she gained international recognition and critical acclaim for film roles that continued into her seventies and eighties. Her later work included performances in Rosemary's Baby (1968), Harold and Maude (1971), and the Clint Eastwood films Every Which Way but Loose (1978) and Any Which Way You Can (1980).[1]
In addition to her acting career, Gordon wrote numerous plays, film scripts, and books, most notably co-writing the screenplay for the 1949 film Adam's Rib. Gordon won an Academy Award, an Emmy, and two Golden Globe Awards for her acting, as well as receiving three Academy Award nominations for her writing.
Early life [ edit ]
Ruth Gordon at age four
Ruth Gordon Jones was born at 31 Marion Street in Quincy, Massachusetts.[2] She was the child of Annie Tapley (née Ziegler) and Clinton Jones, a factory foreman who had been a ship's captain. Her only sibling was an older half-sister Claire, from her father's first marriage.[3] She was baptized an Episcopalian.[4][5] Her first appearance in the public eye came as an infant when her photograph was used in advertising for her father's employer, Mellin's Food for Infants & Invalids.[6] Prior to graduating from Quincy High School, she wrote to several of her favorite actresses requesting autographed pictures. A personal reply from Hazel Dawn (whom she had seen in a stage production of The Pink Lady) inspired her to go into acting.[2] Although her father was skeptical of her chances of success in a difficult profession, in 1914 he took his daughter to New York, where he enrolled her in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
Early career [ edit ]
Gregory Kelly and Ruth Gordon in the Broadway production of Seventeen (1918) Jed Harris in 1928 Ruth Gordon in 1930
In 1915, Gordon appeared as an extra in silent films that were shot in Fort Lee, New Jersey, including as a dancer in The Whirl of Life, a film based on the lives of Vernon and Irene Castle.[7] That same year, she made her Broadway debut in a revival of Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, in the role of Nibs (one of the Lost Boys), appearing onstage with Maude Adams and earning a favorable mention from the powerful critic Alexander Woollcott. Woollcott, who described her favorably as "ever so gay", would become her friend and mentor.[2]
In 1918, Gordon played opposite actor Gregory Kelly in the Broadway adaptation of Booth Tarkington's Seventeen. The pair continued to perform together in North American tours of Frank Craven's The First Year and Tarkington's Clarence and Tweedles. Then in 1920, Gordon and Kelly were wed.
In December 1920, Gordon checked into a Chicago hospital to have her legs broken and straightened to treat her lifelong bow-leggedness.[8] After a three-month recovery, she and Kelly relocated to Indianapolis where they started a repertory company.
Kelly died of heart disease in 1927, at the age of 36. Gordon at the time had been enjoying a comeback, appearing on Broadway as Bobby in Maxwell Anderson's Saturday's Children, performing in a serious role after being typecast for years as a "beautiful, but dumb" character.[2]
In 1929, Gordon was starring in the hit play, Serena Blandish, when she became pregnant by the show's producer, Jed Harris. Their son, Jones Harris, was born in Paris that year and Gordon brought him back to New York. Although they never married, Gordon and Harris provided their son with a normal upbringing and his parentage became public knowledge as social conventions changed.[9] In 1932 the family was living discreetly in a small, elegant New York City brownstone.[10]
Gordon continued to act on the stage throughout the 1930s, including notable runs as Mattie in Ethan Frome, Margery Pinchwife in William Wycherley's Restoration comedy The Country Wife at London's Old Vic and on Broadway, and Nora Helmer in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House at Central City, Colorado, and on Broadway.[11]
Career [ edit ]
Gordon was signed to a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film contract for a brief period in the early 1930s but did not make a movie for the company until her supporting role in Greta Garbo's final film, Two-Faced Woman (1941). Gordon had better luck at other studios in Hollywood, appearing in supporting roles in a string of films, including Abe Lincoln in Illinois (as Mary Todd Lincoln), Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (as Mrs. Ehrlich) and Action in the North Atlantic, in the early 1940s. Gordon's Broadway acting appearances in the 1940s included Iris in Paul Vincent Carroll's The Strings, My Lord, Are False and Natasha in Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic's revival of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, as well as leading roles in her own plays, Over Twenty-One and The Leading Lady. Gordon married her second husband, writer Garson Kanin, in 1942. Gordon and Kanin collaborated on the screenplays for the Katharine Hepburn – Spencer Tracy films Adam's Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952). Both films were directed by George Cukor. The couple were close friends of Hepburn and Tracy, and incorporated elements of their real personalities in the films. Gordon and Kanin received Academy Awards nominations for both of those screenplays, as well as for that of a prior film, A Double Life (1947), which was also directed by Cukor.[citation needed]
The Actress (1953) was Gordon's film adaptation of her own autobiographical play, Years Ago, filmed by MGM with Jean Simmons portraying the girl from Quincy, Massachusetts, who convinced her sea captain father to let her go to New York to become an actress. Gordon would go on to write three volumes of memoirs in the 1970s: My Side, Myself Among Others and An Open Book.[12][13][14]
Gordon continued her stage acting career in the 1950s, and was nominated for a 1956 Tony, for Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play, for her portrayal of Dolly Levi in Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, a role she also played in London, Edinburgh and Berlin.
In 1966, Gordon was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe award as Best Supporting Actress for Inside Daisy Clover opposite Natalie Wood. It was her first nomination for acting. Three years later, in 1969, she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Rosemary's Baby, a film adaptation of Ira Levin's bestselling horror novel about a satanic cult residing in an Upper West Side apartment building in Manhattan. In accepting the award onstage, Gordon thanked the Academy by saying, "I can't tell you how encouraging a thing like this is..." (exhorting laughter from the audience; at the time she had been in the business for fifty years and was seventy-two years old) "And thank all of you who voted for me, and to everyone who didn't: please, excuse me", prompting more laughter and applause.
Gordon won another Golden Globe for Rosemary's Baby, and was nominated again, in 1971, for her role as Maude in Harold and Maude (with Bud Cort as her love interest).[15]
She went on to appear in 22 more films and at least that many television appearances through her 70s and 80s, including such successful sitcoms as Rhoda (as Carlton the unseen doorman's mother, which earned her another Emmy nomination) and Newhart. She portrayed a murderous author on the 1977 episode Columbo: Try and Catch Me. She made countless talk show appearances, in addition to hosting Saturday Night Live in 1977.[16]
Gordon won an Emmy Award for a guest appearance on the sitcom Taxi, for a 1979 episode called "Sugar Mama", in which her character tries to solicit the services of a taxi driver, played by series star Judd Hirsch, as a male escort.[1]
Her last Broadway appearance was as Mrs. Warren in George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, produced by Joseph Papp at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in 1976. In the summer of 1976, Gordon starred in the leading role of her own play, Ho! Ho! Ho! at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts. She had a minor role as Ma Boggs, the mother of Orville Boggs (Geoffrey Lewis), in the Clint Eastwood films Every Which Way but Loose and Any Which Way You Can.
In 1983, Gordon was awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award for outstanding women who, through their endurance and the excellence of their work, have helped to expand the role of women within the entertainment industry.[17]
Harold and Maude, Adam's Rib, and Rosemary's Baby have been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the United States Library of Congress.
Death [ edit ]
On August 28, 1985, Gordon died at her summer home in Edgartown, Massachusetts, following a stroke at age 88.[1] Her husband of 43 years, Garson Kanin, was at her side and said that even her last day of life was typically full, with walks, talks, errands, and a morning of work on a new play. She had made her last public appearance two weeks before, at a benefit showing of the film Harold and Maude, and had recently finished acting in four films.
Legacy [ edit ]
"She had a great gift for living the moment," said Glenn Close, who co-starred in Maxie, one of Gordon's last films, "... and it kept her ageless."
In August 1979, a small theater in Westboro, Massachusetts,[18] and in November 1984, an outdoor amphitheater in Quincy, Massachusetts were named in her honor.[19]
Body of work [ edit ]
Filmography [ edit ]
Television [ edit ]
Writer [ edit ]
Broadway appearances [ edit ]
Seventeen (1918) Ruth Gordon as Lola Pratt (holding her dog Flopit) in the Broadway production of(1918)
Year Title Role Notes December 21, 1915 – January 1916 Peter Pan Nibs Revival January 22, 1918 – August 1918 Seventeen Lola Pratt August 13, 1923 – November 1923 Tweedles Winsora January 5, 1925 – March 1925 Mrs. Partridge Presents Katherine Everitt August 31, 1925 – October 1925 The Fall of Eve Eva Hutton January 26, 1927 – April 1928 Saturday's Children Bobby January 23, 1929 – April 1929 Serena Blandish Serena Blandish January 31, 1929 – May 25, 1929 Lady Fingers Ruth also in ensemble April 14, 1930 – June 1930 Hotel Universe Lily Malone September 29, 1930 – November 1930 The Violet and One, Two, Three Ilona Stobri The Violet April 6, 1931 – May 1931 The Wiser They Are Trixie Ingram October 12, 1931 – March 1932 A Church Mouse Susie Sachs September 6, 1932 – October 1932 Here Today Mary Hilliard March 16, 1933 – May 1933 Three-Cornered Moon Elizabeth Rimplegar February 21, 1934 – April 1934 They Shall Not Die Lucy Wells October 8, 1934 – November 1934 A Sleeping Clergyman Harriet Marshall, Hope Cameron, Wilhelmina Cameron January 21, 1936 – May 5, 1936 Ethan Frome Mattie Silver December 1, 1936 – February 1937 The Country Wife Mrs. Margery Pinchwife December 27, 1937 – May 1938 A Doll's House Nora Helmer May 19, 1942 – May 30, 1942 The Strings, My Lord, Are False Iris Ryan December 21, 1942 – April 3, 1943 The Three Sisters Natalya Ivanovna January 3, 1944 – July 8, 1944 Over 21 Paula Wharton Written by Ruth Gordon December 3, 1946 – May 31, 1947 Years Ago Written by Ruth Gordon September 30, 1947 – November 22, 1947 How I Wonder Produced by Ruth Gordon October 18, 1948 – October 23, 1948 The Leading Lady Written by Ruth Gordon January 12, 1949 – January 15, 1949 The Smile of the World Sara Boulting December 5, 1955 – February 2, 1957 The Matchmaker Mrs. Dolly Gallagher Levi Nominated – 1956 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play March 2, 1960 – March 19, 1960 The Good Soup Marie-Paule I March 21, 1963 – April 6, 1963 My Mother, My Father and Me Rona Halpern September 30, 1965 – October 23, 1965 A Very Rich Woman Mrs. Lord Written by Ruth Gordon October 6, 1966 – October 22, 1966 The Loves of Cass McGuire Cass October 17, 1974 – October 26, 1974 Dreyfus in Rehearsal Zina February 18, 1976 – April 4, 1976 Mrs. Warren's Profession Mrs. Kitty Warren
See also [ edit ]Abstract In the time-reversed counterpart to laser emission, incident coherent optical fields are perfectly absorbed within a resonator that contains a loss medium instead of a gain medium. The incident fields and frequency must coincide with those of the corresponding laser with gain. We demonstrated this effect for two counterpropagating incident fields in a silicon cavity, showing that absorption can be enhanced by two orders of magnitude, the maximum predicted by theory for our experimental setup. In addition, we showed that absorption can be reduced substantially by varying the relative phase of the incident fields. The device, termed a “coherent perfect absorber,” functions as an absorptive interferometer, with potential practical applications in integrated optics.
Time-reversal symmetry is a fundamental symmetry of classical electromagnetic theory and of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. It implies that if a particular physical process is allowed, then there also exists a “time-reversed process” that is related to the original process by reversing momenta and the direction of certain fields (typically external magnetic fields and internal spins). These symmetry operations are equivalent to changing the sign of the time variable in the dynamical equations, and for steady-state situations they correspond to interchanging incoming and outgoing fields.
The power of time-reversal symmetry is that it enables exact predictions of the relationship between two processes of arbitrary complexity. A familiar example is spin echo in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) (1): A set of precessing spins in a magnetic field fall out of phase because of slightly different local field environments, quenching the NMR signal. The signal can be restored by imposing an inversion pulse at time T, which has the effect of running the phase of each spin backward in time, so that after 2T they are back in phase, no matter how complicated their local field environment. Time-reversal symmetry is the origin of the well-known weak localization effect (2) in the resistance of metals, the coherent backscattering peak in the reflection from multiple scattering media (3–5), and the elastic enhancement factor familiar in nuclear scattering (6). Effects due to direct generation of time-reversed waves via special “mirrors” have been extensively studied for sound waves (7–9) and microwave radiation (10).
Recently, several of the authors (11) explored theoretically an exact time-reversal symmetry property of optical systems: the time-reversed analog of laser emission. In the lasing process, a cavity with gain produces outgoing optical fields with a definite frequency and phase relationship, without being illuminated by coherent incoming fields at that frequency. The laser is coupled to an energy source (the pump) that inverts the electron population of the gain medium, causing the onset of coherent radiation at a threshold value of the pump. Above threshold the laser is a nonlinear device, but at threshold for the first lasing mode, the laser is described by the linear Maxwell equations with complex (amplifying) refractive index. Because of the properties of these equations under time reversal (11), it follows that the same cavity, with the gain medium replaced by an equivalent absorbing medium, will perfectly absorb the same frequency of light, if it is illuminated with incoming waves with the same field pattern. Additional analysis showed that if the cavity is illuminated with coherent field patterns not corresponding to the time-reversed emission pattern, it is possible to decrease the absorption well below the value for incoherent illumination. Such a device, related to a laser by time reversal, was termed a “coherent perfect absorber” (CPA) (11). The properties of CPAs point to a new method for controlling absorption through coherent illumination. Here we demonstrate both the strong enhancement and reduction of absorption in a simple realization of the CPA: a silicon wafer functioning as solid Fabry-Perot etalon.
We now give a more precise statement of the CPA theorem. For simplicity, consider the scalar wave equation [see (12) for the vector generalization]: [ ∇ 2 + n 2 ( r ) k 2 ] ϕ k ( r ) = 0 (1)where k = ω/c, ω is the frequency, c is the speed of light, ϕ k (r) is the electric field, and n = n 1 + in 2 is the refractive index (n 2 < 0 for gain and n 2 > 0 for absorption). Outside of the cavity, n is assumed to be real and constant. Steady-state solutions of these equations are described by the electromagnetic scattering matrix (S-matrix) (11), which relates incoming and outgoing channel states whose weights are represented by complex vectors α, β, obeying S [ n ( r ) k ] ⋅ α = β (2)The S-matrix is unitary if and only if n 2 = 0. In general it satisfies the property that, under time reversal, S [ n * ( r ) k ] ⋅ β * = α * (3)Equations 2 and 3 imply that every scattering solution of the amplifying problem, with n = n 1 − in 2 (n 2 > 0) and outgoing amplitudes β, is accompanied by a solution to the absorbing problem with n = n 1 + in 2 and incoming amplitudes β*.
Now consider a laser at threshold: There exists a specific solution, described by a vector of nonzero outgoing amplitudes β (determined up to an overall scale factor), for infinitesimal incoming amplitudes (α → 0). Thus, the S-matrix has an eigenvalue that tends to infinity. By the time-reversal property (Eq. 3), a lossy cavity with n 1 = n 1, −n 2 → +n 2 must possess a solution corresponding to the time-reversed lasing mode, for which the incident field (β*) is completely absorbed (α* → 0); the associated S-matrix eigenvector has eigenvalue zero. This lossy cavity is the CPA, the time-reversed counterpart to the original laser. Furthermore, if the CPA cavity is accessible by more than one asymptotic channel, it typically possesses other eigenvectors with nonzero eigenvalues, so there are many other incident radiation patterns, at the same frequency, that are not fully absorbed.
Early laser studies (13, 14) had briefly noted the possibility of the time-reversed process of lasing, but detailed theory and investigation of practical realizations began with (11). The simplest realization, a single-channel CPA, consists of an asymmetric cavity with a perfectly reflecting mirror at one end and coupled at the other end to a single input channel. When the absorption of the cavity is tuned to an optimal value, the reflection from the “back mirror” of the cavity destructively interferes with the reflection from the front face, and the incident radiation is perfectly absorbed. Several investigators have discovered the coherent absorption effect for this case, without making use of the analogy to a laser at threshold. III-V semiconductor devices that are essentially equivalent to the single-channel CPA have been widely developed over the past two decades as modulators (15–18) (“asymmetric Fabry-Perot” modulators) and detectors (19, 20) (“resonant cavity-enhanced photodetectors”). In addition, a closely related device, used as an optical switch or filter, is the “critically coupled resonator” (21–23), which typically has a ring geometry and is equivalent to two decoupled single-channel CPAs.
Our two-channel CPA is qualitatively different from the single-channel case because it requires two coherent input beams, and perfect absorption is only achieved when these beams have the correct relative phase and amplitude. Thus, it is not only sensitive to frequency but to the amplitude and phase of the input light and can function as an absorptive interferometer, potentially useful as a modulator, detector, or phase-controlled optical switch.
Reaching the precise CPA condition of perfect absorption requires tuning two parameters (e.g., n 1 and n 2 or n 2 and λ); by analogy to the laser, the CPA must have the correct absorption to reach “threshold” and also must satisfy an appropriate interference condition in the cavity. However, simply tuning λ near the band gap of a semiconductor (11) can bring the system very close to the CPA condition, increasing the absorption by many orders of magnitude.
The simplest two-channel CPA has a uniform complex refractive index n approaching one of the values needed for the CPA condition, connected to a single propagating mode on the left and another on the right. In our implementation (Fig. 1), two collimated counterpropagating free-space laser beams are directed onto opposite surfaces of a Si wafer, which functions as a low-Q Fabry-Perot etalon based on Fresnel reflection at the surfaces (Q ≈ 840). Although these illumination conditions are not truly single-channel because of the finite width of the free-space beams, our results indicate that this is not the main source of deviation from the ideal behavior (12). The output beams are collected into a high-resolution spectrometer, and the intensities in each individual output beam, as well as the total output intensity, are measured (12).
Fig. 1 A laser beam from a tunable (800 to 1000 nm) continuous-wave Ti:sapphire source enters a beam splitter (designated 1). The two split beams are directed normally onto opposite sides of a silicon wafer of thickness ~110 μm, using a Mach-Zehnder geometry. A phase delay in one of the beam paths controls the relative phase of the two beams. An additional attenuator ensures that the input beams have equal intensities, compensating for imbalances in the beam splitters and other imperfections. The output beams are rerouted, via beam splitters (designated 2, 3, and 4), into a spectrometer. The inset is a schematic of the CPA mechanism. The incident beams from left and right multiply scatter within the wafer with just the right amplitude and phase so that the total transmitted and reflected beams destructively interfere on both sides, leading to perfect absorption.
In this geometry, the physical origin of the CPA effect is clear (11). As illustrated in the inset of Fig. 1, the multiply scattered transmission from the left beam interferes destructively with the multiply scattered reflection from the right beam at the right interface, and vice versa at the left face. At the precise CPA condition, this leads to an ideal interference “trap” for the two beams, so that eventually the radiation is entirely dissipated by the interband absorption processes in the silicon. Counterintuitively, increasing the single-pass absorption would actually reduce the net absorption by disturbing the ideal balance of absorption and interference at the operating wavelength.
For a given cavity Q-value, only a certain narrow range of absorption coefficients will yield strong CPA resonances. The reflection symmetry of our cavity implies that CPA resonances arise when the reflectance (R) and transmittance (T) are equal, which occurs as λ varies through the band gap and strong absorption sets in. We use this condition to determine the operating wavelength range of 990 nm <~ λ <~ 1010 nm for our system (12); fine-tuning λ within this interval yields strong CPA resonances.
The key quantity measured in the experiment is the total intensity of the scattered radiation (reflectance plus transmittance from both sides). This is determined theoretically by the eigenvectors of the 2 × 2 S-matrix, which satisfy S(k) · α i = s i α i for i = 1, 2. Because of the cavity’s reflection symmetry, the eigenvectors take the form α i = [ I, I exp ( ϕ i ) ], where I is the incident intensity of the balanced beams and ϕ i = 0, π. The total scattered intensity for each eigenvector is 2|s i |2I. Figure 2A shows a theoretical plot of S-matrix eigenvalue intensities, |s|2, assuming n = 3.6 + 0.0008i and slab thickness a = 115.79 μm (12). Multiple CPA resonances exist, occurring alternatively for even and odd eigenvectors.
Fig. 2 Phase modulation of beam absorption. (A) Theoretical plot of normalized total output intensities as a function of wavelength λ for parity-odd (blue) and parity-even (red) scattering eigenmodes. The dashed black line is the result for incoherent input beams. (B to D) Theoretical output intensities at three representative values of λ as the relative phase of the input beams is varied, showing intensities emitted to the right (magenta) and left (green) sides of the slab, and the total intensity (black). Values of λ corresponding to (B) to (D) are marked by vertical lines in (A); (B) is the CPA resonance. (E to G) Experimental results at values of λ approximately corresponding to (B) to (D). Solid lines are fits to the data, not theory curves; results are normalized to max(I out ) of the fit.
If we work at a wavelength corresponding to a CPA resonance, such as the central minimum shown in Fig. 2A, then, upon varying the relative phase ϕ from 0 to π (keeping the two beam intensities constant and equal), the system goes from enhanced scattering (red curve) to nearly zero scattering (blue curve). Intermediate values of ϕ do not correspond to a single S-matrix eigenstate, so the scattered intensity interpolates between the extremal values. The black curve in Fig. 2A shows the expected scattered intensity for incident beams neglecting their interference, 2(R + T)I. At the CPA resonance, it lies roughly a factor of 2 below the scattered intensity of the even (red) mode, demonstrating substantial coherent reduction of absorption for this mode. This is due to constructive interference in this mode for escape from the cavity, reducing its total absorption; other, more complicated structures allow even larger contrast between the CPA mode and the “scattered” mode (11). There also exist “phase-insensitive” points between each pair of CPA resonances, seen in Fig. 2A where the red and blue curves cross. Here, the scattered intensity is completely independent of the relative phase of the two input beams and equal to the value for incoherent illumination.
The experimental data (Fig. 2, E to G) are in good agreement with the theoretical predictions (Fig. 2, B to D). The theoretical plots show the normalized total output intensity at three representative values of the wavelength, indicated by the corresponding labels (b to d) in Fig. 2A. They show, respectively, an odd-parity CPA resonance (Fig. 2B); an intermediate wavelength, with a smaller total intensity variation with ϕ but still a factor of ~2.5 in the scattering of the even- and odd-parity beams (Fig. 2C); and a phase-insensitive point (Fig. 2D). Also shown, along with the total output intensity, are the intensities as measured on the left and right. Generally, these two intensities have maximum attenuation at different values of ϕ. However at the wavelength corresponding to the CPA resonance (Fig. 2B), their minima coincide at a single ϕ (0 or π), producing an absorption contrast of several orders of magnitude. At the phase-insensitive point (Fig. 2D), the left and right outputs are precisely out of phase; varying ϕ leaves the total output unchanged but switches the dominant output between left and right.
A convenient figure of merit for how close the experiment comes to the exact CPA condition is the “modulation depth” M(λ) = max(I out )/min(I out ), the ratio of the maximum to minimum total output intensity as we vary ϕ. The observed values as a function of λ are shown in Fig. 3A. For a device satisfying the exact CPA condition, min(I out ) → 0 and so M → ∞. This does not occur in the present device because we slightly miss the CPA condition by tuning only one parameter, λ, leading to a maximum modulation depth of ~104 to 105.
Fig. 3 (A) Modulation depth—the ratio of maximum to minimum output intensity obtained by varying the relative input phase, M = max(I out )/min(I out )—as a function of wavelength. The wavelength spacing of adjacent M-peaks is ~1.27 nm, closely matching the free spectral range of the Si etalon. Between these maxima, M goes nearly to unity, corresponding to the “phase-insensitive points” where the two S-matrix eigenvalues have the same magnitude. (B) Ratio of these maximum and minimum values to the value 2(R + T), obtained when the two input beams do not interfere coherently, demonstrating both enhancement and suppression of cavity absorption by interference. Squares (A) and triangles (B) are experimental data [in (B), upright triangles denote reduced absorption, whereas inverted triangles denote enhanced absorption]; solid curves are theory, including resolution effects (12).
However, the limiting factors in the experiment are the temporal and spatial coherence of the laser, reducing M(λ) to ~102. The finite laser linewidth (0.18 nm) “smears out” the CPA resonances, which are optimized for a monochromatic input. This effect can be partially compensated by filtering the output through a spectrometer [resolution ≈ 0.05 nm (12)]. This finite resolution of the spectrometer can be incorporated into the analysis, and the resulting theoretical curve, shown in Fig. 3A, agrees well with the experimental data. The dual role of interference in both enhancing and suppressing absorption can be seen more clearly in Fig. 3B, which compares the maximum and minimum output intensities to 2(R + T), the expected output intensity for two incoherent input beams. At the CPA resonant wavelength, the minimum output intensity is less than 1% of the input, while the incoherent illumination gives ~35% output. When the phase is adjusted to maximize the scattering, the output reaches ~70%.
Although we have demonstrated coherent reduction of absorption in our experiment, this effect should be distinguished from the phenomenon of electromagnetically induced transparency, in which absorption is suppressed by coherently driving the absorbing medium itself (24), instead of by enhancing escape from the cavity by constructive interference, as in our system |
the city was flooded and all essential services, including the robust suburban rail network, were shut down. About 900 people were swept away and many went missing. For the first time, floods did not mean just reduced mobility for a middle-class office goer in a city, but death in real terms.
Chennai, situated near the sea, faces floods almost every year, thanks to good rainfall and bad drainage. "Closing of schools due to flooding every year is common in many parts of Chennai," says an article.
Surat in the western state of Gujarat, an otherwise planned city, faced a major catastrophe in 2006. 150 people died and a number of farm animals drowned when the gates of the Ukai dam opened to release excess water from the region upstream of the city.
1999 was the year of floods in Kolkata. "The city turned into a lake. With water mixing with dirt and sewage overflows, the stench in many areas was unbearable," said a news article. There were several news reports asking why a century-old crumbling sewerage was being blamed when 30-year-old new areas were also getting flooded.
The wrath of 'Purandar'
In Indian mythology, Indra the rain God, also has another name-Purandar which means destroyer of cities and forts. "When the town planning of a certain city was faulty, Indra manifested his Purandar form to destroy it. The present destruction of cities is thus easily explained," says environmentalist Anupam Mishra. The rain God pours water designated for each region. If we do not have a proper container of hold that water, it will just flow off or get stuck on roads like it does now, he says.
Meteorologically, there is no major upward or downward trend of rainfall for the last 200 years, but a decrease in rainfall in the last 20 years with a contrast record of increasing floods has been experienced in Chennai. Thus, the oft-cited reason by administration for urban floods - heavy rainfall in a few hours - does not hold. It is only an excuse for bad planning in the cities.
The root cause of the problem is that cities have become less dependent on their own water sources. The number of water bodies in all major cities of India has drastically come down over the last three decades (see graph below).
'Mumbai Marooned' a citizens' report on the 2005 Mumbai floods says that the builder-politician nexus has knowingly and intentionally suffocated the city's open spaces for commercial purposes. This loss of and subsequent commercialization and concretization of open spaces has meant that water, which previously could seep into the soil has practically nowhere to go, leading to flooding, it says.
Instead of introspecting and understanding the reasons for their sources drying up, the cities looked outside. Bangalore turned to the Cauvery, Hyderabad to the Krishna and Delhi to the Ganga and now all the way up to the Giri near Renuka in Himachal Pradesh. "City administration feels that water demand cannot be fulfilled locally. So the city with more political clout goes farther away to get its water. Meanwhile, property rates keep rising and politicians and builders make money by trying to sell off floodplains as prime residential destination," says Anupam Mishra. "But when it comes to monsoon, you can't dictate God that we already have water for our need so please give us only this much rainfall," he says.
These floodplains and lakes in the low-lying parts of a city, did not just fulfil the water needs of a city, but also drained it off the excess rain water that poured there. When construction blocked the path of water, it led to water-logging on the city roads. The blame then fell on the storm water drains which in most cases, were designed very long ago and were not capable of handling the excess water that seeped into the ground. The 'Mumbai Marooned' report says that the city's drainage system was designed in the early 20th century for a maximum rainfall of 25 mm per hour, assuming that half the rain would be absorbed by the soil and only half would flow into the drainage system.
With the onset of rampant and indiscriminate urbanization, most areas are now either paved, concreted or asphalted. As a result very little rainwater is absorbed into the ground. Thus even at one inch per hour, the drainage system is having to cope with almost twice its intended capacity, says the citizens' report.
Natural drainage or the slope of a city was never kept in mind when cities were planned, says Manoj Mishra of Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan, an NGO in Delhi. "Ring road in Delhi is the finest example of that. There are no culverts to discharge excess water. There was a stream feeding into the Yamuna where the busy ITO road stands today and one can see that it is flooded first when rainfall happens. Not just this, all bus stands in Delhi are situated on lakes. If we tamper with the area where rain water is supposed to rest, then we might as well be prepared for the wrath of floods," he says.
"Typically, the rain water that drains off an empty plot of land (run-off) is 10%. However, build a house on the same site and almost 90 per cent of the rain falling will runoff as storm water. No storm water drain can handle so much flow," says S. Vishwanath, an expert on rainwater harvesting, especially when they are already polluted by sewage, industrial and household waste. "The government should start cleaning drains in February at least so that passage for rain water is clear. But they wake up only in May when monsoon is right in the face and then too, debris collected from the drain is left on the banks of nullahs for it to flow back when rain comes," said Manoj Mishra.
The latest fad to have caught the fancy of the powers that be is river channelisation. The belief that taming the river into a proper channel by constructing walls around it can save us from floods has proved wrong time and again but the government has turned a blind eye to it. Embankments as these walls are called, create havoc in the flood plains of the Kosi river in Bihar every year when the river changes its course and breakes them, rendering thousands of people homeless. Even though the government is fully aware of this, embankments costing crores of Rupees have been constructed around the Sabarmati river in Ahmedabad, all in the name of beautifying the river zone.
The present disastrous floods in central Europe, which does not even have a monsoon, saw rivers diverting up to three kilometres from their designated channels even with little rainfall, flailing the whole idea of channelisation. The Western world which introduced channelisation and development near rivers to us is itself facing its consequences and even removing embankments at a great cost now. The State of India's Environment report on floods brought out by the Centre for Science and Environment shows that all the money spent on flood mitigation has only resulted in more floods because the government focussed only on constructing more and more embankments.
The way out
Water harvesting in lakes and ponds is no traditional wisdom, says Anupam Mishra. "It is a very contemporary solution, time-tested and need of the hour, not just to mitigate floods but also to fulfil our water requirements locally," he says. "Rain water is actually meant to become ground water so every citizen has to take the initiative to recharge it," says Mishra.
When somebody constructs a house it is their responsibility to take care of the excess water from that plot of land, which would otherwise go into a storm water drain or else create water-logging around the plot, says Vishwanath. The solution is a proper rain water harvesting system in the house itself. It would not just replenish ground water but also improve its quality and mitigate flooding. 5% of any built up area, be it an apartment complex or individual house, if used for rainwater harvesting, can mitigate floods and also reduce water bills. Some towns in Germany have made it mandatory for construction projects to take responsibility for their excess run-off or pay more for putting pressure on storm water drains.
Rain water harvesting is what all individuals can do but the administration can contribute to this effort as well. Storm water drains could be utilized as a water harvesting measure rather than just act as carriers of excess water to the sea, says Sekhar Raghavan, head of Rain Centre in Chennai. The Centre provides technical and logistical support to people keen to implement rainwater harvesting measures. "Recharge wells can be constructed in open spaces around storm water drains. Water in drains can be intercepted and directed to these wells," says Raghavan in his proposal to the Chennai municipal corporation. In areas where open spaces are not available, recharge wells can be dug in the drain itself under the man-hole so that it can be cleaned also from time to time.
Re-laying of roads as per the natural drainage patterns needs to be carried out, feels Mishra. Hydrology expert Professor A. K. Gosain from IIT Delhi is preparing a model of a sustainable drainage network for Delhi. "Any new construction can thus be carried out keeping the model in mind," said Gosain. The modelling process will take about six months once they have all data in hand, he informed.
Every drop contributes to floods, so permeable gravel or stone lined parking spaces and footpaths that can absorb water rather than concretized floor would also help. And there is no substitute to planting trees in whatever area is available to promote absorption of water and control run-off of soil.By Tim Thomas
“I am sick of explaining that it provides millions of women with birth control, cancer screenings, and STI tests every year. I am sick of pointing out, again and again, that federal dollars do not fund abortion services at Planned Parenthood or anywhere else.”
I am sick of explaining this to Republicans Women aren’t fools. We can tell the difference between reality and lies. And that’s why we’re here, fighting back on the Senate floor, to stop the Republican health care bill. Posted by U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday, June 21, 2017
If you’ll pardon the foray into the personal here, I’d like to use this space send the good Senator a message.
Senator Warren, I’m sick too.
I’m sick of hearing that Planned Parenthood doesn’t spend any of that half a billion dollars — roughly half its income — on abortion. Without that money, much of their abortion expenditure would have to be diverted to other costs — which means that regardless how they shuffle it around, that half a billion enables them to provide abortion services.
I’m sick of hearing that abortion only accounts for about 3% of the services provided by Planned Parenthood simply because they count handing out one brochure on safe sex as an equal service to the intentional dismembering and vacuuming out of a preborn human being.
I’m sick of hearing how Planned Parenthood uses that half a billion to provide those services, some of which can often be obtained from local government health clinics for free or nearly free.
I’m sick of hearing politicians like yourself and many of your colleagues on both sides of the aisle manipulate figures and twist facts for the sole purpose of gaining points for their own party, getting another mention in the New York Times, or firing up Twitter followers.
I’m sick of hearing that abortion is a women’s health issue when it’s really a women’s character issue.
But mostly I’m sick of hearing that every year hundreds of thousands of our most innocent are slaughtered on the altar of sexual freedom and personal convenience — and I’m sick of people like you telling me that I hate women if I don’t embrace it.
So, Senator, I have a suggestion that will end both your sickness and mine: Convince your friends at Planned Parenthood to just drop their abortion services.
If what you say is true, it shouldn’t be a problem. After all, it’s only 3% of what they do.
Imagine the result of such an action.
Republicans would be forced to either drop their opposition to Planned Parenthood or risk exposing themselves as the woman-haters you claim them to be.
Planned Parenthood could hang on to that half a billion dollars without having to spend millions of that same money lobbying to keep it.
They also wouldn’t have to spend so much time and effort playing a glorified shell game with that half a billion just to claim that none of it is spent on abortion.
And think of all the time you’d save and how much better you’d feel by not doing something that makes you sick. You could even use that extra time to do something for yourself.
I hear Ancestry.com has some great tools for researching your family tree.I was hopeful. I saw the new take on Lara Croft way back when and thought, well, color me intrigued. The old Lara Croft never really spoke to me — comic book proportions, sassy British accent, short-shorts, whatever. No harm, no foul, but not the game for me. And then along comes this new reimagining — Lara Croft by way of John McClane. A rougher, tougher hero — kicked around but triumphant.
I was good with that.
I’m not so good with it now.
I refer you to this article: You’ll ‘Want To Protect’ The New, Less Curvy Lara Croft, at Kotaku.
From that article:
“When people play Lara, they don’t really project themselves into the character,” Rosenberg told me at E3 last week when I asked if it was difficult to develop for a female protagonist. “They’re more like ‘I want to protect her.’ There’s this sort of dynamic of ‘I’m going to this adventure with her and trying to protect her.'” So is she still the hero? I asked Rosenberg if we should expect to look at Lara a little bit differently than we have in the past. “She’s definitely the hero but— you’re kind of like her helper,” he said. “When you see her have to face these challenges, you start to root for her in a way that you might not root for a male character.”
Well, sure. Because who could possibly relate to a — snerk, gasp — female protagonist? Better instead to assume that we’re just helping the poor dear along. Because if we don’t, well…
In the new Tomb Raider, Lara Croft will suffer. Her best friend will be kidnapped. She’ll get taken prisoner by island scavengers. And then, Rosenberg says, those scavengers will try to rape her. “She is literally turned into a cornered animal,” Rosenberg said. “It’s a huge step in her evolution: she’s forced to either fight back or die.”
Ah! See, there it is. If we don’t act as her helper, we’ll “help” her get raped.
Aaaaaand then killed.
As a storyteller, this is troubling on a number of levels — that we humanize a female character by making her weak, by forcing her into the role of the victim. I’m not saying there’s not a mode for a story where a woman fights off brutal male attackers and triumphs against them. There is. I’m also not sure that Tomb Raider is it. Especially since we had a character who was shallow, yes, but she was also a wealthy confident ass-kicker who brooked no bullshit. She wasn’t a potential sexual bullseye for a bunch of island thugs. Is this our current idea of a strong female character? A bloodied victim? An abused teen girl? Is there no middle-ground between “super-bazoomed comic book heiress” and “survivor of torture porn island adventure?” Can’t we scuff her up but keep the rape out of it? And can’t we come to her being a strong relatable character not because she’s a woman, not despite the fact she’s a woman, but regardless of it?
As a human fucking being, this is troubling on one particular level: that all women can hope for is to get out alive and, y’know, unraped. We already approach rape in this culture like it’s a pothole in the road you need to avoid — as if the power to not get raped is solely in the hands of the woman. As if the onus of responsibility is not at all on the scum-fuck rapists. It always seems to be a message of How Not To Get Raped as opposed to How Not To Be A Shitty Fucking Rapist. Nobody’s saying women shouldn’t learn to be strong and protect themselves — but it’s not a woman’s responsibility not to get raped.
And yet, that’s what this Tomb Raider appears to be saying.
This doesn’t make her bad-ass.
It doesn’t make her or the situation “more real.”
(As if that’s what games like this need — a hard high dose of rapey reality.)
It doesn’t improve her or make her stronger.
It goes too far. It pushes too hard. It weakens her deeply.
We cannot “relate.” We need to “help” and “protect” her.
We turn her human by “literally” making her a “cornered animal?”
All this says some very scary things about how we look at women, I think.
(A caveat: this is based on this one article and some game footage. For all I know, the game will come out and not be this at all — but by all indications, we’re in for some trouble with this one.)
(Also check out this post by Kat Howard.)Molly Antopol teaches creative writing at Stanford University, where she was recently a Wallace Stegner Fellow. She received the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” Award, and her writing has appeared on NPR’s This American Life, as well as magazines like One Story, Ecotone, and Esquire. She spoke to me by phone from her home in San Francisco.
Molly Antopol: I first read Grace Paley in a college American Literature seminar. By then, I already knew that I loved short stories, and that I wanted to write fiction—but I’d never encountered anything like her work. Her stories are so funny, so smart, and just incredibly compassionate; I was blown away by the emotional generosity she demonstrates towards all her characters, even the ones who behave badly. As much as anything, though, I was amazed to encounter her people on the page. These were characters I knew from life: a certain type of Old-World, lefty Jew whose family talks politics around the dinner table. I’d never seen anyone write so intimately about the background I come from. She captured the voices I’d grown up hearing, but had never before read.
Paley's voice made me think of my grandparents' generation: their idealism, their contradictions, and especially their politics. I know the world she chronicled—my grandfather, who was very active in the Communist Party, might have been one of her characters. Politics was a central part of his life, something his children inherited, in part, because the political arena entered his home—their house was always being monitored by the government. Even before I started writing, I used to try to imagine what it had been like for my mom and for her siblings to grow up under surveillance, to know that all her most peaceful and private moments were being recorded and catalogued.
Paley herself devoted a great deal of time to activism. She was involved in many political groups, traveling often to advocate for issues she cared about, at the same time she was writing stories, poetry, and political essays. In interviews, you can sense how frayed she sometimes was: as if, with politics, and being a mom, and writing, her life was cluttered with too many good things. She seemed tired in the way you might feel exhausted after a day that’s incredibly full. But the political world she portrays so vividly is one of the things that, for me, greatly enhances her fiction.
“Wants,” a story I love for its power and compassion and brevity, is a great example of the subtle ways Paley’s political orientation manifests in her fiction. The narrator, a woman who owes an insane amount of overdue fines for library books, is finally going to return them—when she runs into her ex-husband on the steps of the library. I love how she greets him:
Hello my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.
They have an incredibly intense and heartbreaking conversation about what he’d wanted out of life and marriage versus what she’d wanted. The man wanted the trappings of success—good meals, nice things, a sailboat (which he claims he might still one day buy). “I’m doing well this year and can look forward to better,” he says, “but you always wanted nothing.” The accusation knocks her flat. As he walks away, she defends herself against his charge by detailing her own set of wants, totally different from her ex-husband’s:
I want, for instance, to be a different person. I want to be the woman who brings these two books back in two weeks. I want to be the effective citizen who changes the school system and addresses the Board of Estimate on the troubles of this dear urban center. I had promised my children to end the war before they grew up.
So “Wants” juxtaposes two contradictory measures of success—civic and material—and though it’s clear why these two grew apart, Paley treats both points of view with understanding and respect. In a page and a half, we get the full lives of these two people, a penetrating sense of who they were and what they want to be, and maybe a sense of the irreconcilability of humanitarian engagement and financial comfort.<no subject>
From:gene@promontory.com To: John.podesta@gmail.com Date: 2015-05-02 09:10 Subject: <no subject>
John, Great speaking with you yesterday. As discussed, I am attaching an early effort at a policy ideas paper. You were nice to give me a listen. I have tremendous respect for what you are doing and I want to do anything I can do to be helpful. I am passionate about getting Hillary elected. This is our last best shot at getting America back on track. If we don’t our children face a grim future. Hillary can do it, and we can’t be bold enough. The riots in Baltimore -- sadly if we don’t do anything more to come — are a reflection of a system that is badly out of kilter. If you have no real chance at a good job, no real chance at a college education (unless — if you could conceivably get in — you borrow till your future is in jeopardy), If you are likely to have been imprisoned before your 25 etc. etc. etc. BTW my daughter has been a legal defender part time in Berkley and my favorite case is a black homeless high school age kid who was jailed in Oakland for going through a stop sign on his bicycle. Of course you know all of this. I believe for a variety of reasons, the ideas I have set out on the attached will help. Warm regards, Gene ________________________________ CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE This message and any attachments are only for the intended recipient and contain confidential information. All intellectual property and other proprietary rights associated with this message and any attachments are owned and retained by Promontory Financial Group, LLC and its affiliates. No license or other conveyance of such rights is intended or granted with respect to this message and any attachments. If you are not the intended recipient or the person responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, then you are notified of the strict prohibition against copying, distribution, further transmission or other disclosure of this message and any attachments, and taking any action in reliance on this message and any attachments. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately by reply e-mail or by telephone (+1-202-384-1200), delete this message and any attachments from your system, and destroy any hard copy that you may have made. Thank you for your cooperation.Coffee drinkers are encouraged to buy environmentally-friendly coffee, whether it be certified, organic or shade coffee (grown under the shade of trees that are important habitat for birds), but how effective are these ways of growing coffee at combating climate change?
Researchers at Bangor University, Wales, the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Centre, Costa Rica (CATIE) and the Natural Resources Institute of the University of Greenwich, have recently published findings that may go some way to answering this question in the scientific journals Agricultural Systems and Agriculture Ecosystems and Environment.
The results of these studies suggest that reducing carbon emissions through agricultural intensification can help coffee farms combat climate change. Carefully intensifying the productivity of existing coffee farms, as an alternative to extending coffee production onto existing forest land, could reduce carbon emissions that cause climate change.
Their study was based on coffee farms and long-term field experiments in Costa Rica and Nicaragua and investigated whether it would make more financial and climate sense for farmers to switch from one type of farm management to another. For example, from a less intensive to a more intensive system, or from conventional to organic farming.
Dr Martin Noponen, a joint Bangor University-CATIE PhD student and lead author of both studies, said: "Our results suggest that in agricultural production systems with shade trees, such as for coffee, the increase in greenhouse gas emissions from intensification of production can be compensated for, or in some cases even outweighed, by the increase in uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide into above-ground and below-ground tree biomass".
"Although growing coffee under shade was not found to improve soil carbon stocks over the first ten years, we know that shaded coffee farms (those with trees planted amongst the coffee bushes) store much more carbon in tree biomass than unshaded full-sun coffee systems. At the same time, however, full-sun farms can be more profitable through higher coffee yields thus creating an economic incentive for farmers to convert shaded to full-sun coffee."
The study found that compensating farmers for not converting to more profitable (but less environmentally-friendly) unshaded coffee would cost from 9.3 to 196.3 US$ per tonne of carbon emissions avoided, depending on the type of shaded system – a value range that is for the most part very expensive and far above current international carbon market prices.
John Healey, Professor of Forest Sciences at Bangor University, who led the research team, said: "It's important to remember that, although shaded coffee farms might store more carbon and therefore be good for the climate in one sense, if the coffee yield is lower, then coffee farmers collectively may choose to farm a larger area of land in order to maintain their income. This could mean that some encroach onto forested areas with negative impacts on climate, biodiversity and other services provided by forest ecosystems."
"On the other hand, if production could be intensified on shaded farms, coffee farming could help to reduce climate change by storing more atmospheric carbon dioxide in above-ground biomass, while at the same time reducing pressure for further forest conversion to agriculture."
Dr Jeremy Haggar, Head of Agriculture, Health and Environment at the University of Greenwich, said: "Although there are short-term economic advantages to growing full-sun coffee, farmers in Central America have been reverting to shaded systems as they are cheaper to maintain when coffee prices fall." "Within shaded production there is a broad range in the intensity of production, and thus potential to manage those systems with higher coffee productivity and storage of carbon in trees. Overall this would minimize the carbon footprint and reduce the need to expand the area under coffee. Nevertheless identifying those management options will depend on specialised technical support to farmers and incentives to make that investment."
Explore further: Another reason to drink a nice cup of shade-grown joeIt will include select details, provided by the breaker-upper, of what the break-up-ee has done to be broken up with.
It will also include, at the end of the proceedings, an offer for the freshly dumped individual to visit The Breakup Shop’s online gift emporium, which includes such time-tested sadness solutions as a Blu-Ray of The Notebook ($25), a set of two 18-oz. wine glasses ($15), and a box of Chips Ahoy! Rainbow Cookies ($5).
We know all this because the Motherboard writer Emanuel Maiberg recently tested the service out on his girlfriend of five years, arranging for a breakup call that cited for its existence, among other deal-breaking flaws, her love of makeup and her distaste for helping out in the kitchen. (The call was, fortunately, an actual test: Maiberg warned her in advance that the call was coming, and the breakup was enacted for stunt purposes only.)
And: The results of the breakup call were just as awkward as even more awkward than you’d expect. The Breakup Caller paused at inopportune moments. He dutifully cited the reasons for the breakup, clearly reading from a list. He suggested, at the end, that the dumpee take solace in that online gift shop. The whole thing was terrible and horrible and haunting on pretty much every level imaginable.
So. Yes. Anyway. Here is the argument for the existence of a service like The Breakup Shop: Closure. The avoidance of the confusion and the anxiety that can come when an official breakup is skipped in favor of a drawn-out process of ghosting. MacKenzie, one of the founders of the service, in fact got the idea for The Breakup Shop when he was ghosted upon by a girl he was seeing casually: Rather than telling him that they were done, she simply cut off communication with him. And “the least you can do is break up with someone and give them that closure,” Evan, The Breakup Shop’s other founder, noted. Which is extremely true.
But, then, here are the arguments against a service like The Breakup Shop: Empathy. Human decency. The fact that your mom raised you so much better than this.
And the fact, too, that this is probably not the kind of thing we, as a society, want to do with our new technologies. Last week, in an essay for The Atlantic, Robin Sloan argued against the sometimes dehumanizing efficiencies that the app economy is bringing about. “We are alive,” he wrote, “at a time when huge systems—industrial, infrastructural—are being remade, and I think it’s our responsibility as we make choices both commercial and civic—it’s just a light responsibility, don’t stress—to extrapolate forward, and ask ourselves: Is this a system I want to live inside? Is this a system fit for humans?”
The Breakup Shop may be efficient and, to a degree, even useful. But: Is it a system fit for humans?
It’s revealing that the cofounders of The Breakup Shop—MacKenzie and Evan, who are brothers, based in Canada—offer many, many justifications for their service. It’s even more revealing, though, that they asked Maiberg not to share their full names with his readers. They wanted, they explained—though, really, no explanation was necessary—“to protect their identity.”
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen, left, presents singer-songwriter Dolly Parton her star as she is inducted into the Music City Walk of Fame on November 8, 2009 in Nashville, Tennessee. Current potential Michigan Senate candidate Robert Ritchie, a.k.a. Kid Rock, applauds center-right. (Rick Diamond/Getty Images)
Former Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen is weighing whether to jump into Tennessee’s senate race to replace retiring Sen. Bob Corker.
Bredesen is the last Democrat to win statewide office in Tennessee.
After initially denying interest in the seat, Bredesen said in a statement he was weighing a run, according to the Tennessean.
“Since then, a number of people for whom I have great respect have encouraged me to reconsider and I am doing so,” he said. “In the days ahead, I’m going to do some research, talk with people and carefully think this through.”
The state’s top Democratic donor, businessman Bill Freeman, encouraged Bredesen to run in an online petition.
In the past, Bredesen self-financed his campaigns, but a Senate run would require a vast amount of money, he said.
Bredesen’s name has been floated for a Senate run in the past. But he declined to challenge Sen. Lamar Alexander, the state’s other Republican Senator, in 2014.
“I love solving problems and in Washington right now there is plenty of material,” his statement said.
So far, the top contender in the race is Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who announced earlier this month.
Term-limited Republican Gov. Bill Haslam decided not to seek the seat but former Rep. Stephen Fincher is seen as another potential candidate.
Currently, the only Democrat in the race is Nashville attorney and veteran James Mackler. But Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke and state Rep. John Jay Clemons are also considering bids.Rice co-founded the David Grisman Quintet in 1975, and they toured Japan. But when Grisman suggested the Quintet leave America to tour with the French violinist Stéphane Grappelli, Rice balked. Grisman lined up a replacement. “Musically, my heart was not in it,” Rice said. He had his own band in mind, as well as “The Bluegrass Album,” a 1980 project that has spawned six volumes.
Ninety minutes into our conversation in Reidsville, Rice’s voice began to fail. To give it a rest, I asked to see the “Antique,” his D-28 herringbone guitar, a prewar model sometimes referred to by aficionados as the Holy Grail. As he lifted it, rattlesnake tails bounced around inside. It’s tradition to add them, whether for the subtle sound or, as some say, to keep mice from nesting there.
“I don’t think I can play it right now,” he said. “I picked it up a few days ago, and my hands hurt so bad that I just put it back in the case. It is still mind-blowing to me that the first time I played it was 52 years ago.” Rice was thinking of California, where he made his live-broadcast radio debut at age 9. The show also featured Clarence White, the D-28’s owner at the time, who let the boy play the distinctive guitar with an enlarged sound hole and an extended finger board.
Built in 1935, the guitar’s “D” is a nod to dreadnought battleships, denoting an oversize body squared off for a bass-heavy tone. White dinged the D-28, parked cigarettes on it and once ran it over with his station wagon. White eventually turned to an electrified sound, playing with the Byrds and Gram Parsons. By that time, though, he had popularized the guitar as a lead instrument in bluegrass, and Rice had avidly studied him during dozens of performances on the festival circuit. After White’s death in 1973 at age 29 (he was struck by a drunken driver while loading equipment after a gig), Rice wondered what happened to the guitar. He eventually learned that White had sold it to a friend, Joe Miller, whose father owned liquor stores in Pasadena. Rice looked up “Miller’s Liquors” and found Joe Miller, and in March 1975 flew from Kentucky to LAX with $550 in cash. Though the strings were green, that sound hole was unmistakable. The D-28 had been lying under Miller’s bed.
In Rice’s hands, the guitar took on mythical properties, revered for its vitality of sound. The Santa Cruz Guitar Company’s “Tony Rice” line is influenced by its design. Then the guitar was almost lost again, in 1993. When a tropical storm took Rice’s home in Crystal River, Fla., Rice had to quickly move his dog to high ground, leaving his beloved guitar in peril. He gave a young fisherman $20, asking him to rescue “a big blue case” from the house. The boy brought back the priceless instrument, waterlogged but salvageable.
At the Days Inn, Rice perched on the bed’s edge, leg crossed to cradle his guitar, and played part of “Barbara Allen.” The sound was agile, the pick work economical. He moved on to “Shady Grove” but stopped after only a verse, the pain becoming too much. “That was Garcia’s favorite tune.”
“I certainly hope to have things in my life more stable again,” he said over one last cigarette, as we talked about the canceled gigs and a series of family losses, including the 2011 death of Pamela’s son. “Where I can start to concentrate on being on the road, with my friends and my musicians, playing good music. It’s a work in progress.” He exhaled. “It just happens to be going a hell of a lot more slower than I wish it would.”PARIS (Reuters) - WikiLeaks said on Monday it had published a searchable archive of what it said was more than 21,000 verified emails associated with key figures in the election campaign of French President Emmanuel Macron.
French President Emmanuel Macron walks down the stairs in the courtyard of the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, July 31, 2017. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer
The stolen data was originally dumped on the internet in May, on the eve of the run-off between Macron and far-right opponent Marine Le Pen.
Within hours of the leak, Macron’s staff had said it had been targeted by a “massive and coordinated” hacking operation.
His Republic on the Move (LREM) party on Monday said the mails published by WikiLeaks seemed to be the same as the ones leaked on May 5 and warned that fake documents were mixed with authentic ones.
“Republic on the Move calls for vigilance over these publications,” it said in a statement. “Under the guise of novelty, WikiLeaks is taking over as its own the detribalization operation from May.”
The document dump came too late in the campaign to have any direct influence on the election, in part because the electoral commission warned it was a crime to republish any details from the emails before the vote.
French newspapers which have pored over the documents since then said they found nothing scandalous to report. By turning the dump into a database, WikiLeaks has made the documents easily searchable for any internet user.
The hack drew comparisons with the 2016 U.S. election campaign, during which U.S. intelligence agencies alleged Russia had interfered to benefit Donald Trump. Russia denies that.
Macron’s team also blamed Russian interests in part for earlier attempts to interfere with his campaign. The Kremlin has denied it was behind any such actions.
WikiLeaks said it was publishing the leaks now after verifying the authenticity of the email addresses. It did not say how the emails were obtained but cited a comment by a government cyber security official saying the data dump appeared to be the work of an “isolated individual”, apparently playing down the theory a foreign state was involved.
French law enforcement and intelligence officials have not accused anyone of the campaign attacks.
WikiLeaks said it found 21,075 verified emails in an archive of 71,848 emails, along with 26, |
on me, but most of it is pump. She’s some kind of ethnic blend I can’t quite pinpoint. I don’t exactly fit into any ethnic categories beyond “dusky,” which is a nice way of saying “dark.” I could be mistaken for Turkish in Turkey, Persian in Persia, and Brazilian in Brazil. For the job, it’s convenient.
I think the brassy hair on Parish’s escort is fake. I’d bet hard coins on it, actually. Her roots are darker than my prospects of scoring cheap blow.
She glides up to the sink and fusses with the delicate pile of honey-colored hair on her head. She’s smooth, no scars that I can see, and her eyes don’t have the gutted-pumpkin look of a streetwalker. She’s been doing this for a while, and she’s well paid, and the service made sure she’s never had to deal with the everyday brutalities of a pimp. If I were to take the long-shot guess, I don’t even think she was trafficked. This is a girl with specialties. I respect that.
“I like your hair,” I lie. Too elaborate, it looks like a fucking weathervane. “It’s really pretty.”
I see her real face for about a half millisecond, flicking with the kind of fear you see on the eyes of small forest animals. It’s just a whisper before her mask comes up, the Sultry Bitch talking to the Street Urchin.
“I don’t have any money,” she lies.
Jesus, am I really that pathetic looking? I glance into the mirror fretfully. I allow a moment of honest assessment - the dark eye makeup only accentuates how tired I look, and the motley assortment of ill-fitting clothes evoke the image of a thrift store’s vomit.
“Oh,” I laugh and slap at my sleeves. “I’m backpacking around the Mediterranean. Most of my clothes got jacked in Pula. Womp womp.”
Her eyes lighten one shade, but this isn’t the kind of girl who takes chances.
“Well thank you,” she says, after a long time, like she was looking for the words at the bottom of her purse.
“Smoke?” I ask, and I shake a pack at her.
She straightens her shoulders, her back arching, unconsciously striking a Zebra-like pose of alertness. Her eyes flick toward the door then back again.
“Really?”
“Yeah, why the hell not?” I ask. “I snuck into this place because it seemed like it had good air-conditioning.”
She laughs, and it’s a pleasant, throaty sound. There’s no hint of girlishness in it, which I suspect she might have affected if she was laughing around Parish. Oh Parish you’re so funny, please penetrate me.
I tap out a pair of coffin nails and light them with a disposable. She leans in to get the flame to her mouth, and I get a close look at a few things. I’ve got fast hands.
“Remmy,” I say, simply, between drags. I prefer breathing fire to that other stuff. Call me nostalgic.
“Desiree,” she says, and I laugh. She laughs back. “Ceyda.”
“Better,” I say into a tail of smoke, chin tilted toward the ceiling tiles. “What’re you in for?”
A smirk. “Business.”
“I figured.”
She cocks her hip in annoyance and plants her free hand there. She’s got long, well-manicured nails. My nails are streetfighter short, bitten in boredom and filed against my jeans.
“I make more money than you,” she snaps. This girl has a dagger behind her back all the time. I don’t blame her.
“I’m 100% positive about that,” I say.
“What do you do?”
“Mostly shitwork for ungrateful assholes,” I say. “You?”
“Similar, but mine pays.”
“Oh come on, sometimes they’re grateful.”
Ceyda offers a smile that would make DaVinci break out his paints.
“I’ll bet you’ve never had to buy jewelry in your entire career,” I say, gesturing with my smoke-hand towards the cords of ice strapped to her wrist and nestling between her bronzed tits.
“Maybe one or two,” Ceyda admits.
“Aren’t you late?”
“Never,” she says. “I arrive when I mean to.”
“Like Gandalf,” I say.
“Who?”
I wave my hand.
Ceyda stubs her cigarette out against the shiny black marble around the sink and tosses the roach into the trash. A white mint goes into her mouth next. She collects her purse off the counter and tilts her head.
“Thanks for the smoke,” she says.
“And the chat?”
“Well,” she says, and her eyes are hard again. “It’s been a while.”
“For both?”
To my surprise and delight, she cocks a finger gun at me. I’m almost too stunned to laugh, and she strolls gracefully out of the bathroom. I shuck my sleeve and catch the white keycard I lifted out of her purse when I’d leaned in to light her cig.
Room 1015.
Bong.
They have dinner at a fancy restaurant attached to the hotel bar: it’s called “The Golden.” She’s laughing more than she’s talking, and Parish yaps quietly but endlessly. His bodyguards are all eyes from their spot at the Golden’s mirror-finished mahogany sidebar. The two palookas nurse beers that look suspiciously non-alcoholic.
Everything’s coming up Remmy, though, and the long dinner allows me to ride the elevator to the tenth floor and scope out Parish’s room. He’s got private security downstairs, but no one in the hall or in his room. The inside is decorated like Mediterranean Disneyland - lots of old-school arches with Arabian cutouts. The tones lean toward sand and flame, and I’m not feeling remotely nostalgic. There’s one California King bed with aqua sheets, the only nod to cool colors. An oasis. Cute.
I turn the room upside down, but I do it delicately and make sure to memorize where everything goes. I find a few hundred bucks in various pants and coats, I skip the jewelry (too much hassle), and I try the manufacturer debug code on the safe. It works, and I take the time to assess what’s going on there.
Here’s what’s inside the safe:
10 stacks of lira in hundreds, pushed into a miniature tower of pale blue. Probably around a hundred grand, which let me do the math divide by cosine equals about 50,000 America. 30-something thousand Euro. Nobody’s buying an island with it, but it’s more cash than I’ve ever had. I don’t steal it, though, because eldritch mythological entities shouldn’t look so fucking petty.
Also inside the safe:
A tiny European-looking pistol, a notebook full of what looks like financial reports, and a bottle of wine.
I have no clue what’s going on in this guy’s head.
I’m about to close the safe when inspiration kicks me in the labes. I grab two empty wine glasses near the complimentary wine bottle on the hutch. I pop the wine in the safe and fill the two glasses with blood-red. I set the glasses and the open bottle of wine inside the safe. Then I rearrange a few stacks of lira so they look like a little house. Then I close the safe, grab the cheap bottle of wine from the hutch, and uncork it. I take a swig, roll it around in my mouth, and nod approvingly. Shades of Two-Buck Chuck, but conventional wisdom tells me something shitty about beggars and choosers.
I glance at my mobile - their dinner could end early if Parish is a poon hound, but something tells me different. Maybe it’s the fact that he ordered a 30+ year-old escort, or that he keeps wine in his safe, or just his general look, but I’m betting he’s a man who thinks being personable to an escort is romantic.
There’s time.
I take my first shower in like five days, and Oh Sweet Jaime Lannister does it feel like six giant masseuses melting my bones with ancient Babylonian stress-relieving rubs while the Archangel Gabriel plays burning noir jazz in the corner. I stay under the hot water until it threatens to poach me, then I towel off and hop into a fluffy white robe, compliments of the Whatever Hotel whose name I forget. I use some tiny bottles of goo to get my short hair into “fashionable messy,” pop on my sunglasses, and head to the balcony with the cheapo bottle of wine to my lips. Another few swallows and the world gets better.
I close the balcony sliding-glass and recline in a deck chair. I let my bare feet dangle over the railing.
The spray of Constantinople’s nightlights dazzles me, and I breathe in the cool air and see the sights for a long while. The lights reflect in the glassy mirror of both the Bosphorus and the Marmara, soft-focused windows to the deep.
I’m halfway through the bottle when the lights behind me come to life. I glance at my phone - almost two hours at dinner. Not bad. I hear Ceyda giggling, and Parish is mumbling in low tones. Low-resolution silhouettes play against the white curtains, and I watch them fuck for around 18 minutes. Lots of foreplay, good for him. When they’re done and cleaned up, I take a deep breath, a big swig, and scoop myself up. I count to forty, hoping it’s enough time for them to get decent.
I knock the wine bottle three times against the sliding glass door, then I tip it back and drain the rest of the bottle. Clothing sounds shuffle around, and the curtains rake and sway to a stop. The “Lawrence of Arabia” decor both clashes and compliments the salt-and-pepper Caucasian now staring at me through the glass. He’s got his own white fluffy robe on - I smile and tug the trailing belt ends of my robe.
This is where it could have gone bad. A knock on a strange hotel window in the middle of the night. This is where he could have gone to his safe for the pistol, or he could have called his goons, or the hotel staff. Hell he could have just booked screaming from his room. Instead here he stands, glaring at me disapprovingly. His eyes narrow, and his lips press into a line, but he’s not nearly as unmanned as he probably should be.
I guessed right. A “hands on” type of guy. Remmy, you sexy devil.
I hold up the bottle and wiggle it.
“Should we call room service?” I ask.
I wonder if the words make it through the thick glass.
Behind him, Ceyda’s wearing his button-up, the tails tied up to reveal most of her golden thighs. Her hair is tussled, her makeup perfect, and her eyes are calm but wide. Taking in everything, missing nothing. The look clever prey can get when they hear the wolf howl. She’s sitting on the bed, on her knees, her back drawn up. She could spring to her feet and be out the door before either Parish or I could pivot.
Parish reaches out and settles his hand on the sliding glass door handle.
I waggle my eyebrows and pitch the wine bottle over my shoulder, off the balcony. It’s okay, there’s a giant fountain down there, I checked.
His thumb hesitates on the lock, but he doesn’t push it. Instead, he slides the door open and returns his hand calmly to his side.
“I know you,” he says.
His voice is smoother than our first meeting. Ceyda’s certainly buffed down the edges. Men are like that, though. Porcupines before sex, marshmallows after. Whoever called them the weaker sex really had their head screwed on right.
“You do!” I say brightly, and glide past him and into the room. My bare feet grab at the lush carpet.
Ceyda’s purse is on the chair by the door. I drop something into it with my right hand while my left hand makes a mystical-looking gesture in Parish’s face.
“The cab.” Parish’s voice is slow, a bit dreamy.
“Two points, and you only need one more to take home the prize,” I say. I hop up on the edge of the dresser and cross my legs. The robe is brief, to say the least.
“Remmy?” Ceyda whispers, from the bed.
I grin at her and waggle my eyebrows theatrically.
“Bonus points! Your team is deep in the green here, Mr. Harlan Parish.”
Parish stiffens. His eyes bore into mine.
“How do you know my name?” Parish says to me.
I saw your wallet when you paid the cabbie. “I’m a djinn, remember?”
“Djinn?” Ceyda whispers.
“Sorry, genie,” I say, to Parish. “Same thing different bastardization, you dig?”
Parish crosses to the closet and throws the door open. He looks at the safe (which is closed and locked), then at me. His eyes scrape me from toes to coif, and it’s the least sexual up-and-down I’ve ever seen. He looks through me, then he takes me apart piece by piece and puts me back together again. I almost shiver under the scrutiny. Almost.
“Did you come here to rob me?” Parish asks.
I turn out the pockets of my robe. I think about flashing him to show him just how defenseless I am, but I think better of it. Not a good idea to put that thought in his head. That way lies unpleasantness for everyone. I am buck-ass nakie beneath the terrycloth, for the record, though.
“Then why are you here? How did you get in here?”
I shrug. Parish glares at Ceyda.
“How do you know her name?” Parish asks Ceyda. “Partners? Is this a shakedown, assassination, blackmail, what?”
Ceyda’s eyes narrow, and her breathing tells me she’s about four microseconds away from cutting an escort-shaped hole in the flame-toned wall.
“No,” Ceyda says. “I just - ”
I stole your room key from her purse. “I met her downstairs,” I say. I pop my hanging foot up and down. “In the ladies room. You know how us gals are.”
“You’re lying,” Parish says, but it sounds like a question.
“It’s true,” Ceyda whispers. Parish doesn’t look at her.
“Tell me what you want right now,” Parish says. “I haven’t called my security yet because the sudden appearance of a nearly-naked woman in my hotel room intrigues me.”
I laugh at that. His lips don’t smile, but his eyes do. It’s not entirely warm, but I like it anyway.
“Let’s cut the bullshit,” I say. “I’m a djinn, and you have three wishes.”
Parish sighs and rubs the bridge of his nose. He leans down and starts pushing buttons on the safe.
“Wait!” I hold both hands out, because that part of the trick isn’t ready.
Parish glances at me. His finger hesitates over a button. I figure he’s going for the pistol.
“Why in God’s name would I ever believe that? Do you honestly think that would work?” Parish asks.
It’s not a bad question. I bite my cheek, hard, and I hide the wince as I tear a hole. Pennies flood into my mouth, and with it the little power I have soaked inside my body. I lift my sunglasses and push the power into my eyes - it’s no easy trick, and I have to shove with more willpower than I’d like. In response, my eyes flash with deep orange embers, for just a moment. With the grin I’m rocking on my dark maroon lips, the effect is immediate.
Parish takes a step back, and Ceyda starts crying. It’s not weeping, don’t get me wrong, she’s still as ever. But her eyes pour tears across her lovely cheeks.
I drop my sunglasses back into place and lean backward on the dresser.
Parish runs a shaking hand across his face.
“I think I need a drink,” he whispers.
“That’s a wonderful idea,” I say, and snap my fingers. “I’ll have one too. The bottle in your safe will do, I think.”
Parish’s eyes are glazing, but my words shake him. He looks through his fingers at me, then toward the safe. He finishes inputting the code, and the door pops. He swings it open and looks inside for a long time, like there’s an open Clive Cussler novel in there or something.
He’s turned away from me, blocking the action, but I see him reach in with both hands. He turns back, and he’s holding too full glasses of wine. Ceyda screams.
“Stop it!” Parish growls, and Ceyda covers her mouth.
Parish marvels at the two full glasses of wine, and the open bottle. I wonder if he even noticed the cash-house I’d made inside. Maybe I gilded the lily too much. I have that problem.
“Is this real?” Parish whispers.
I nod slowly, straight face. There’s a fine line between “theatrical” and “demonic,” and I try not to take a flying leap over it. Normies never do well at this part. It’s not their fault. This is the part where everything turns upside down and shit gets real and the boogie monsters of the world are suddenly re-
“Three wishes?”
I frown at Parish.
Well that was quick.
“Like Aladdin?” he says, and takes a sip of wine. He turns and hands the other glass to Ceyda.
I sigh. Dammit. I really wanted to try that wine.
“Well, bless-his-hilarious-face but I’m no Robin Williams -”
“And I get whatever I want?”
“There are some addendums - ”
“Okay.” Parish takes another sip and stares at me.
“Do you have a business card?” Parish asks.
“Sorry what?”
“Somewhere I can reach you? Like an office? Or an email? LinkedIn account? What do your Mondays look like? I’m pretty busy this weekend. Is Monday good?”
“Monday’s fine,” I mumble, but Parish is already taking my hand and leading me out of the room.
“Wait, hold on. You gotta hear the rules - ”
“I’ll call you when I’m ready, shouldn’t be more than a few days. I’ll have the guys give you the details.”
I gawk at him, and he pushes me outside the hotel room.
“Get her some clothes and have Clay drive her wherever she needs to go,” Parish says, to his bodyguards. “And tell Clay to get her contact information, as much as he can.”
The two giant-necked security guards look at me. I expect a double take or even a hint of surprise, but the door behind me whumps shut and they ask me where I’d like to go shopping.
My face is numb, and they lead me downstairs arm-in-arm.The Senate health care bill released Thursday would cut Medicaid for low-income Americans, roll back tax hikes passed under the Affordable Care Act and allow states to waive standards on insurance coverage.
Named the Better Care Reconciliation Act to distinguish it from the House version of the bill, a “discussion draft” was released publicly Thursday after a working group of Republicans put it together behind closed doors.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the legislation would allow Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“The Senate will soon have a chance to turn the page on this failed law,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday. “We have to act, and we are.”
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Senate Democrats, meantime, cited President Trump’s remark that the House version of the bill was “mean.”
“The way this bill cuts health care is heartless,” said Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. “The president said the House bill was mean. The Senate bill may be meaner. The Senate Republicans health care bill is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, only this wolf has even sharper teeth than the House bill.”
Here’s what we know about the details of the bill and its differences between the Affordable Care Act and the the House bill, known as the American Health Care Act:
Waiving Affordable Care Act regulations
Under the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies are barred from refusing customers with pre-existing conditions and all coverage must include 10 essential health benefits, including maternity care and mental health coverage. Seniors cannot be charged more than three times the premiums of younger adults, and people with pre-existing conditions cannot be charged more than healthier people in their area. Insurers must also spend a certain amount of their revenue from premiums on claims and provide plans that cover a certain percentage of an individual’s overall health care cost.
Under the House bill, states would be able to apply for waivers to bypass these five major parts of Obamacare and establish their own guidelines for insurers.
Under the Senate bill, according to CNN, states would be allowed to apply for waivers for all but one of these five regulations: the community rating provision that prevents people with pre-existing conditions from being charged more. However, there is some doubt that this measure will survive to the final bill because of parliamentary rules on budget reconciliation bills.
Cutting Medicaid
Under the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid was expanded to include more than 10 million more lower-income Americans. After the Supreme Court ruled on the law, the expansion was made voluntary, which led some states to choose not to expand.
Under the House bill, government spending on Medicaid would decrease by about $840 billion over 10 years. The bill would also eliminate funding provided to states for Medicaid expansion by 2020, meaning no new people would be able to enroll. It would also institute a per capita cap that placed restrictions on how much money the federal government spends on each recipient and allow states to choose to receive a block grant instead.
Under the Senate bill, there will be steeper cuts to the Medicaid program. The bill would grant states a fixed amount of money each year depending on the enrollment (per capita cap) or in the form of a block grant. But Medicaid’s annual growth rate would be based on standard inflation by 2025, instead of medical inflation, causing a further slash in funds over time. In a concession to Senate moderates, the bill would instead phase out the Medicaid expansion by 2021, instead of 2020.
Ending subsidies for insurance
Under the Affordable Care Act, individuals receive subsidies to help pay for insurance plans based on their income, age, where they live, and the cost of their coverage. Overall, 85 percent of enrollees qualify for financial assistance.
Under the House bill, individuals would receive subsidies based on their age, not income, health care plan, or where they live. The House also included $138 billion over ten years for high-risk pools to help states pay for people who require more expensive care, though critics say that would not be enough. According to a recent study conducted by the AARP, premiums could surpass $25,000 per year for these high-risk patients. Also, overall, Americans would receive significantly less money under the AHCA program than they do under the current Affordable Care Act subsidies system.
Under the Senate bill, the Obamacare subsidies program will remain largely intact. However, by 2020, fewer people would receive coverage. Only individuals earning up to 350 percent of the poverty level would qualify, instead of 400 percent, as it was under Obamacare. There will also likely be more money added to the state stability fund. Though, this remains a point of contention among Republican senators.
Cutting funding for Planned Parenthood
Under the Affordable Care Act, patients could use Medicaid funds to get care at Planned Parenthood, which offers people a wide range of reproductive health care services. According to estimates, half of the 2.5 million people that go to Planned Parenthood clinics each year pay for their services with Medicaid.
Under the House bill, Planned Parenthood would lose 30 percent of its funding it gets through Medicaid reimbursements, unless the clinics stop offering abortions.
Under the Senate bill, the provisions would be the same. Planned Parenthood would be stripped of a large portion of its funding for one year.
Increasing the number of uninsured
Under the Affordable Care Act, the amount of uninsured Americans has dropped around 13.3 percent since 2013, or around 12.8 million people, according to the Census Bureau.
Under the House bill, 16 million people would lose health care by next year, and by 2026, 23 million people would be without insurance, according to CBO estimates.
Under the Senate bill, many Americans would still lose coverage, though Senators are hoping the CBO will project a smaller number of uninsured than the House bill. No one will know for sure until the CBO releases its score.
Write to Jack Brewster at jack.brewster@time.com.… make the whole scene literally glow with the fires of his imagination. — Alfred Kazin, Harper's,
Even Muff did not miss our periods of companionship, because about that time she grew up and started having literally millions of kittens. — Jean Stafford, Bad Characters,
Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry … than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. — James Joyce, Dubliners,
… yet the wretch, absorbed in his victuals, and naturally of an unutterable dullness, did not make a single remark during dinner, whereas I literally blazed with wit. — William Makepeace Thackeray, Punch,
Many words can be used both literally and figuratively.
He took her comments literally.
He's a sailor who knows his ropes, literally and figuratively.
The term “Mardi Gras” literally means “Fat Tuesday” in French.
The story he told was basically true, even if it wasn't literally true.I can't really give a definitive answer, because by the time I interviewed at Google in 2004 Python was already prominent at Google.
Indeed, there's one apparently attractive explanation that I can definitely deny: it's not that Google uses Python because it employs so many prominent Pythonistas -- rather, most "prominent Pythonista" googlers joined Google, at least in part, because we knew about Python's prominence there (possible exceptions include Peter Norvig and Jeremy Hylton, but historically Google's choice of Python predated even them).
That's definitely why I first got interested (my publisher let me know about the large amount of copies of my book that Google was purchasing -- at first, I thought of it as a good opportunity to sell my freelance consulting service...;-), how I was later able to convince Guido to join us, and, I believe, part of the motivation for such Pythonistas as Greg Stein, Wesley Chun, Fredrik Lundh, Thomas Wouters, Collin Winters, Jeffrey Yasskin,...
It all got started, I believe, because the very earliest Googlers (Sergey, Larry, Craig,...) made a good engineering decision: "Python where we can, C++ where we must" -- they used (a subset of) C++ for the parts of the software stack where very low latency and/or tight control of memory were crucial, and Python, allowing more rapid delivery and maintenance of programs, for other parts. At the time, late '90s, the choice for the latter role was essentially between Python and Perl: other scripting languages were either unripe (I don't think Ruby was around yet, for example) or had other issues and limitations. Perl was more mature (especially in terms of its ecosystem of available add-ons via CPAN), but Python was deemed to be more readable and maintainable, and interfacing to C++ libraries (via SWIG) was easier.
Java came in later, covering an intermediate niche -- and more recently of course Go was developed (though I don't believe there's much production work in it yet, as it's still evolving and maturing). Some specialized languages such as sawzall are also in the mix for very specific tasks, and of course Javascript is very important for browser-side work.
Other languages, including the ones that Greg mentioned back in '06, are either "kind of accidental" or used for other specific tasks (e.g., Objective C for clients on iPhones or Macs) -- e.g., when Google hired its first system administrators, those employees inevitably came with very strong mastery of Perl and Bash, and often used either of those languages to develop some complex internal system; recoding those in Python (for easier deployment and maintainability) has often happened. Others (such as C#) may have been in the mix temporarily due to acquisitions, but, again, recoding in one of the "main Google languages" is always a pretty high priority (in C#'s case, recoding would typically be mostly in Java, as the two languages address similar areas in terms of levels of abstraction).(UPDATED 5:45 pm: The post has been updated to include additional discussion about the significance of the justices’ decision to block the lower court’s order requiring the state to draw new maps by the fall.)
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has suggested that it might be the most important case of the upcoming term. On October 3, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Gill v. Whitford, a challenge to the redistricting plan passed by Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2011. A federal court struck down the plan last year, concluding that it violated the Constitution because it was the product of partisan gerrymandering – that is, the practice of purposely drawing district lines to favor one party and put another at a disadvantage. The challengers argue that the redistricting plan would allow Republicans to cement control of the state’s legislature for years to come, even if popular support for the party wanes; the lower court’s decision, they contend, merely corrected “a serious democratic malfunction that would otherwise have gone unremedied.” By contrast, the state of Wisconsin counters that if the lower court’s decision is allowed to stand, it will open the door to “unprecedented intervention in the American political process.”
The Wisconsin case is not the Supreme Court’s first foray into partisan gerrymandering. When the Supreme Court tackled the issue 13 years ago, in a challenge to Pennsylvania’s redistricting plan, the justices were deeply divided. Four justices – Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Clarence Thomas – agreed in Vieth v. Jubelirer that courts should never review partisan-gerrymandering claims, because it is too hard to come up with a manageable test to determine when politics plays too influential a role in redistricting. Four other justices – Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and Stephen Breyer – disagreed; they would have allowed courts to review partisan-gerrymandering claims. The key vote in the case came (as it so often does) from Justice Anthony Kennedy, who agreed that the Supreme Court should stay out of the Pennsylvania case but left open the door for courts to have a role in reviewing partisan-gerrymandering cases in the future if a workable standard could be found.
Over several decades, federal courts – rather than the Wisconsin legislature – drew the state’s redistricting maps, after politicians could not agree on a plan. But in 2010, Republicans won control of both houses of the state legislature and the governor’s office, which led to the legislature, instead of the courts, redrawing the maps after the 2010 census. Republicans fared well in the two elections that followed: In 2012, they won 48.6% of the statewide vote, giving them 60 seats in the state’s 99-seat assembly, while in 2014 they won 52% of the vote, giving them 63 seats. By contrast, in 2012, Democrats won 51.4% of the vote but secured 39 seats, while in 2014 they won approximately 48% of the vote, which gave them 36 seats.
A group of challengers, led by retired law professor William Whitford, went to court to oppose the new redistricting plan as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. They argued that the legislature had created a plan that was intended to dilute Democratic votes across the state, using two methods: “cracking,” which divides up supporters of one party among different districts so that they do not form a majority in any of them; and “packing,” which puts large numbers of a party’s supporters in relatively few districts, where they win by large margins.
A divided three-judge district court (which, under federal law, is the designated forum for redistricting challenges) agreed with the challengers. The court acknowledged that politics can play a role in redistricting, and that there is no violation of the Constitution simply because one party’s share of the seats in a legislature exceeds its share of the statewide vote. But, the court continued, even if it can sometimes be difficult to tell when politics plays too influential a role in redistricting, this case is “far more straightforward.” The record in the case, the court concluded, showed that the state legislature intended to, and did, draft a redistricting plan to lock in Republican control of the state legislature, even though it could have drafted a different plan that would have accomplished other valid redistricting goals “while generating a substantially smaller partisan advantage.”
Urging the justices to reverse the district court’s ruling, the state of Wisconsin emphasizes that partisan gerrymandering is both a longstanding and common practice. Moreover, it continues, the 2010 map does not violate the Constitution because politics was only one of several factors that the legislature considered in drafting a map that “complies with traditional redistricting principles.” It goes on to point out that the 2010 map is not significantly different from the map drawn by a federal court in 2002, under which Republicans won 53.5% of the statewide vote, giving them 60 seats in the assembly.
The state also argues that the challengers lack a legal right – known as “standing” – to challenge the whole 2010 map. For example, they point out, lead plaintiff William Whitford lives in a district that Democrats have historically won by wide margins. Whitford’s injury, therefore, is not that his own vote is diluted, but that the 2010 map makes it harder for him to “engage in campaign activity to achieve a majority” in the assembly. But that is not the kind of specific and personal injury that Whitford would need to file a lawsuit, the state stresses. Instead, the state contends, it is “a subjective preference that any person could assert, so long as that person is interested in the election of more Wisconsin Democrats.”
Allowing claims by plaintiffs like Whitford to go forward would also create an “unthinkable and perverse loophole,” the state tells the justices, by permitting statewide partisan-gerrymandering challenges even though the Supreme Court has ruled that plaintiffs in racial-gerrymandering cases can only challenge their own districts, rather than statewide maps. Given the close correlation between race and party affiliation, the state suggests, allowing statewide challenges based on partisan gerrymandering would almost certainly prompt plaintiffs to bring their racial-gerrymandering cases as partisan challenges.
Finally, the state observes that one of the most important tests for whether something is a “political question” – that is, an issue best left to the elected branches of the government, rather than the courts – is whether there are standards that courts can easily identify and apply to resolve the dispute. That is certainly not the case for partisan gerrymandering, the state contends, as the “last three decades of fruitless litigation” have shown. But in any event, the state tells the court, the challengers cannot win because their proposed rule is not “limited and precise,” but in fact is the “opposite,” because it relies on a mix of social-science techniques that would “sow chaos”: Each plan drawn by a state legislature “would be immediately challenged in federal court. A trial would follow, where each side would present dueling ‘social science’ expert(s), and then the district court would need to pick a winner. There would be no way for any legislature to know, ex ante, what metric would guide the inevitable future trial.”
The challengers seemingly agree with the state that a key question in the dispute now before the Supreme Court is whether there is an identifiable and manageable test for partisan gerrymandering. But the answer to that question, they counter, is yes. Each of the three parts of the test that the lower court applied to reach its conclusion that the 2010 map violates the Constitution, they argue, is both squarely grounded in the Supreme Court’s cases and “highly workable.”
First, they note, the district court looked at whether the 2010 map reflects an intent by Republicans to discriminate against Democrats. Pointing to the court’s earlier partisan-gerrymandering cases that specifically refer to the map drafters’ intent, they argue that the Supreme Court itself has indicated that the intent inquiry is a manageable one that can be applied consistently.
Turning to the district court’s conclusion that the 2010 map also had a discriminatory effect, the challengers assert that several justices specifically envisioned an inquiry into whether a redistricting plan had a discriminatory effect in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, a 2006 case in which the court rejected the claim that Texas’ 2003 congressional redistricting was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. The challengers emphasize that they are not asking the Supreme Court to endorse a specific social-science technique to measure a plan’s discriminatory effect. Rather, they stress, they are simply asking the court to do what it has done in other redistricting cases involving allegations of discriminatory effect: announce a standard “whose precise contours are filled in through subsequent litigation.”
The third prong in the district court’s test – whether there is a “legitimate justification” for the map – is, the challengers contend, “drawn directly” from the Supreme Court’s cases involving the “one-person, one-vote” doctrine – the principle that legislative districts should contain roughly equal populations. Experience demonstrates that this prong is workable, the challengers add, because it has been used in “one-person, one-vote” cases for 50 years; the “legitimate justification” test has also been suggested by “several” justices in the court’s partisan-gerrymandering cases.
The challengers also push back against two other arguments advanced by the state, beginning with the idea that, like racial-gerrymandering cases, partisan-gerrymandering claims cannot challenge an entire statewide map. In his concurring opinion in Vieth |
3 to a new low of 52 percent today, according to a new survey by Gallup.
Related: The Big Winners in the Trump-Clinton Race: Hatred, Prejudice and Voter Disgust
The long-term decline in extreme pride in the country – including steep drops in early 2005 and in 2013 -- are likely linked to a rising dissatisfaction among Americans with the general drift of the country and its economy, according to Gallup. At the height of the patriotic ardor, in 2004, 55 percent of Americans said they were generally satisfied with the way things were going. Since then, the rate of satisfaction has mostly held below 30 percent, according to the polling organization.
“Americans’ patriotism stayed relatively flat from 2006 through 2013, a period that spanned the Great Recession and Barack Obama’s election and first term as president,” Gallup wrote. “But over the last three years, Americans’ willingness to say they are extremely proud to be an American has declined further.”
For sure, there is still plenty of enthusiasm among Americans for their country: 29 percent of the public surveyed by Gallup from June 14 to 23 said they were “very proud” to be an American, while 13 percent said they were “moderately proud.” Only one percent said they were not at all proud to be citizens.
Yet since patriotic zeal peaked in 2003 after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, “all major subgroups have shown significant declines in the percentage saying they are extremely proud to be Americans,” the study found. And the current brutal presidential campaign between presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton isn’t likely to make things better.
Related: Are Clinton and Trump Really in a Dead Heat?
The billionaire Trump has vowed to “Make America Great Again,” and yet his attacks on immigrants, Muslims, Mexican-Americans and others have made him one of the most loathed presidential candidates in modern times. Forty-two percent of Americans have a “highly unfavorable” view of him, according to the latest Gallup survey. Clinton, the former secretary of state, isn’t doing much better, with a 26 percent “highly unfavorable” rating.
The largest decline in the number of extremely proud Americans has been among young people, ages 18 to 29. Over the past dozen years or so, the number of young people fiercely proud of being an American sank by 26 percentage points. Only 34 percent of this group of Millennials say today that they are extremely proud to be Americans, compared to 51 percent of that same age cohort in 2001.
There are a number of theories to explain this. One is that Millennials have far less reasons to feel patriotic today than did young people in the same age group in the wake of 9/11, when many were motivated to engage in public service or join the military to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq. “And that generational change may help explain why there has been further decline in patriotism among all U.S. adults over the last three years,” the Gallup study observed.
Among other groups that have shown a sharp decline in their patriotic fervor between 2003 and 2016 and no longer say they are “extremely proud” to be Americans:
. People 30 to 49 years of age, down 23 percentage points.
. White Americans, down 19 percentage points.
. Non-college graduates, down 19 percent points.
. Democrats, down 20 percentage points.
. Republicans, down 18 percentage points.
. Independents, down 18 percentage points
Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:Uber and Lyft have agreed to terms with the Port of Seattle and will begin picking up Sea-Tac Airport passengers on Thursday. Wingz, a company that offers prebooked rides, will begin service early next week.
Passengers arriving at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Thursday will have new options for getting home: Uber and Lyft.
Uber has agreed to terms with the Port of Seattle and plans to offer uberX and uberPOOL rides by noon Thursday, said Brooke Steger, Uber’s Seattle general manager.
Lyft will begin offering rides at 11 a.m. Thursday, according to a statement from Bakari Brock, the company’s Senior Director of Business Operations.
Last week, the Port outlined conditions for ride-service companies to pick up airport passengers in a one-year pilot program. The companies have to pay a one-time activation fee, meet fuel-efficiency targets and track drivers to ensure they only pick up from Sea-Tac’s third-floor garage.
Another company involved in ride-service negotiations with the Port, Wingz, which offers prebooked rides, will start its service from Sea-Tac next week.
To meet the Port’s environmental goals, Steger said Uber will allow only vehicles that get 45 mpg or better to pick up from the airport. She said about 30 percent of the company’s drivers in Seattle use cars that meet that standard.
“We want to put more people in each car, help reduce congestion and help reduce emissions,” Steger said.
She said Uber delivers thousands of people to the airport each week, and allowing at least some vehicles to pick people up will reduce one-way trips.
Uber created a geofence to let drivers make airport pickups if they’re waiting in a designated lot, Steger said. The requirement should help keep traffic flowing smoothly in arrival lines, she said.
Sea-Tac passengers should see signs in the airport directing them to ride-service locations, Steger said. The Uber app will also give directions to the third-floor garage where uberX and uberPOOL rides are available.
Passengers who select uberPOOL rides are matched with people going to similar destinations, and receive about a 25 percent discount for sharing a ride.
Steger said the company plans to offer uberPOOL service from downtown to the airport.
Uber’s black-car drivers, who must be licensed for airport pickup, will continue to pick up passengers in Sea-Tac’s arrivals driveway.
Wingz caters to frequent fliers and charges flat rates. Rides must be booked at least two hours in advance, said Mary Krick, the company’s chief administrative officer.
Last year, Wingz stopped drivers from picking up Sea-Tac passengers to be in compliance with the Port.
Krick said the company was looking forward to restarting operations in the Pacific Northwest.Reporter Sean Ross Sapp has compiled an interesting list of facts regarding the Royal Rumble;
ROYAL RUMBLE
Scott Hall was never in a Royal Rumble Match, but did win a WCW World War 3 match
Mick Foley has been in the Royal Rumble under 4 personas (Mick Foley, Mankind, Dude Love, Cactus Jack), Rikishi as 3 (Fatu, The Sultan, Rikishi), and Kane as 3 (Isaac Yankem, Diesel, Kane)
The Godfather was in the Royal Rumble under five gimmicks (Papa Shango, The Supreme Fighting Machine Kama, Kama Mustafa, The Godfather, and The Goodfather)
1/3 of Entrants in the 2004 Royal Rumble went on to work for TNA
Half of the entrants in the 2004 Royal Rumble were WCW, WWE or World Heavyweight Champions at some point in their careers.
All three women who have been in the Royal Rumble match (Kharma, Beth Phoenix and Chyna) have eliminated male opponents.
The 2008-2011 streak of Royal Rumble winners failing to win their respective titles at WrestleMania was the longest in history.
The only year that no competitor eliminated at least 6 Superstars was 2005. However, Edge and Batista both eliminated 5 each
John Cena lasted just over 22 minutes in the 2010 Royal Rumble, which was the longest that year, the year before, ten superstars lasted longer.
Every Royal Rumble has been won by an eventual WWE/WCW Champion or Hall of Famer.
Despite going out of business in 2001, every Royal Rumble since 2000 has featured a former WCW Champion
From 2005 to 2010, the last wrestler eliminated from the Royal Rumble went on to also have a world title match at Wrestlemania.
The last time a WWE Royal Rumble winner closed the show was Batista at WrestleMania 21.
The last time a Royal Rumble winner challenged for the WWE title at Wrestlemania and won, was Brock Lesnar in 2003
It took more men to eliminate Viscera (eight in 2007) than any other Royal Rumble participant in history, breaking his own record from 1994, when it took 7.
An American wrestler hasn’t won the Royal Rumble since 2009.
Wrestlers from the USA, Canada, Ireland, and Mexico have won the Royal Rumble
Bob Backlund (1993) and Triple H (2006) both lasted over an hour in the Rumble match, and didn’t win.
Andre the Giant (1989), Randy Savage (1992), Ahmed Johnson (1997), Mil Mascaras (1997), Faarooq (1997), Drew Carey (2001), Kane (1999), Mick Foley (2004) and MVP (2010) all eliminated themselves from the Royal Rumble
Neither of the Dudley Boyz participated in a Royal Rumble match.
Royal Rumble entrants have entered at intervals of 60, 90, and 120 seconds throughout the history of the Rumble.
Of the fifteen superstars over 400 pounds or 7 feet tall, only Yokozuna has won the Royal Rumble.
The Number 1 and 2 entrants have won the Royal Rumble four times.
The Undertaker has drawn number 30 three times.
22 of the 30 entrants in the 2002 Royal Rumble would go on to work for WCW.
The only Superstar to win a 30 man Rumble to draw a number between 9 and 21 is Shawn Michaels in 1996
‘Nature Boy’ Buddy Landel was slated to be in the 1996 Royal Rumble, but was pulled and given a WWF Title match with Bret ‘The Hitman’ Hart on a Saturday morning episode of ‘WWF Mania’ instead.
Shawn Michaels was thrown over the top rope by Vader in 1996 (whom he’d already eliminated), but it was disallowed, the only time that rule was enforced.
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June 11, 2013, 7:28 PM GMT By Eun Kyung Kim
Could revelations about the U.S. government’s massive surveillance program be sending people hunting for that classic novel about a nation under the oppressive rule of "Big Brother?"
Amazon has recorded a spike in sales of the George Orwell novel, “1984” in the wake of revelations about the National Security Agency's data collection programs.
The centennial edition of the book ranked number 4 on the seller’s “movers and shakers list,” as of Tuesday afternoon. Book sales increased by more than 6,000 within the last 24 hours, jumping to the 123rd spot on book sales overall, from it's spot at 7,636 the previous day.
The book, originally published in 1948, centers on a rebellious effort against totalitarianism and was meant to serve as a futuristic look into a government with overreaching powers.
Sales may have received a boost as the book has been referenced by politicians in relation to the news.
President Obama mentioned the novel last week when he defended the surveillance programs."In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, then I think we've struck the right balance,” he said last Friday.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders also used the book to describe the programs overseen by the super-secret NSA.
“Kids will grow up knowing that every damn thing that they do is going to be recorded some place in a file,” the Vermont Independent told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Monday. “And I think that will have a very Orwellian and very inhibiting impact on the way we live our lives."
A representative for Penguin, the novel's publisher, said there's clearly a link between the NSA news and the book's surge in sales.
Sales of George Orwell's '1984' have jumped since news of the NSA's surveillance programs broke. Toby Melville / Today
"Absolutely," Liz Keenan told TODAY.com via email. "The current coverage has translated in a surge in mentions and conversations about Orwell's classic providing new platforms of discovery to bring readers to the book."
While she acknowledged that the novel is often popular this time of year as students prepare for the upcoming school year, she called the current uptick in sales "dramatic" and noted the publisher is happy to have the book in the public conversation.
"It is exciting that Orwell’s classic is being discovered by a new readership and rediscovered by readers, but not surprising," she said. "It is a perennial classic on the Plume perpetual bookshelf, and the interest and relevancy of it has never really waned since its original publication. Of course the themes and political and social issues explored in the book feel even more relevant. And the current news cycle, prophetic."Brazil’s president Michel Temer, who has been surrounded by a cloud of scandalous allegations since he took office in August, 2016, was officially charged with corruption Monday — making him the first sitting president in Brazil to be charged with a criminal offense.
Brazil’s Attorney General Rodrigo Janot filed the charges accusing Temer of accepting bribes, including a $150,00 payoff from the former chairman of JBS, a Brazilian meatpacking company. Brazil’s lower court will assess the case and decide whether or not it should proceed. If it does, Temer could be suspended from office while the case is tried.
The allegations of bribery and corruption are connected to a larger scandal in which a leaked phone call allegedly revealed Temer endorsing a payoff from JBS to Eduardo Cunha, an imprisoned Brazilian politician. Temer denied the allegations, but the company was reportedly later fined $3.2 billion for bribing around 1,900 politicians.
Temer had managed to weather several previous allegations of corruption, and in early June, Temer and his predecessor, Brazil’s former president Dilma Rousseff, were acquitted of charges of illegal campaign financing in a 4-3 vote.
Temer has denied the charges and says he won’t step down, with growing street protests calling for his resignation and a spiraling Brazilian economy, he risks being the second Brazilian president impeached in less than a year.0
Universal Pictures is having an absolutely banner 2015, with record-breaking box office from a number of ambitious plays that range from big-budget reboots like Jurassic World to sequels to moderate hits like Pitch Perfect 2. But one of the studio’s biggest films of 2015 was Furious 7, a sequel that is currently the fifth highest grossing movie of all time with a worldwide gross of $1.51 billion. Obviously Universal wasted no time in putting together the follow-up, but while Chris Morgan has been busy scripting the New York-centric sequel, Universal is encountering some significant issues in finding a new director.
James Wan helmed Furious 7 and managed to navigate one of the most difficult productions in history, restructuring the entire movie mid-shoot to account for actor Paul Walker’s untimely death and result in a film that’s actually pretty solid. Universal had options on Wan to direct Furious 8 and Furious 9, but when he told the studio he wanted to direct The Conjuring 2 for Warner Bros. instead, they graciously acquiesced given how tough the Furious 7 shoot had been.
But in the wake of Wan’s absence, THR reports that finding a new filmmaker to take the helm has proved incredibly difficult. After Wan opted not to return, Universal went to franchise staple Justin Lin—who directed Tokyo Drift through Fast & Furious 6—to see if he’d be interesting in coming back, but he chose to direct Star Trek Beyond for Paramount instead. When that happened, THR reports that Universal went back to Wan with “life-altering money” as part of a new deal, but he once again declined.
Why the reluctance to return? Not only was it a difficult shoot logistically and emotionally, but THR suggests that working with star Vin Diesel was taxing:
“Sources say Diesel proved extraordinarily difficult. As a producer, he is said to have questioned even small details on elaborate action sequences, often holding up the complex production. He also was known to summon filmmakers to repeated late-night script sessions to make him comfortable with his character and dialogue.”
Both Diesel and Wan’s reps deny any on-set tension, and producer Neal Moritz goes so far as to say, “Obviously if there was any issue, we wouldn’t be making the eighth [film] with [Diesel] right now.” The studio is currently in the midst of casting a wider net, approaching Non-Stop helmer Jaume Collett-Serra (who’s unavailable) and both experienced action directors and relative newcomers. THR says some at Universal fear that Diesel will want to direct an installment of the series at some point, while another source says that prospect doesn’t interest Diesel. Regardless, he remains involved as a producer on the series and must be consulted on director choices, though he does not have veto power.
Wan was a newcomer to the action genre and made the transition quite well, so I imagine the studio isn’t focused solely on those with experience crafting set pieces. But as the film’s April 2017 release date approaches, they may be veering closer to those at least nominally versed in the action genre due to what could become a very tight schedule.
The Fast & Furious franchise has grown into a fascinating beast, toeing the line somewhere between action soap opera and cartoon, so when it comes to choosing a filmmaker to take the helm, a variety of choices seem appropriate. Personally I’d love to see John Wick directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch bring a grounded, fist-fight-focused approach to the franchise, but alas they’re busy with John Wick 2 at the moment. Given Wan’s horror background, I’m also fascinated by what The Babadook director Jennifer Kent might do with the franchise.
What do you think, readers? Who would you like to see direct Fast & Furious 8? Sound off in the comments below.The release of the NFL schedule provides fans the opportunity to project how their favorite team will do in the upcoming season. For many, their estimations are forced almost entirely by how teams played the year before. That's not a foolproof method, but it still makes for some interesting discussion.
Because of the fluid nature of the NFL, it's difficult if not impossible to figure out which teams will have the easiest and toughest schedule at the outset of the regular season. Teams coming off great seasons could lose an integral player to injury (think the Indianapolis Colts without Peyton Manning in 2011) or see an older veteran or two regress (the Denver Broncos with a 39-year-old Manning in 2014).
In other cases, teams that finished outside of the playoff picture manage to improve significantly, whether via free agency, the draft or simply the current roster developing into better football players.
Because each team plays divisional opponents twice each year, strength of schedule is mostly a reflection of how the division performed a year ago. For teams in the NFC South, that means a very favorable outlook. For those locked in the death match known as the NFC West, not so much.
Below is the strength of schedule for every team as it enters the 2015 season:The New Year, apparently, is not going to be "happy" after all. According to David Cameron, it is to be a year of "grave economic uncertainty". Yet, in this unpredictable world, one thing is certain. The government will carry on behaving as if the consequences of economic failure are actually its causes. They have to, really. If the coalition doesn't cloak its crude and desperate accountancy in the drapes of political purpose, they will be forced to admit a terrible thing: the democratic paralysis that has gripped the world is entirely the result of self-preserving, take-no-responsibility neoliberalism. Look upon your works, ye mighty, and despair.
Difficult as it is to accept that Nick Clegg can be described as "ye mighty", it's worth looking at a few choice quotes from his latest missive to the electorate, a piece published in the Times this week. "We came together to fix the UK's broken economy – and that purpose defines the coalition even more today than it did back then. Why? Because the repair job is bigger than we thought." Clegg sounds like a car mechanic of yore, explaining to an owner that he couldn't have known that the big end was gone until he got the car over the pit. Or something. Except, of course, that the coalition isn't actually fixing Britain's "big end", the UK economy. It's slashing welfare, which only exists because the economy never did have a big enough engine to take all of the population in the right direction.
Clegg continues: "The biggest divide in politics today – here and around the world – is between those who offer leadership and those who only offer dissent." What he means by "offer leadership" is "make cuts in state spending". What he means by "offer dissent" is "oppose cuts in state spending". He bolsters this interpretation with an explicit attack on Labour. "They're learning the tricks of opposition and finding their rhetorical refrains. But where are the numbers? Where are their sums?"
What's sad about this attack is that it's narrowly honest. Before the election, Clegg led a party that claimed to reject the "old politics". This, he as good as admits, can be filed under "the tricks of opposition" and "rhetorical refrains". Now, in power (as he fondly imagines himself to be), he is trying to make a virtue of the fact that he has learned that politics is not about ideas or idealism after all, but merely about balancing the government's books. He believes that the electorate will come to respect him for his hard-won wisdom. But who can respect a politician whose great revelation is that there's no place for politics in politics, because in the end it's all just bean-counting? Especially when he is so spectacularly wrong?
In framing cuts as "the answer", Clegg and the coalition are performing an astonishing inversion. The welfare state exists because competitive, choice-driven, capitalist economies by definition create winners and losers. The coalition instead behaves as if there would be no losers if the welfare state didn't create them. How can adults profess to believe so fervently in competition and choice, but deny that in competition someone always comes last, and that for some people to make "good" choices, other must make "bad" ones?
Democratic politics exists only to make the powerful answerable to the vulnerable. Without that exchange, it is nothing. The coalition – the right – overturns that link and despises the welfare state for giving the vulnerable protection from the powerful. They think that without protection, the vulnerability would disappear. Yet they need only look to places – and times – without welfare, to see what a delusion this is.
It's important to recognise that the coalition is sincere in its delusion. Accusing them of cynically employing "shock and awe" opportunistically to deliver "ideologically driven" cuts and privatisation in the wake of the banking crisis is no good. They really believe, I think, that neoliberalism has been stunted and retarded by the socialistic welfarism of the "big state". They really believe that once the public sector has been curtailed, the private sector will move in to replace it with services that are more efficient and dynamic. It's their genuine conviction that they are in the process of making Britain and the world a better place that makes them so dangerous.
The reality, however, is that all three of Britain's major political parties were speaking the truth at their pre-election conferences in 2009. Each admitted that there would have to be deep cuts to public services. But this wasn't because the economy needed "rebalancing". It wasn't because making cuts would achieve any sort of effect on the economy. It was because, as outgoing chief secretary to the secretary Liam Byrne wrote in a note to his post-election successor: "There is no money left." It's important to remember that the cuts are reactive. They are not being made to achieve an economic result. They are an economic result, a logical conclusion. The most dispiriting thing in the human world today is that there is so little clarity over what they are the result of.
The government and the opposition have carved the story up between them. They appear to have contradictory narratives when each is telling part of the truth. Labour insists that the deficit exists because the global financial crash, and the consequent bailout, cost the government a huge amount of money at a time when, also because of the crash, tax revenues were plummeting. True. The coalition insist that the deficit exists because Labour "didn't mend the roof while the sun was shining". (Interestingly, that analysis is the only bit of Keynesianism the Conservatives ever deploy.) Also true.
But the important thing is to understand what the Labour government would have to have done in order to avoid the situation it found itself in at the time of the banking crash. It would have to have been the banks' bank – taking the revenue generated by the banks and keeping it safe, in order to give it back when the sun stopped shining and rainy days came. Is it realistic, this vision of "liberal democracy" as entirely apolitical, existing only to smooth out the cycle of boom and bust? It's more realistic than Gordon Brown's great delusion that he'd "banished boom and bust". But it relies too much on the myth that booms enrich everyone, a myth easily exposed by pointing out that under that supposedly profligate Labour administration, now accused of recklessly taking from the rich and giving to the poor, the gap between the richest and the poorest didn't narrow. Even under a heavily redistributive government, it widened. Why? Because big states are a consequence of unfettered capitalism. Only when politicians – and capitalists – stop trying to pretend that isn't so, will the political cycle of spend and cut be banished. It wasn't the government that failed to mend the roof while the sun was shining. It was the banks. They borrowed and spent like there was no tomorrow. They inflated the economy until it exploded. They had no savings set aside for times of trouble. It's amazing that in five short years this glaring fact has been all but disregarded, while politicians get on with the business of blaming each other for the chaos.At least 14 people killed in trolleybus explosion, the day after 17 died in another suicide attack at city's railway station
At least 14 people have been killed in a suicide bombing on a trolleybus crowded with morning commuters in Volgograd, less than 24 hours after another deadly suicide attack at the city's main train station.
The authorities initially said 15 people were dead, but a statement from local authorities subsequently put the toll at 14. Dozens were reported injured, including a one-year-old child who was in a critical condition.
The blast ripped apart the trolleybus, leaving a disfigured carcass without the roof and walls.
It is the third bombing attack in Volgograd in three months, with most security experts linking the wave of attacks to the pledge by the Chechen jihadist leader Doku Umarov to disrupt the Olympic Games in Sochi, which start in six weeks' time.
The explosion occurred as the trolleybus approached a stop near a market and the hospital, where many casualties from the train station attack were taken on Sunday. Russian investigators said the explosion was caused by a male suicide bomber.
Local news sites reported that people in Volgograd, a city of more than 1 million inhabitants, were avoiding public transport and walking to work on foot.
"For the second day, we are dying – it's a nightmare," a woman near the scene told the Reuters news agency, her voice trembling as she choked back tears. "What are we supposed to do – just walk now?"
The attacks sent waves of horror across Russia. Popular writer Sergey Minayev said on Twitter the atmosphere reminded him of 1999, when a series of bombing attacks on apartment blocs shook Moscow. "It's like someone has declared a war on us," he wrote.
The death toll from Sunday's attack rose to 17 overnight, with more than 40 injured, some of them still in grave condition. The bomb went off near security gates at the entrance to Volgograd's main train station.
The authorities said it was detonated by a suicide bomber but there were conflicting reports about whether the perpetrator was a man or woman.
The two attacks will raise fears of a concerted campaign of violence before the Olympics, which start on 7 February in Sochi, about 430 miles south-west of Volgograd.
In a video posted on the web in July, Umarov, the leader of insurgents who want to carve an Islamic state out of the north Caucasus, a string of Muslim provinces south of Volgograd, urged militants to use "maximum force" to prevent the games from being held.
Two months ago, another bomb killed 10 people on a bus in Volgograd, which is a few hundred miles from the restive north Caucasus region.
Volgograd, formerly known as Stalingrad, is also of great symbolic importance for Russians as the site of the bloodiest battle of the second world war – something that north Caucausian jihadist websites were quick to emphasise after the train station blast.
Security expert Andrey Soldatov told the Guardian on Sunday the Volgograd tragedy showed that militants from the north Caucasus had sufficient capability and manpower to stage deadly attacks beyond their region. It also means that Russian security bodies will be forced to divert their attention to other regions at a crucial time on the eve of the Olympic Games.As Greece threatens new shocks for the eurozone, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and top EU officials have laid out a vision for the currency involving tighter control from Brussels.
In a report published on Monday (22 June), in cooperation with the heads of other EU bodies, Juncker also proposed help for states in distress.
The report recommended governments back modifications in procedures over the next two years, and set out longer term ideas that could be adopted in new treaty obligations within the next decade.
Despite the crises of the past years, as governments unable to devalue national currencies have struggled to manage their finances amid global recession, the report began with the phrase: “The euro is a successful and stable currency.”
However, “quick fixes” to the problems now need overhaul, especially in view of high unemployment, to ensure the euro – more than a currency but a “political and economic project” – had a “lasting, fair and democratically legitimate basis”.
“The world is watching us and they want to know where we are going. Today we lay out monetary integration and bring it to its ultimate destination,” Juncker said in a statement. Valdis Dombrovskis, Vice-President for the Euro and Social Dialogue, described the plan as a “ambitious, yet pragmatic vision” for the future of the eurozone.
A need for economies and budgets to converge would “inevitably involve sharing more sovereignty over time”, the report added, saying such steps would only be envisaged after 2017, when French and German elections are being held.
“For the euro area to gradually evolve towards a genuine Economic and Monetary Union, it will need to shift from a system of rules and guidelines for national economic policy-making to a system of further sovereignty sharing within common institutions, most of which already exist and can progressively fulfil this task,” the report says.
In practice, this would require EU countries to “accept increasingly joint decision-making on elements of their respective national budgets and economic policies”, it adds, saying this would “pave the way for some degree of public risk sharing”, a reference to euro bonds.
One ultimate outcome could be a “euro area treasury”, although the report stressed it did not foresee “stabilising” cash transfers going permanently to certain states, nor seek to use them to equalise incomes among rich and poor countries.
The report foresees three stages in deepening integration:
Stage 1 (1 July 2015 – 30 June 2017): A “deepening by doing” stage where small steps are taken towards fiscal convergence, using “existing instruments” and treaties.
(1 July 2015 – 30 June 2017): A “deepening by doing” stage where small steps are taken towards fiscal convergence, using “existing instruments” and treaties. Stage 2 (30 June 2017 – 2025): A “more binding” completion stage, with “a set of commonly agreed benchmarks for convergence that could be given a legal nature, as well as a euro area treasury”.
(30 June 2017 – 2025): A “more binding” completion stage, with “a set of commonly agreed benchmarks for convergence that could be given a legal nature, as well as a euro area treasury”. Stage 3 (By 2025 at the latest): A final stage, where the vision would be complete.
Earlier drafts of the report, seen by EURACTIV, were equally humble, remaining vague on social issues which are of crucial importance to France and southern EU member states struggling with high unemployment.
>> Read: Leaked eurozone blueprint makes timid call for integration
National leaders, who commissioned the report last year, will have a first chance to discuss it at a summit on Thursday and Friday that may be dominated by efforts to prevent Greece defaulting on its debts and losing access to the euro.
Differing views on the report are to be expected, though it contains elements likely to appeal to various parties.
It may please Germany by calling for tougher discipline on countries, like France and Italy at present, that fail to meet budget criteria.
But it also says that states running persistent trade surpluses, such as Germany, should adjust them. And it calls in vague terms for some shared fiscal resources to help countries in difficulty, an issue on which German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been wary.
Immediate measures
In the short term, the report recommends quickly setting up national competitiveness authorities, possibly on existing Dutch and Belgian models, that would press governments to pursue policies that would help productivity. It calls for greater emphasis on promoting employment and sustainable pension systems as part of a more “forceful” use of annual EU reviews of national budgets.
The report also calls for measures to strengthen cooperation in avoiding the kind of banking crises that sucked in government cash in recent years. One measure it recommends taking within the next two years is to create a European Deposit Insurance Scheme, to share risks among EU states.
Dealing with Britain
One element of any tightening of eurozone coordination will be dealing with Britain, the main EU economy set on keeping its own currency. Prime Minister David Cameron has made guarantees of Britain’s access to the EU single market without euro membership a condition for the UK remaining in the bloc.
British officials have said they support tighter integration of the eurozone and would like new terms for London included in changes to treaties on the subject. But Juncker’s timeline makes clear that treaty change is not on his agenda until after 2017.
However, the preamble to the report emphasised that eurozone integration should not harm the single market in any way.
“Completing Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union” is known as the Five Presidents Report, drafted by Juncker with European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi, European Council President Donald Tusk, European Parliament speaker Martin Schulz and Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the chair of eurozone finance ministers.LL have started releasing more information on the Advanced Experience Tools developed during the creation of Linden Realms and its predecessor game demonstrated at SLCC-2011.
The blog post (yay! BLOG post!) provides an overview of the new tools and permissions, with the video providing further information. Bear in mind when reading and watching that this is only an initial announcement and that as such, further information will be forthcoming…
The video delves a little deeper into the creation of the tools themselves and which includes some interesting factoids and tidbits of information.
One of the tidbits demonstrates the popularity of the Linden Realms game, which has 5,000 unique visits per day, for a total of 249,000 unique visits since the game opened in (I presume) Beta. Had the game relied upon a “traditional” means of HUD attachment via people’s inventories, the game would be generating 4 million new inventory items per month!
The tools discussed by both blog post and video are:
Teleport agent: this is a new LSL function that enables an agent (avatar) to be teleported automatically to a given location / destination. Within Linden Realms, this is used when people are “killed” by the various threats to their safety; within the video, the LL spokesperson suggests a further interesting use for the capability: the teleport “gun”…
The function supports both local and remote teleports and also respects teleport and access permissions.
Temporary Attachment: this functions is a similar manner to llAtach, but avoids the creation of an item within a user’s inventory. This has two benefits, the most obvious being that people’s inventories don’t get cluttered with items each time they visit a region where the function is in active use and the second, as an extension of this, the asset database itself isn’t overloaded with millions of requests (again, Linden Realms would be generating an estimated 4 million items a month if using llAttach). Attachments for both avatar and screen (HUD) are supported.
The blog and video indicate that temporary attachment is not forced attachment, but a part of the overall Experience Permissions system.
Experience Permissions: this is a simplified version of the existing permissions system currently in use across the grid. Under the current system, permissions to control your avatar would need to be handled on a case-by-case basis. In something like the Linden Realms game, this means that rather than “dying” and being teleported on contact with a rock monster, the player would get a pop-up asking them if they wish to “die”.
Allowing these permissions to be granted requires action on the user’s part – such as walking through the Portals in the Linden Realms game, but they only need to be granted once, and can be applied across multiple regions (again, as with Linden Realms), allowing for large, continuous experiences to be built.
Permissions that can be granted (according to experience requirements) include:
Teleporting
Attaching objects to an avatar / screen
Control / track camera
Trigger animations
The permissions system is specifically geared to prevent more dangerous permissions such as inventory access, debit a user’s account and change links.
Potential Uses
The potential uses for these tools in terms of games and adventures are clear. However, there are wider applications for the tools, including:
Providing a means for guided tours within sims – |
Partners of Santa Ana, Calif., and Taihan Techran, a renewable energy company also based in Seoul.
In July, Taihan Techran signed a lease with Boulder City for 2,200 acres adjacent to the Dry Lake Bed.
According to POSCO, the 300-megawatt project, when completed, would be the world's largest solar plant.
In an official statement referenced by Reuters and several other news agencies, POSCO said the project would produce enough power for 60,000 homes in Nevada. The company purchased a Norwegian manufacturer of photovoltaic solar panels in August as part of an initiative to expand its renewable energy interest.
Boulder City Manager Vicki Mayes said the project would still require engineering, drainage studies, connection agreements and the construction of transmission lines before work on the plant itself could begin.
The company said it plans to open the plant by 2014.
As part of the city's agreement with Taihan Techran, Mayes said the company has agreed also to build a 2-megawatt solar plant on city land to provide energy for Boulder City. She said a site near the wastewater treatment plant was under consideration, as it would provide immediate access to the city's grid.
Boulder City distributes its own power, and the proposed plant would be the city's first solar energy source.
The 54-year lease that Boulder City and Taihan Techran signed in July is expected to bring in almost $200 million for the city over its lifetime. The POSCO site is just north of the Eldorado Energy Zone, Mayes said, which is already home to four other solar plants.This video is no longer available
This video was hosted on Vidme, which is no longer in operation. However, you might find this video at one of these links:
Video title:
Am I A Suck up? 🌀 ~ Mr2ndopinion ~ 🌀 0146
Upload date:
June 6 2017
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Mr2ndopinion
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👉🌀TIP&FOLLOW🌀👈 ❋❋❋❋❋❋❋❋❋❋❋❋❋ Follow Count: 306/1000! Thanks for the Support your giving! I'll give back! 🎁 We have a website! Click ads support us! 😄 https://mr2ndopinion.com ♥SHARE! ♥UP-VOTE! ♥COMMENT! ♥RING-BELL! Tomorrows Video => *June Vlog + Fitness Q&A?* Subscribers (Unlimited LOVE): @The_Cyborg Tippers (Lumix G7 Fund: 2/500$): @JonThomas Want to Send Something I should Review or Try? -> PM me for the Address! The Art of Sucking Up! Am I a Suck Up? What is the meaning of being a Suck Up? How to Impress a Boss? So you want my piece advice while I'm not a Suck up myself. Am I a Pleaser? I sure am. But Am I a Suck Up? So I'm not. Flattery to me is something else than being a Suck Up. You have to know how to give good compliments. Good compliments for me are different than Kissing up to the Boss. In today's video, I'll let you in on who I am. What kind of person I am. My piece of Advice to you is that I don't like Suck Ups. I also take flattery mildly. Sure I have a soul and I like to see people think Am I a pleaser? It's good they think that of themselves! I encourage it! Because a pleaser is a nice person! Am I a Suck Up or do I have Nice Things to Say? Nice things to say are different from being an expert in the Art of Sucking Up. You should know how to impress a boss but not being giving compliments. If you're Sucking Up to people they will sooner or later catch on to you not being good at anything but Sucking Up. Will that be your life? Like I said don't give up giving Good compliments. It's entirely different than kissing up to the boss. Be a pleaser but be so by putting yourself out there and by earning respect. Grab some nice things to say along the path. You'll get to know Suck Up meaning when you overly engage into flattering someone and others will be like you less for it. It's like you don't give them a chance. So Am I a Suck Up is a good reflection on how you should be. How you should compliment and what you should expect from yourself. If you enjoyed this video give me a good compliment by voting for this video! I won't see it as you Sucking Up to me. I'll see it as you sharing a video with friends who deserve it as well! Bye Follow Mr2ndopinion on https://Vid.me/mr2ndopinion Lend us a hand or buy us a coffee: http://ko-fi.com/A861GAD Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiMJVBUlOyW0LHI7JSxovUA?sub_confirmation=1 Website: https://mr2ndopinion.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mr2ndopinion Twitter: https://twitter.com/Mr2ndopinion_ Google+: https://plus.google.com/+Mr2ndOpinion1 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mr2ndopinion/ Skyrock: http://mr2ndopinion.skyrock.com/ #vidme #vidmecommunity #vidmeforward #vidmestuff #vidmevlog #vidmevloggers #vlog #reflection #suckup #asskisser #asskissing #kissingass #compliment #flattery #flatter #nicethings #mr2ndopinion #lifestyle #lifestyleadvice #cowardism #coward #vidmesports #boss #bossy #sethcarnett
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Just months after concluding a Daredevil run that turned the character into one of Marvel’s most popular heroes, Frank Miller continued to impress the comics world with Ronin #1 (DC), a futuristic sci-fi book with roots in Japanese manga. It’s a remarkable amalgam of styles, telling the story of a ronin and the demon who killed his master as they engage in a fight that spans millennia. After being freed from their captivity within a mystical sword, the ronin possess the body and mind of limbless psychic Billy, building a cybernetic body that is capable of all kinds of cool tricks for Miller to draw. Inspired by Lone Wolf And Cub, Ronin’s incorporation of Japanese story elements and manga techniques make the title a striking contrast to DC’s superhero work of the time. It showed the publisher’s willingness to experiment with more mature content, which would eventually lead to the formation of the Vertigo imprint following Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and Watchmen and Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. [OS]
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No one could have predicted that a comic book about Canada’s premier superhero team would last for more than 100 issues, and the foundation laid by John Byrne in Alpha Flight #1 (Marvel) made that possible. Following the closing of Department H, Alpha Flight is no more, but a new threat in the form of a giant tundra monster reassembles the team with a few new faces. Byrne is clearly passionate about the characters he created in the pages of Uncanny X-Men, writing and drawing their first ongoing adventure with confidence and enthusiasm. He has a delightfully cheeky sense of humor, spotlighted by developments like the debut of an acrobatic dwarf by the name of Puck (as in hockey), but he also mines surprisingly psychological depths in his script. Aurora suffers from acute dissociative identity disorder, viewing her civilian identity as a completely different person, and her mental issues allow Byrne to look at the negative effect of a superhero’s secret identity before it was the hip thing to do. A team of Canadian stereotypes may sound like a joke, but John Byrne’s work helped make Alpha Flight the fan-favorite it is today. [OS]
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Following the runaway success of Chris Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men, Marvel capitalized on the property’s popularity by launching a spin-off with a new cast of teenaged characters. New Mutants #1 (Marvel) spotlights the diverse group of gifted youngsters introduced in Marvel Graphic Novel #4 as they acclimate to their new lives as students of Professor Charles Xavier, but not as X-Men. From the outset, the focus is on adolescent drama rather than superhero action, showing how the kids deal with their physical changes in a strange new environment. Claremont is joined by artist Bob McLeod, whose style is similar to Uncanny X-Men artists Paul Smith and Dave Cockrum but less flashy, providing more modest visuals for a more down-to-Earth title. These characters would grow from these humble beginnings to become X-Men, Defenders, and Avengers, but there’s an undeniable charm to the simplicity of the days when they all wore matching yellow and black tights. [OS]
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Walt Simonson delivered a master class in taking over an established title when he wrote and drew The Mighty Thor #337 (Marvel), an issue that kicked off a legendary five-year run. The cover establishes major changes as the horse-like alien Beta Ray Bill crushes the book’s logo with Thor’s hammer, and Bill’s introduction is just one of the many plot threads Simonson juggles in this issue. While Thor teams up with Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D., Balder The Brave undergoes a personal crisis, the warrior Sif struggles with boredom, and Loki begins his newest scheme to mess with his brother, planting seeds that would be cultivated over the course of Simonson’s tenure. His art has all the bombast of Jack Kirby with stronger attention to detail, meticulously rendering locations on Earth and Asgard without losing any energy in his character work. The grandiosity of the story and art fits the godly hero, and few writers have been able to balance superhero and fantasy elements of a Thor title as well as Simonson. [OS]
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Before becoming a badass biker antihero in the ’90s,bounty hunter Lobo looked like a mix of Gene Simmons in KISS makeup and X-Men villain Scalphunter. He looks ridiculous, but he makes one hell of an introduction in The Omega Men #3 (DC) by writer Roger Slifer and artists Keith Giffen and Mike DeCarlo. In his very first scene, Lobo flicks the nose of an alien who just helped him and his partner, sending the creature’s brain through the back of its head. A caricature of aggressive heroes like Punisher and Wolverine, Lobo was eventually embraced by the public for the very qualities his creators were criticizing, becoming one of the poster boys for hyper-violent, overly sexualized superhero comics. His character in Omega Men is more restrained, but still a scumbag, wondering mid-battle if his glowing opponent Kalista had the same radiance when she lost her virginity. He would become far more crass in the future, but Lobo is a total bastich from the very beginning. [OS]
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After making his first appearance 10 issues past, Jason “Jay” Todd steps into the role he was created to play in Batman #366 (DC), putting on the Robin costume and leaping into action as the Dark Knight’s new sidekick. Before Crisis On Infinite Earths explained Todd’s history to make him a street urchin, he was basically a carbon copy of former Robin Dick Grayson, the son of two circus performers who were tragically killed in an event that leads him to Bruce Wayne. Batman initially rejects Todd for trying to steal Grayson’s identity by dying his strawberry blond hair black and wearing the old Robin uniform, but if Batman didn’t want a reflection of his past partner, he shouldn’t have adopted a boy who is exactly the same. Writer Doug Moench introduces an interesting twist to the dynamic duo relationship in this issue, and it would only continue to change after Crisis rewrote Todd’s history and made him a more distinct, obnoxious character. [OS]
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Howard Chaykin’s cinematic style made him the perfect artist to illustrate Marvel’s Star Wars comics in the late ’70s, and that flashy, intricately detailed work helped make his creator-owned American Flagg! a classic. American Flagg! #1 (First) transports reader to Chicago in 2031, where political factions are allowed to wage war in the streets as long as it’s televised, and the new home of former TV star Reuben Flagg during his five-year tour of duty. It’s a wickedly funny satire of Cold War politics and pop culture, imagining a world where conflict only escalated through the ’90s and new millennium. The quick pace of the story is well served by Chaykin’s dense page designs, which use unconventional panel layouts to convey massive amounts of information in visually striking ways. Chaykin also has a talent for drawing sultry women, so he makes sure there’s plenty of sex in the midst of all the sci-fi silliness. [OS]
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As market forces and creator unrest spurred DC to let rising star Frank Miller try his hand at his own creator-owned series Ronin, Marvel was ahead of the curve. After having launched two ambitious outlets for creator-owned material, the Marvel Graphic Novel series and the Métal Hurlant-like Epic Illustrated, in 1981, the company spun the latter series into an imprint, Epic Comics. Dreadstar was its flagship series. Written and drawn by cosmically minded phenomenon Jim Starlin, Dreadstar launched at the end of 1982 on the heels of the character Vanth Dreadstar’s appearance in Epic Illustrated and a Marvel Graphic Novel #3—which established the far-future swashbuckler as the only survivor of the annihilated Milky Way Galaxy. In 1983, #3 of the series introduces a genocide that will set in motion an epic war that will consume much of the remainder of the book’s run—which winds up jumping to the independent publisher First Comics in 1986. At this early stage, though, Starlin’s archetypal antihero is a vivid example of what mainstream writers and artists of the Bronze Age could accomplish when given enough rope to launch themselves… [JH]
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The British comics anthology Warrior (Quality) only ran from 1982 to 1985, but it was a fertile three years. In particular, it kick-started the career of Alan Moore, giving the fledgling scribe room to develop ongoing strips like Laser Eraser And Pressbutton and The Bojeffries Saga. More notably, though, Moore worked a pair serialized stories in Warrior that wound up putting him on the map, long before Swamp Thing, Watchmen, Killing Joke, and beyond—those two being Marvelman and V For Vendetta. Miraculously, Moore was juggling both of these storylines (among other projects) in 1983 issues of Warrior such as #11, in which the author’s deconstruction of superhero mythos, Marvelman, probes the latent god complex of the genre’s iconographic figureheads through a reconstituted Silver Age hero (sound familiar?). At the same time, V For Vendetta, an original creation of Moore’s, brutally lays bare the perverse nature of both fascism and freedom for a readership about to enter the fabled year 1984. All that and more for a measly 60p… [JH]
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Grendel #1 (Comico) came out long before the dark, gritty trend in morally dicey vigilantes got a grip on the mainstream—but there’s no doubt creators of all levels were taking careful not of Matt Wagner’s brooding, bloodthirsty Hunter Rose. An author-turned-crime boss who lives by his own complicated code of honor as the costumed figure Grendel, Rose was the cracked-mirror image of Bruce Wayne, a masked nightmare who struck fear into the hearts of thugs, but only so that he could control them himself. Grendel had made his first appearance in 1982 in the anthology Comico Primer, but it was the debut of Wagner’s ongoing series that cemented the slippery ethos of an elemental character who would eventually be revealed as an eternal being that has taken many forms throughout history. It’s a shaky start; in particular, Wagner’s sleek, manga-influenced art had yet reached its ultimate refinement, and his narrative chops were still haltingly raw. But that all adds to the vitality of a comic that seemed so much more revolutionary before its tropes had been co-opted by convention… [JH]
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Like Grendel, Nexus is a creator-owned character published by an independent house that bears just enough overlap with Big Two superhero comics to have brought it well-earned attention circa 1983. But the respective tone of Grendel #1 and Nexus #1 (Capital) could not have been more different. Nexus’ co-creators, writer Mike Baron and artist Steve Rude, had already established their upbeat but deceptively multidimensional protagonist in a three-issue, black-and-white magazine that ended in 1982—but the addition of color with the launch of the long-running regular series brought Rude’s classic, Jack Kirby-meets-Alex Toth artwork to life, leaving Baron to more deeply develop Horatio Hellpop’s futuristic world of Ylum and its offbeat, tragicomic inhabitants. And unlike the more widely appropriated aesthetic of Grendel, Nexus’ kinetic mythology still feels fresh and inventive 30 years later… [JH]
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Love And Rockets #3 doesn’t stand out that much from the early run of Los Bros. Hernandez’s legendary series, except for one major milestone: the introduction of a little place called Palomar. Although Gilbert Hernandez’s character of Luba had already appeared in his and Jaime Hernandez’s frenetic hodgepodge of science fiction and magic realism, she was extracted from the aliens-and-ray guns milieu and relocated to the fictional Central American town whose thematic borders Gilbert would eventually expand to include a staggering, cyclical narrative of generational love, strife, and sacrifice. Not only does the third issue of the Love And Rockets’ first Fantagraphics run initiate Gilbert’s rich, poignant “Heartbreak Soup” storyline set in Palomar, it features prime Jaime material starring his star-crossed duo, Maggie Chascarillo and Hopey Glass. That Jaime’s crisp, virtuosic draftsmanship and Gilbert’s evocative storytelling were already so fully developed at this point makes this issue not only strong, but bursting with promises of riches to come… [JH]
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Weirdo #8 is a comic book teetering on the cusp. Within a year, founder and editor Robert Crumb would depart the publication, leaving it in the hands of spunky up-and-comer and regular contributor Peter Bagge, who had yet to make his mark with Neat Stuff, let alone Hate. If there’s any fatigue in Crumb’s bones, though, they don’t show. The preeminent alternative anthology of the early ’80s, Weirdo updated Zap and such likeminded underground comix of Crumb’s formative years for a leaner, punk-inspired absurdism. The eighth issue has it all: shaggy, prankish surrealism from Crumb and his sidekick Terry Zwigoff (long before the latter would direct the definitive documentary Crumb); dark, jagged romanticism by the late Dori Seda; and Bagge’s collaboration with writer David Carrino, the scathingly satirical “Martini Baton!” Top it all off with Crumb’s manic solo outing “The Adventures Of George ‘Murky’ Murkoid”—not to mention his lurid, eye-gouging cover that seems to sum up the underground fallout of the era—and Weirdo #8 is a about as close as the medium gets to an ’80s alt-comics time capsule… [JH]
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Robert Crumb had his fingers in more pies than Weirdo in 1983. He found time to illustrate a handful of pages of a sporadic comics magazine he’d been involved with since its 1976 inception: American Splendor. In #8 of writer Harvey Pekar’s quietly trailblazing autobiographical comic, Crumb lends scratchy, teeming-with-neurosis visuals to some of the issue’s—and the series’—best stories, including the tour de force “American Splendor Assaults The Media.” Although most of Pekar’s first-person vignettes focus on his downbeat, occasionally meditative life as a working-class Clevelander, “Assaults The Media” is one of his sudden eruptions of misanthropic yet self-effacing ire—a passionate, quixotic tilt at The Village Voice and all other hoity-toity outlets who would deny him. Other superb American Splendor artists such as Greg Budgett, Gary Dumm, and Gerry Shamray also pitch in throughout the eight issue, but the synergy between Pekar’s bile and Crumb’s itchiness captures American Splendor, ironically enough, just three years away from its first major trade paperback collection. Not that success ever relaxed the late Pekar’s squinty eye for injustice… [JH]No Comments
Vote for a 2015 Honda Fit SEMA Project Winner on Tumblr
For the past five weeks now, six build teams have been customizing their own 2015 Honda Fits as part of the 2015 Honda Fit SEMA Project. The automaker has been following their progress and posting photos and gifs to its Tumblr account, with the hashtag #ProjectFit. Until the polls close on October 22, 2014, you can vote for your favorite customized Fit by liking or reblogging the photos, videos, and gifs that each team has been uploading to hondaloves.tumblr.com. Whichever customized Fit the people of Tumblr like the best (i.e., whichever one is decorated with the most photos of Benedict Cumberbatch) will be announced and crowned victorious at the 2014 SEMA show in Las Vegas on November 4, 2014.
But even if you don’t plan on exercising your inalienable right to reblog crap on Tumblr, you should check out some of the cool images of the customization being done by the six build teams: Bisimoto Engineering, Kontrabrands, MAD Industries, Spoon Sports USA, Tjin Edition, and the award-winning Kenny Vinces. Even lazy non-voters like us enjoyed seeing the new wheels and custom paint jobs that the teams are modding their Fits with. According to Honda, competitors are also installing suspension and audio upgrades, body kits, and more.
In addition to Tumblr, Honda is also spreading #ProjectFit on its Facebook page and Twitter profile, which thankfully has finally stopped tweeting those awful #Cheerance memes. The brand is also promoting the 2015 Honda Fit SEMA Project at automobiles.honda.com.Things change quickly in the smartphone world and what was once a company's flagship, becomes supposedly second best as it makes way for the latest and greatest.
With the Apple iPhone 7 now on the shelves, what of the iPhone 6S? Is the 2015 flagship from Apple still worth considering given that Apple now offers a higher spec model?
At the launch of the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus on the 9 September 2015, Apple said that "the only thing that's changed is everything" and having used the iPhone 6s for a full year, it was right.
Virtually identical design to the iPhone 6
Now comes in Rose Gold
On the surface everything about the iPhone 6S appears the same as the earlier iPhone 6. The form is the familiar finish, complete with curved glass, curved edges, and a polished exterior. But if you read the specs then you'll see the two devices are ever so slightly different: the iPhone 6S measures 138.3 x 67.1 by 7.1mm and weighs 143g compared to the older iPhone 6 which measures 138.1 x 67.0 x 6.9mm and weighs 129g.
So the 6S is heavier and a tiny amount larger, but in the real world you'll be hard pushed to notice the difference in size or weight, we certainly haven't over the last year. If you are worried these tiny changes are going to mean your cases and accessories don't fit anymore, then don't be - we've had no trouble with a range of iPhone 6 accessories we've got in the office.
Apple won't confirm why the iPhone 6S has 14g of extra weight, but the belief is that it's a by-product of the new 3D Touch display (more on that in a bit) and the new stronger aluminium used for the casing (they aren't going to fall foul of bendgate again). The screen delivers the same 750 x 1336 resolution 4.7-inch panel as seen in the iPhone 6.
The other more pronounced change is the option to have the iPhone 6S in a Rose Gold finish, or "bros gold" as we like to call it. Oh, and it's no longer possible to get the iPhone 6 in a Gold finish, which is reserved for the 6S alone. If you're a man, the Rose Gold will get you comments, and it can at times look overly pink, but like a good glass of rose wine, it's soft and whimsical.
So the changes are there, but they don't impact the user experience. The iPhone 6S still looks as good as it did last year, which is a testament to Apple's design approach. Sure, some will moan that the camera protrudes slightly from the rear of the phone, but having used an iPhone 6 for the previous 12 months and now the 6S for the last 12 months, we've not found it to cause too many issues. Besides, Samsung and other manufacturers follow a similar suit with protruding cameras, so while we'd prefer a flush rear the design has almost become the norm across the board.
New pressure sensitive screen for additional commands
One of the biggest changes to how you use the iPhone 6S is the introduction of a new feature called 3D Touch. Working in a similar way to Force Touch on the Apple Watch and MacBook trackpad, the iPhone 6S can now determine how much pressure you place on the screen.
Baked into the core of iOS 9 and iOS 10 - the operating system that ships with the device - and available to third-party app developers, the 3D Touch feature opens a host of new options for users to get to information quickly. On the homescreen, for example, pressing down on certain icons now reveals a secondary level of options. Press on the Phone app icon and after a small haptic buzz the screen reveals your top three favourites to call. Do the same to the camera app icon and you get shortcuts - or as Apple calls them Quick Actions - to elements within the camera like Take Selfie or Record Slo-mo. Different apps provide different Quick Actions: Messages dynamically change based on who you are texting, while we love the Photos option that lets you quickly jump to photos you look a year ago.
But it's not just secondary menus on the homepage. The 3D Touch feature goes further in other ways, with Peek and Pop the primary example. This feature lets you peek into things, such as an email to see what it says without fully opening it, while the pop element is a longer press that then opens what you've been peeking into. This works particularly well for quickly glancing into a specific emails from your inbox, while being able to check your calendar to see if you are free - no need to go through the process of opening your calendar app and then double clicking the home button to return to the Mail app. The one we've been using the most, though, is the ability to press on the small Contacts icon within Messages and Mail to quickly access their details.
As 3D Touch can sense pressure levels, it's also come in handy when sketching in Notes and using the new Markup feature in Mail.
While 3D Touch is very clever and has the potential to add plenty to the experience, we've found over the last 12 months we've failed to really use it effectively. It's nice for deep pressing to get Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or Battery menus from the settings icon, but we've found we've hardly used peek and pop, or other features at all. That might be different for you, but developers have struggled to get to grips using it, and we suspect users have struggled to remember it's there.
The one gesture we've constantly found hardest to perform or remember is the one where pressing on the edge of the screen brings up the app switch menu (usually a double-tap on the home button), which sometimes works, but other times doesn't - probably to do with how we are holding the 6S at the time. Other times we find ourselves cursing ourself when we've forgotten to use the feature altogether, until we forgot to even curse.
12 megapixel rear sensor
5 megapixel front camera
4k video support
While the two cameras on the iPhone 6S look the same as those on the iPhone 6 from the outside, both rear-facing and front-facing cameras have been improved. The rear camera now uses a 12-megapixel sensor, up from 8 megapixels, and comes with the usual Apple tweaks to get the most from the scene in front of you.
Photos are natural in their colours and tones, with the iPhone 6S performing as well as many compact cameras we've seen. In terms of performance, it's able to cope well with a multitude of different shots.
We're impressed with the autofocus too - it actually focuses on the subject, rather than trying to make the whole scene sharp - and copes with an array of lighting scenarios including low-light.
Although the default camera app doesn't allow you granular control over things like white balance and ISO levels, there are plenty of third-party apps that allow you to do just that.
On the front the 6S has a 5-megapixel iSight camera, but most important is a new feature that turns the entire phone screen into a sort of flash for those perfect selfies. Press the shutter button and the phone will analyse the light needed and then change the hue of the white accordingly. We've seen bright clean whites to creamy tones depending on the ambient light situation.
The improvements on the iPhone 6S over the iPhone 6 can be clearly seen, and Apple has continued to move the capabilities of the camera forward in its latest. Shots aren't just bigger in terms of output size, they're better as a result of all those additional tweaks.
Other camera advancements include bigger panoramas that capture even more detail. The main absence is a lack of optical image stabilisation, which the larger iPhone 6S Plus offers, and the more recent iPhone 7.
According to Apple, the problem with still photos is that they don't show what's happening at the time you take the photo. That laugh seconds before or after a magic moment, or the movement in the background of a river or waterfall. Its answer is something it calls Live Photos, which work by taking 1.5 seconds of video before and after the shot to give you a sense of movement to your photos.
Thing is, it's not exactly a brand new feature in the tech world. Look back to Cinemagraph from Nokia, or HTC Zoe, and you'll find similar solutions (ones that aren't talked about much at all these days).
Using the iPhone 6S a spilt second of that captured movement is shown every time you scroll through your images in the Photos app, while a press of the screen using 3D Touch lets you play the whole Live Photo clip.
The iPhone 6S and the 6S Plus are the only two Apple phones that can capture these Live Photos, but it's possible to share them with other iOS 9 and Mac OS X El Capitan users and keep the effect in place. But sending to Android and friends on other platforms won't work - they'll just receive a default still photo instead.
One frustration is that audio is automatically recorded, which at times is lovely - a child's giggle for example - but not so great when you've got the same child screaming in the background.
The people we've shown Live Photos to have fallen into two camps: those with kids and those without. Parents automatically get it and love it. Others, at the moment, not so much, but of the thousands of iPhone Live Photo shots we've taken since the launch of the iPhone 6S there have been some gems that we wouldn't have captured otherwise. A cheeky smile, a firework exploding in the air.
Sometimes though, we found that the Live Photo captured a better image, but the final one wasn't so great. It would be good to be able to pick any moment within that 1.5 seconds.
All that extra video adds to their size too, with a Live Photo being around two still photos in terms of storage. While you can offload some of that to Apple's iCloud Drive service (at a yearly subscription) a 16GB iPhone 6S isn't going to stretch as far as it used to (compounding the argument for a 32GB minimum model).
It's not just still photographs that have had an enhancement. New to the iPhone 6S is the ability to shoot 4K video, although you'll have to make sure you turn on the setting buried deep within the Settings app before you start shooting, as oddly it's not possible to do so from within the Camera app. Perhaps that's because 4K is a bit of a space-eater: a minute of 4K footage we shot came in at 375MB compared to 60MB for a 720p HD clip of the same length, so about six times larger.
Although 4K is very much in its infancy, that is changing fast with the price of 4K UHD TVs coming down and more content becoming available every month (Amazon has just announced the 4K-ready Fire TV with hundreds of 4K TV shows and movies).
The iPhone 6S doesn't feature a 4K screen like the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium, and you can't you stream its content to your television at this resolution via the new Apple TV (that doesn't support 4K either). But that hasn't stopped Apple from being ready when things do start to upgrade around you. While you do wait, you can use the 4K capture to zoom in on the footage you've shot if you want.
Quality is decent. The 3840 x 2160 footage is captured at 30fps, offering smooth playback, but there's no option for slow-motion capture at this higher resolution. If you want to use Slow-mo then that's available at 1080p 120fps and 720p 240fps for smooth playback at up to an eighth of the original speed.
Thanks to Clodge at C S Lewis in Ascot for allowing us to film.
The iPhone 6S now comes with iOS 10 bringing with it a number of new features above iOS 9 that the iPhone 6S launched with. This new software experience is a subtle change over what users will have seen in iOS 9. iOS 10 comes with a number of new features like a dedicated Home app to allow you to control and manage your HomeKit accessories, a much more advanced Messages app that bring things like apps and stickers, and Widgets to the lock screen so you can quickly grab information snippets from your favourite apps (if they are supported).
READ: Apple iOS 10 review: Bringing more complexity and features to your iPhone and iPad
The notion that iOS is a simple operating system is now a long and distant memory, given the complexity it opens up for power users. In iOS 10 Apple has focused on layering the experience with even more complexity and depth than ever before. In the same breath, if you're not a phone geek it's still a breeze to use. The update works well on the iPhone 6S. Giving a new lease of life to the 2015 flagship handset.
Low Power Mode
You would expect all these new features to hammer the battery, but they don't. Apple has not only improved the battery performance with iOS 9, but despite a 5 per cent dip in battery capacity compared to the iPhone 6, we've seen comparable life per charge.
One thing that will help the iPhone 6S last longer than the previous iPhone is the introduction of Low Power Mode. Available to all iPhones running iOS 9 rather than a specific new feature of the 6S, the new mode shuts down all non-essential functions to extend the battery life of the phone. You're asked if you want to turn the Low Power Mode on with 20 per cent remaining and again at the 10 per cent mark, giving you plenty of juice to still be able to order that Uber home at the end of the evening.
In our tests we've been really impressed with longevity. Our iPhone 6S used only 15 per cent of battery in 12 hours with it on, while an iPhone 6S Plus lasted a similar 24 hours for 29 per cent of battery. As ever with a phone, hammer it with the gaming apps and you'll squeeze that juice out faster, but it's all relative.
As a heavy user it won't last you till bedtime on a single charge, especially if you are travelling, so it's advisable for long days to pack a battery charger or a cable to be able to top up at some point.
A9 processor
Up to 240 hours standby, 14 hours of talk time
Apple boosted the power of the iPhone 6S, thus making it faster than the iPhone 6 and the iPad Air 2 as well, and while that has now be superseded by the iPhone 7 it is still a very capable device in terms of performance. There is an updated processor from the iPhone 6, more RAM, and other advances on the speed, efficiency, and technology front.
The motion (co) processor has now been incorporated into the main processor, dubbed the A9, to save power and increase performance, and for the time we've being using the 6S everything has run smoothly and swiftly.
Whether that's editing 4K video on the iPhone with iMovie, or playing graphically demanding games like Real Racing 3 or Asphalt 8 (it still gets a little hot after a while), we've not noticed any lag or latency issues. To the point: the iPhone 6S works.
Touch ID fans will also be pleased to hear the sensor has been upgraded too: it's a lot quicker to respond, although Apple still hasn't been able to solve the issue of not being able to use it with sweaty hands after running or wet fingertips after getting caught in the rain, something we've consistently been frustrated with over the last year, especially coming back from a run.
The iPhone 7 brings a number of changes to the party over the iPhone 6S, although the changes to the 2016 model aren't as pronounced as previous |
collectively create a better society.
I think that a key reason for this is the increasing reliance, concern about, and expectations for increasing individual personal wealth and the role that property ownership plays in this. Increased property prices, and the flow on in costs of living is a major factor in growing inequity within Australia, and other western countries.
There are sound technical solutions to addressing property (this topic has been reviewed over, and over, and over again). But any solution requires political will, and acceptance that those implementing will lose some of their current supporters (although they may also gain some). And who is prepared to show this political will?
The aggression, and fear, that so many people feel about change.
And the way that they sometimes express that, verbally or in writing, towards us. No one deserves personal abuse.
Drawing the line between personal freedom and the need for oversight / intervention.
There are many people who are frustrated, and wish for less red tape / less regulation. There are many others whose response to any matter they don’t agree with is ‘we need more regulations’. Sometimes those supporting regulation and opposing it are one and the same (ie, put controls on our neighbours but not on us – or, at least, not until we’ve finished developing our property).
There is a fine line between putting into place plans and processes that make things work better, and becoming a nanny state, where everyone abrogates responsibility to a government body. The line is not always drawn well. This is probably part of the reason as a profession, many people dislike planners (sadly – we are generally actually pretty nice, and well meaning, people).
The bureaucratic system that we work within.
By necessity, there needs to be some processes in place (checks and balances). Sometimes, however, these processes seem to be there ‘just because’, or ‘that’s the way we have always done things’. Improvements to systems can, and should, always be explored. And more effective ways to assist elected representatives to fully, but efficiently, consider matters, should also be tested.
This bureaucratic concern also extends to a tendency to work within arbitrary administrative boundaries, despite the fact that the implications can often be much broader. This is a real issue that warrants far more attention.
The suspicion that many people seem to have about planners.
Many people seem to think we are somehow corrupt, or lazy, or ‘on the take’ (I have been on the receiving end of these comments lately, unfortunately). It is true that there been some people who have taken advantage of knowledge, and that has given the whole industry a bad name. I doubt, really, that it is any worse that other industries, although there always needs to be ongoing monitoring – which there is).
When things go wrong – which unfortunately can happen.
Sometimes a critical piece of information was not properly considered, or identified, when formulating policy. Sometimes a building is poorly constructed. That can have major, and terrible implications. While not flawless, though, I believe there would be more errors without the oversight that we provide
In summary My list of ‘hates’, is longer than my ‘loves’, I know. But, on balance, the field of planning will always interest me, I think. There are definite flaws in the system – in the degree, breadth and depth of consideration of issues, in the way, and at which point, we involve those affected in helping to determine the best outcomes, and in the timeliness of decision making and actual completions. However, in the main, I do believe outcomes are better through the involvement of planning than in its absence. And I am drawn to playing a role in this process – so, for the time being anyway, I see myself continuing in this field. Phew, I feel better getting that off my chest! How do you feel about your work? What do you love and what do you like less (and how do you deal with that)?
AdvertisementsBy Troy Stangarone
The United Nations (UN) sanctions on North Korea’s fourth nuclear test were flawed. The March sanctions were intended to limit North Korea’s ability to export coal, the most significant licit source of the hard currency that the regime has to fund its nuclear weapons and missile programs, while also not precipitating a humanitarian crisis that could cause instability on the peninsula and worsen the lives of an already deprived North Korean population. However, the livelihood exception proved too loose an exception to limit North Korean coal exports and an unexpected flaw also allowed North Korea to benefit from its coal trade. The new UN sanctions are designed to correct the flaws in the earlier sanctions this year and address other questionable money earning activities by North Korea. Do they succeed?
A shortage of coal for power and steel production in China has led to an unforeseen flaw in the sanctions from March. The failure to account for the influence of market forces that have increased the revenue North Korea generates from exporting coal. With Chinese coal inventories below 20 days’ supply as a result of Chinese efforts to close unsafe mines, there has been a surge of coal imports into China that have also driven up prices. As a result, imports of North Korean coal are up 13 percent by volume over last year’s high and prices in recent months for North Korean coal may be up 68 percent to $90 per ton.
In 2015, North Korea earned a little over $1 billion on exports of 19.6 million metric tons for an average price of $53.47 per metric ton. At those prices over a full year, North Korea could have seen its earnings in coal trade from China remain the same as in 2015 even if the volume of trade fell by close to 40 percent. To preclude this possibility in the future, the new resolution caps both the volume and value of North Korean coal exports at 7.5 million metric tons and $400.1 million per year, respectively, based on whichever cap is reached first.
What is unique about the decision to place a hard cap on North Korean coal exports is that since, in essence, China imports all of North Korea’s coal, China has agreed to restrain its own imports of coal from North Korea. While China has not gone as far towards sanctioning North Korea as many would have hoped in the past, they do share a concern about North Korea’s nuclear weapons. Clearly Beijing has made a calculation that the cap is stringent enough to send a strong message to North Korea about its nuclear program, but not so stringent as to precipitate a collapse of the regime and undermine China’s own strategic interests on the Korean peninsula.
As with any resolution, enforcement is the key. Under the new resolution states will be required to send details of their purchases of North Korean coal to the United Nations for monitoring. Once global imports reach 95 percent of the cap, states are required to cease their purchases of North Korean coal. While there will be incentives for smuggling from the cap, it should be effective in limiting the licit trade in North Korean coal.
The sanctions also address North Korea’s other mineral resources. While UN Security Council Resolution 2270 had already placed prohibitions on exports of iron and iron ore, the new resolution expands those prohibitions to include copper, nickel, silver, and zinc. Exports of minerals such as lead and zinc had returned to normal levels in 2016 after a downturn in 2015 and represented perhaps a way for North Korea to mitigate some of its losses from the trade in coal. That avenue should now be closing as well.
Beyond its efforts to limit North Korea’s trade in coal, the resolution is interesting in its level of specificity on some of North Korea’s money making activities and it begins to lay markers for future areas to sanction. North Korea has been known to use its Embassy’s for money making ventures and use diplomatic privileges to move goods and cash. The resolution makes clear that Embassy purposes should not be used for commercial ventures and that the luggage of diplomats should be considered cargo – specifically pointing out the tendency to transmit money in large bags – and cracks down on the number of bank accounts Embassy and Embassy officials can hold by limiting them to one each.
Two areas where markers are put down for future actions by the Security Council include North Korea’s overseas laborers and technical cooperation with other states. In regards to North Korea’s use of overseas laborers to earn hard currency, the sanctions resolution expresses concern over this practice and calls on “States to exercise vigilance over this practice.” Despite early expectations that North Korea’s use of labors overseas would be banned in the current resolution, its inclusion in the current resolution signals that this is one future area of action for the Security Council should North Korea engage in additional provocations.
The new sanctions also take an important step towards ending North Korea’s weapons development cooperation with states such as Syria and Iran. North Korea is known to have worked with Iran on missile development and is suspected to have cooperated on the development of its nuclear weapons program as well. The new resolution calls for the suspension of all scientific and technical cooperation, other than medical, and for states notify the UN in advance of any technical cooperation that is deemed not related to the nuclear program. It will be interesting to see if future resolutions take more direct aim at these practices.
No sanctions resolution is perfect, but the current resolution takes significant steps towards limiting North Korea’s ability to earn hard currency to finance its weapons programs and reiterates the obligations of states to ensure that all North Korean cargo is inspected so that sanctions are properly enforced. At the same time, we should also keep in mind that sanctions are not a short-term solution to the North Korea problem, but rather a tool to slow North Korea’s progress and provide the pressure needed to convince Pyongyang to return to talks over its weapons programs. If North Korea has not returned to talk in six months, that does not necessarily mean that the sanctions have failed. However, at the same time, the international community needs to also consider being more pro-active when unintended loopholes are discovered.
Troy Stangarone is the Senior Director for Congressional Affairs and Trade at the Korea Economic Institute of America. The views expressed here are the author’s alone.
Photo from United Nations Photo photostream on flickr Creative Commons.Barack Obama has been in office for four and a half years. While it is too early to judge his overall foreign policy legacy, what can be said about the fortunes of the United States in the Middle East is not reassuring. Under Mr Obama, America has been in retreat in the region, sometimes through no fault of the president's, but more often because he has allowed this to happen.
From the start, Mr Obama sought to break with his predecessor George W Bush, who had made US policy in the Middle East a cornerstone of his behaviour overseas. This was due to the September 11, 2001, attacks, which focused Washington's attention on terrorism emanating from the Arab world. US involvement expanded when Mr Bush invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
In December 2011, Mr Obama, a staunch critic of Mr Bush and the Iraq war, ended the US campaign in Iraq, withdrawing troops earlier than had been scheduled. This was welcomed by an American public tired of constant wars abroad, but it left behind a fragile Iraq, just as it was beginning to rediscover relative peace after years of conflict.
Mr Obama washed his hands of a country that had cost the US thousands of lives and billions of dollars without first attempting to contain Iran's growing influence there. While Mr Bush had facilitated Iran's agenda there by removing the Iraqi regime, Mr Obama seemed unperturbed by the fact that Washington's principal regional rival would benefit from too hasty a US disengagement.
The loss of Iraq was compounded by a far more serious strain on American alliances when the so-called Arab Spring broke out in early 2011. No matter how justified, the Obama administration's decision to persuade the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, to step down had two consequences: it pushed an allied country into a prolonged period of political uncertainty and it alarmed another long-standing ally, Saudi Arabia, which came to question American reliability.
After Mr Mubarak's downfall, the US avoided intervening in the Egyptian political process, which was defensible. Less understandable was why the Obama administration did not help the new leadership to consolidate a democratic post-Mubarak political and economic system. The only thing that seemed to truly concern Mr Obama was whether Egypt maintained its peace treaty with Israel.
The US retains influence in Egypt, particularly over the army. But its ties with the Muslim-Brotherhood-dominated government have been variable. This may ultimately make for a healthier relationship than before, but unless Washington helps unify the hopelessly divided political class and encourages economic reform, Egypt may succumb to chronic political and financial instability. Allowing this is not an option for the US, which in over three decades has spent tens of billions of dollars to turn Egypt into a pillar of its regional presence.
The Saudis were distressed with Mr Mubarak's departure, and even more so with the Obama administration's encouragement of it. If the Egyptian leader could be abandoned, the Saudis felt, then why not the Saudi monarchy? In fact that was not Mr Obama's intention and ties between the US and the kingdom have improved since then, although there remains a lack of closeness between the two.
Washington has behaved ambiguously towards Saudi priorities. The administration is not particularly happy with the Saudi-endorsed policy in Bahrain, but has done nothing to prevent it. On Iran and its nuclear programme, the US has imposed sanctions, but continues to avoid any resort to war.
Mr Obama has shown little interest in the region, so the Saudis see a president upon whom they feel they cannot rely. This has handicapped America's ability to enrol the Saudis in its diplomatic ventures, above all peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Mr Obama's initial willingness to depend on an alternative country, Turkey, to help advance American regional interests has failed, as Turkish limitations in the Syrian conflict have become evident.
The notion that America can lead from behind is a fantasy. Without America in the vanguard imposing a common agenda, there will be only cacophony as America's allies pursue separate aims.
Nowhere has this been more obvious than in Syria, with Qatar and Turkey supporting some rebel factions, and the Saudis backing their rivals.
Gone are the days of the 1990s when the US held all the reins in the Middle East. Then, the regional architecture was built on the combination of a friendly Egypt that played a vital role in bolstering American regional diplomacy, Saudi Arabia, which steadied the energy markets, and Israel, which was America's foremost military arm in the region, and whose conflict with the Arabs was supposed to be resolved through an American-sponsored peace process.
Mr Bush's invasion of Iraq sent a shock through the region and shattered the Arab status quo. Iran gained in Iraq, worrying the Sunni Gulf states and heightening Sunni-Shia tensions. Mr Obama, in turn, downgraded America's regional presence, creating a vacuum that its allies have struggled to fill.
Syria's conflict embodies American duality, with the Obama administration frustrated by a fractured opposition pulled on all sides by regional actors, even as Washington remains unwilling to force President Bashar Al Assad from office itself.
The US is an important actor in the Middle East, with tremendous military power, but its ability to shape the region's future has been greatly reduced. Mr Obama's reluctance to be sucked into regional dynamics has left a volatile void.
For the first time, it is possible to discern the contours of a potential post-American Middle East. It's no surprise that Russia, China and Iran are exploiting this opening.
Michael Young is opinion editor of The Daily Star newspaper in Beirut
On Twitter @BeirutCallingrsync is an open source utility that provides fast incremental file transfer.
Installation
Install the package.
rsync must be installed on both the source and the destination machine.
Front-ends
Grsync — GTK+ front-end.
gutback — rsync wrapper written in Shell.
JotaSync — Java Swing GUI for rsync with integrated scheduler.
luckyBackup — Qt front-end written in C++.
Other tools using rsync are and AUR.
As a cp alternative
rsync can be used as an advanced alternative for the cp command, especially for copying larger files:
$ rsync -P source destination
The -P option is the same as --partial --progress, which keeps partially transferred files and shows a progress bar during transfer.
You may want to use the -r / --recursive option to recurse into directories.
Files can be copied locally as with cp, but the motivating purpose of rsync is to copy files remotely, i.e. between two different hosts. Remote locations can be specified with a host-colon syntax:
$ rsync source host:destination
or
$ rsync host:source destination
Network file transfers use the SSH protocol by default and host can be a real hostname or a predefined profile/alias from.ssh/config.
Whether transferring files locally or remotely, rsync first creates a file-list containing information (by default, it is the file size and last modification timestamp) which will then be used to determine if a file needs to be constructed. For each file to be constructed, a weak and strong checksum is found for all blocks such that each block is of length S bytes, non-overlapping, and has an offset which is divisible by S. Using this information a large file can be constructed using rsync without having to transfer the entire file. For a more detailed practical explanation and detailed mathematical explanation refer to how rsync works and the rsync algorithm, respectively.
Note: The use of the term checksum is not interchangeable with the behavior of the --checksum option. The --checksum option affects the file skip heuristic used prior to any file being transferred. Independent of --checksum, a checksum is always used for the block-based file construction which is how rynsc transfers a file.
Trailing slash caveat
Arch by default uses GNU cp (part of GNU ). However, rsync follows the convention of BSD cp, which gives special treatment to source directories with a trailing slash "/". Although
$ rsync -r source destination
creates a directory "destination/source" with the contents of "source", the command
$ rsync -r source/ destination
copies all of the files in "source/" directly into "destination", with no intervening subdirectory - just as if you had invoked it as
$ rsync -r source/. destination
This behavior is different from that of GNU cp, which treats "source" and "source/" identically (but not "source/."). Also, some shells automatically append the trailing slash when tab-completing directory names. Because of these factors, there can be a tendency among new or occasional rsync users to forget about rsync's different behavior, and inadvertently create a mess or even overwrite important files by leaving the trailing slash on the command line.
Thus it can be prudent to use a wrapper script to automatically remove trailing slashes before invoking rsync:
#!/bin/zsh new_args=(); for i in "$@"; do case $i in /) i=/;; */) i=${i%/};; esac new_args+=$i; done exec rsync "${(@)new_args}"
This script can be put somewhere in the path, and aliased to rsync in the shell init file.
As a backup utility
The rsync protocol can easily be used for backups, only transferring files that have changed since the last backup. This section describes a very simple scheduled backup script using rsync, typically used for copying to removable media.
Automated backup
For the sake of this example, the script is created in the /etc/cron.daily directory, and will be run on a daily basis if a cron daemon is installed and properly configured. Configuring and using cron is outside the scope of this article.
First, create a script containing the appropriate command options:
/etc/cron.daily/backup
#!/bin/bash rsync -a --delete --quiet /folder/to/backup /location/of/backup
-a indicates that files should be archived, meaning that most of their characteristics are preserved (but not ACLs, hard links or extended attributes such as capabilities) --delete means files deleted on the source are to be deleted on the backup as well
Here, /folder/to/backup should be changed to what needs to be backed-up ( /home, for example) and /location/of/backup is where the backup should be saved ( /media/disk, for instance).
Finally, the script must be executable:
# chmod +x /etc/cron.daily/backup
Automated backup with SSH
If backing-up to a remote host using SSH, use this script instead:
/etc/cron.daily/backup
#!/bin/bash rsync -a --delete --quiet -e ssh /folder/to/backup remoteuser@remotehost:/location/of/backup
-e ssh tells rsync to use SSH remoteuser is the user on the host remotehost -a groups all these options -rlptgoD (recursive, links, perms, times, group, owner, devices)
Automated backup with NetworkManager
This script starts a backup when network connection is established.
First, create a script containing the appropriate command options:
/etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/backup
#!/bin/bash if [ x"$2" = "xup" ] ; then rsync --force --ignore-errors -a --delete --bwlimit=2000 --files-from=files.rsync /folder/to/backup /location/to/backup fi
-a group all this options -rlptgoD recursive, links, perms, times, group, owner, devices --files-from read the relative path of /folder/to/backup from this file --bwlimit limit I/O bandwidth; KBytes per second
Also, the script must have write permission for owner (root, of course) only (see NetworkManager#Network services with NetworkManager dispatcher for details).
Automated backup with systemd and inotify
Note: Due to the limitations of inotify and systemd (see this question and answer), recursive filesystem monitoring is not possible. Although you can watch a directory and its contents, it will not recurse into subdirectories and watch the contents of them; you must explicitly specify every directory to watch, even if that directory is a child of an already watched directory.
This setup is based on a systemd/User instance.
Instead of running time interval backups with time based schedules, such as those implemented in cron, it is possible to run a backup every time one of the files you are backing up changes. systemd.path units use inotify to monitor the filesystem, and can be used in conjunction with systemd.service files to start any process (in this case your rsync backup) based on a filesystem event.
First, create the systemd.path file that will monitor the files you are backing up:
~/.config/systemd/user/backup.path
[Unit] Description=Checks if paths that are currently being backed up have changed [Path] PathChanged=%h/documents PathChanged=%h/music [Install] WantedBy=default.target
Then create a systemd.service file that will be activated when it detects a change. By default a service file of the same name as the path unit (in this case backup.path ) will be activated, except with the.service extension instead of.path (in this case backup.service ).
Note: If you need to run multiple rsync commands, use Type=oneshot. This allows you to specify multiple ExecStart= parameters, one for each If you need to run multiple rsync commands, use. This allows you to specify multipleparameters, one for each rsync command, that will be executed. Alternatively, you can simply write a script to perform all of your backups, just like cron scripts.
~/.config/systemd/user/backup.service
[Unit] Description=Backs up files [Service] ExecStart=/usr/bin/rsync %h/./documents %h/./music -CERrltm --delete ubuntu:
Now all you have to do is start/enable backup.path like a normal systemd service and it will start monitoring file changes and automatically start backup.service.
Differential backup on a week
This is a useful option of rsync, resulting in a full backup (on each run) and keeping a differential backup copy of changed files only in a separate directory for each day of a week.
First, create a script containing the appropriate command options:
/etc/cron.daily/backup
#!/bin/bash DAY=$(date +%A) if [ -e /location/to/backup/incr/$DAY ] ; then rm -fr /location/to/backup/incr/$DAY fi rsync -a --delete --quiet --inplace --backup --backup-dir=/location/to/backup/incr/$DAY /folder/to/backup/ /location/to/backup/full/
--inplace implies --partial update destination files in-place
Snapshot backup
The same idea can be used to maintain a tree of snapshots of your files. In other words, a directory with date-ordered copies of the files. The copies are made using hardlinks, which means that only files that did change will occupy space. Generally speaking, this is the idea behind Apple's TimeMachine.
This basic script is easy to implement and creates quick incremental snapshots using the --link-dest option to hardlink unchanged files:
/usr/local/bin/snapbackup.sh
#!/bin/bash # Basic snapshot-style rsync backup script # Config OPT="-aPh" LINK="--link-dest=/snapshots/username/last/" SRC="/home/username/files/" SNAP="/snapshots/username/" LAST="/snapshots/username/last" date=`date "+%Y-%b-%d:_%T"` # Run rsync to create snapshot rsync $OPT $LINK $SRC ${SNAP}$date # Remove symlink to previous snapshot rm -f $LAST # Create new symlink to latest snapshot for the next backup to hardlink ln -s ${SNAP}$date $LAST
There must be a symlink to a full backup already in existence as a target for --link-dest. If the most recent snapshot is deleted, the symlink will need to be recreated to point to the most recent snapshot. If --link-dest does not find a working symlink, rsync will proceed to copy all source files instead of only the changes.
A more sophisticated version keeps an up-to-date full backup $SNAP/latest and in case a certain number of files has changed since the last full backup, it creates a snapshot $SNAP/$DATETAG of the current full-backup utilizing cp -al to hardlink unchanged files:
/usr/local/bin/rsnapshot.sh
#!/bin/bash ## my own rsync-based snapshot-style backup procedure ## (cc) marcio rps AT gmail.com # config vars SRC="/home/username/files/" #dont forget trailing slash! SNAP="/snapshots/username" OPTS="-rltgoi --delay-updates --delete --chmod=a-w" MINCHANGES=20 # run this process with real low priority ionice -c 3 -p $$ renice +12 -p $$ # sync rsync $OPTS $SRC $SNAP/latest >> $SNAP/rsync.log # check if enough has changed and if so # make a hardlinked copy named as the date COUNT=$( wc -l $SNAP/rsync.log|cut -d" " -f1 ) if [ $COUNT -gt $MINCHANGES ] ; then DATETAG=$(date +%Y-%m-%d) if [! -e $SNAP/$DATETAG ] ; then cp -al $SNAP/latest $SNAP/$DATETAG chmod u+w $SNAP/$DATETAG mv $SNAP/rsync.log $SNAP/$DATETAG chmod u-w $SNAP/$DATETAG fi fi
To make things really, really simple this script can be run from a systemd/Timers unit.
Full system backup
This section is about using rsync to transfer a copy of the entire / tree, excluding a few selected folders. This approach is considered to be better than disk cloning with dd since it allows for a different size, partition table and filesystem to be used, and better than copying with cp -a as well, because it allows greater control over file permissions, attributes, Access Control Lists and extended attributes.
rsync will work even while the system is running, but files changed during the transfer may or may not be transferred, which can cause undefined behavior of some programs using the transferred files.
This approach works well for migrating an existing installation to a new hard drive or SSD.
Run the following command as root to make sure that rsync can access all system files and preserve the ownership:
# rsync -aAXv --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found"} / /path/to/backup/folder
By using the -aAX set of options, the files are transferred in archive mode which ensures that symbolic links, devices, permissions, ownerships, modification times, ACLs, and extended attributes are preserved, assuming that the target file system supports the feature.
The --exclude option causes files that match the given patterns to be excluded. The contents of /dev, /proc, /sys, /tmp, and /run are excluded in the above command, because they are populated at boot, although the folders themselves are not created. /lost+found is filesystem-specific. The command above depends on brace expansion available in both the bash and zsh shells. When using a different shell, --exclude patterns should be repeated manually. Quoting the exclude patterns will avoid expansion by the shell, which is necessary, for example, when backing up over SSH. Ending the excluded paths with * ensures that the directories themselves are created if they do not already exist.
Note: If you plan on backing up your system somewhere other than /mnt or /media, do not forget to add it to the list of exclude patterns to avoid an infinite loop.
or, do not forget to add it to the list of exclude patterns to avoid an infinite loop. If there are any bind mounts in the system, they should be excluded as well so that the bind mounted contents is copied only once.
If you use a swap file, make sure to exclude it as well.
Consider if you want to backup the /home/ folder. If it contains your data it might be considerably larger than the system. Otherwise consider excluding unimportant subdirectories such as /home/*/.thumbnails/*, /home/*/.cache/mozilla/*, /home/*/.cache/chromium/*, and /home/*/.local/share/Trash/*, depending on software installed on the system. If GVFS is installed, /home/*/.gvfs must be excluded to prevent rsync errors.
You may want to include additional rsync options, such as the following. See for the full list.
If you use many hard links, consider adding the -H option, which is turned off by default due to its memory expense; however, it should be no problem on most modern machines. Many hard links reside under the /usr/ directory.
option, which is turned off by default due to its memory expense; however, it should be no problem on most modern machines. Many hard links reside under the directory. You may want to add rsync's --delete option if you are running this multiple times to the same backup folder. In this case make sure that the source path does not end with /*, or this option will only have effect on the files inside the subdirectories of the source directory, but it will have no effect on the files residing directly inside the source directory.
option if you are running this multiple times to the same backup folder. In this case make sure that the source path does not end with, or this option will only have effect on the files inside the subdirectories of the source directory, but it will have no effect on the files residing directly inside the source directory. If you use any sparse files, such as virtual disks, Docker images and similar, you should add the -S option.
option. The --numeric-ids option will disable mapping of user and group names; instead, numeric group and user IDs will be transfered. This is useful when backing up over SSH or when using a live system to backup different system disk.
option will disable mapping of user and group names; instead, numeric group and user IDs will be transfered. This is useful when backing up over SSH or when using a live system to backup different system disk. Choosing --info=progress2 option instead of -v will show the overall progress info and transfer speed instead of the list of files being transferred.
Restore a backup
If you wish to restore a backup, use the same rsync command that was executed but with the source and destination reversed.
File system cloning
rsync provides a way to do a copy of all data in a file system while preserving as much information as possible, including the file system metadata. It is a procedure of data cloning on a file system level where source and destination file systems do not need to be of the same type. It can be used for backing up, file system migration or data recovery.
rsync's archive mode comes close to being fit for the job, but it does not back up the special file system metadata such as access control lists, extended attributes or sparse file properties. For successful cloning at the file system level, some additional options need to be provided:
rsync -qaHAXS SOURCE_DIR DESTINATION_DIR
And their meaning is (from the manpage):
-H, --hard-links preserve hard links -A, --acls preserve ACLs (implies -p) -X, --xattrs preserve extended attributes -S, --sparse handle sparse files efficiently
Additionally, use -x if you have other filesystems mounted under the tree that you want to exclude from the copy. Produced copy can be simply reread and checked (for example after a data recovery attempt) at the file system level with diff's recursive option:
diff -r SOURCE_DIR DESTINATION_DIR
It is possible to do a successful file system migration by using rsync as described in this article and updating the fstab and bootloader as described in Migrate installation to new hardware. This essentially provides a way to convert any root file system to another one.
rsync daemon
rsync can be run as daemon on a server listening on port 873.
Edit the template /etc/rsyncd.conf, configure a share and start the rsyncd.service.
Note: As of -3.1.2-5 the systemd unit rsyncd.service included in the package adds security feature ProtectSystem=full ( ProtectHome=on has been undone in -3.1.2-8) under the [Service] section. This makes the /boot/, /etc/ and /usr/ directories read-only. If you need rsyncd write system directories you can ProtectSystem=off in the [Service] section of the overriding snippet. As of -3.1.2-5 the systemd unitincluded in the package adds security featurehas been undone in -3.1.2-8) under thesection. This makes theanddirectories read-only. If you need rsyncd write system directories you can edit the unit and setin thesection of the overriding snippet.
Usage from client, e.g. list server content:
$ rsync rsync://server/share
transfer file from client to server:
$ rsync local-file rsync://server/share/
Consider iptables to open port 873 and user authentication.
Note: All transferred data including user authentication are not encrypted.Turkey has reiterated its call to the European Union and NATO allies to take concrete measures against the activities of the PKK terror organization amid rise of activities by the supporters of the group in the member states, and urged for support to Ankara's fight against Daesh, PKK, YPG, and Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) as it acts as a block between terror groups and the Western world.
Addressing the NATO Parliamentary Assembly meeting in Istanbul on Monday, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that Turkey acts as a barried between the threats posed by the terror groups and the rest of the world, as well as the influx of refugees, and continued by adding: "The support you provide to Turkey will add further strength to fight against terror organizations which target our shared security.
"Turkey act as a block between terror groups and the rest of the world, beginning with Europe. If we fail in this fight, meaning if this barrier falls, the terror groups will turn the world into a bloodbath, with a flood fire. We say, instead of weaken this barrier, let's strenthen it. Any support given to Turkey in fight against terror is a contribution that country's securing of its own future," President Erdoğan said.
President Erdoğan criticised the EU for turning a blind eye to the activities of the PKK terror group, including doing terror propaganda, recruiting, and racketeering within their borders, saying all allies states should take necessary concrete measures against the group.
The president's comments came amid recent pro-PKK rallies authorized by the EU member states across several cities, where the supporters of the terror groups were able to carry flags of the group, as well as posters with the photos its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan, despite the group being listed as a terror organization by the EU, the United States, and Turkey.
Ankara has long criticized the EU for being hypocritical on its stance on the PKK, arguing that the EU politicians rhetorical support to Turkey against PKK do not align with their practice and measures against the terror group. Erdoğan added that the EU should take into consideration the warnings given by Turkey against terror groups, as it has a long experience of dealing with them, or sooner or later the EU will be also fall victim and become targets of the terror groups.
"Terror groups use armament made by Western allies"
The president highlighted that Turkey has been the only country with successful results in its fight against Daesh terror group in Syria, while adding that it has also suffered the most from being targeted by Daesh, and also PKK's Syria affiliate YPG terror groups. President Erdoğan added that the weapons captured from the PKK militants were found to be provided by some of Turkey's Western allies.
"Do you know that some of the weapons captured from the groups we declared as terror groups in Iraq and Syria are produced by our allies? An we know these weapons so well, and we even possess their serial numbers. However, when we inform them [the allies], they do not bother caring. Some say they were provided during previous administrations. Others say we do not consider PYD/YPG as a terror group," Erdoğan said and criticized Turkey's allies for picking-and choosing between terror groups.
The U.S. administration has been providing military support to YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces in northern Syria against Daesh, as it considers it the most effective partner in anti-Daesh fight. However, the Washington's support to YPG has been criticized by Ankara as it considers the group as a terror organization, due to its organic organizational links to PKK, and argues that the arms are ultimately used against Turkey. Moreover, Turkey sees the presence of YPG in northern Syria as a national security threat to its sovereignty.
On Sunday, Erdoğan criticized Obama administration's foreign policy on Syria, as well as the isssue related to the extradition of the U.S.-based FETÖ leader, Fetullah Gülen, to Turkey, during an interview with CBS News. The extradition has been a key issue straining Turkey-U.S. relations as Ankara blames Washington for turning the extradition issue into one that is political, rather an a legal one.
Meanwhile, the president commented on the U.S. presidential elections during an interview with the Israeli broadcaster Channel 2, saying the election results must be respected. Und |
In 2005, Blizzard introduced a new area to its popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft. The boss of the area was able to cast a spell called Corrupted Blood, which was supposed to infect and cause damage to all the players nearby. Contrary to what Blizzard planned, however, the players got their pets infected and used them to transmit the disease outside of the area, contaminating pretty much everyone around them. The plague spread through the game servers and thousands of players died. Blizzard managed to create quarantine zones within the game, and shortly afterwards it introduced a ‘cure’ for the infection. Despite the remedies the event created a lot of buzz in online forums and community websites.
10 Woman was virtually raped in Second Life
Belgian user of Second Life was forced, by using a so called “voodoo doll” –a piece of code that takes the form of a regular object as a cup or pen or whatever but in fact gives control of your avatar– to perform sexually explicit behavior. In theory, a user must give his consent in order for other player to take control of his avatar, but using one of the above mentioned voodoo dolls and some persuasion you can make a user (especially a new one) to give access to his avatar. After the incident, Brussels’ public prosecutor asked patrol detectives of the Federal Computer Crime Unit to go on Second Life to investigate the “virtual rape”.The Disappearance of Sally-Anne Perks
Summary:
Harry recalls that a pale little girl called Sally-Anne was sorted into Hufflepuff during his first year, but no one else seems to remember her. Not only is Sally-Anne no longer at Hogwarts; there is no trace of her in the school records, and the professors claim she never existed. Was there really a Sally-Anne? Harry and Hermione set out to solve the chilling mystery of the lost Hogwarts student.
...
There weren't many people left now. "Moon" "Nott" "Parkinson" then a pair of twin girls, "Patil" and "Patil" then "Perks, Sally-Anne" and then, at last - "Potter, Harry!" (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Chapter 7)
Ten minutes later, Professor Flitwick called, "Parkinson, Pansy - Patil, Padma - Patil, Parvati - Potter, Harry." (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Chapter 31)
~At some point between September 1991 and the spring of 1996, Sally-Anne Perks left Hogwarts. Perhaps she dropped out of school. Perhaps she fell ill. Perhaps she died. Or maybe she just vanished...
...
There was a hint of chill in the October evenings. The days were still warm and golden, but at night they could feel frost in the air, an icy breath of the winter that was to come.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione were curled up in front of the fire in the Gryffindor common room. The warmth and the quiet murmuring sounds of the flames were making them comfortably drowsy. Even Hermione had let her book sink down into her lap for a moment and gazed dreamily into the fire.
Harry inhaled the spicy, woodsy scent of the burning hickory and tried to make out shapes in the fire. How many colors there were in the crackling flames! He had always thought of fire as orange; but now he noticed that the dancing flames had all kinds of hues; ocher, amber, shades of deep gold and flaming red, and now and then a flicker of an incandescent blue.
"I can see a pyramid," he mumbled sleepily. "See it? Right there, where the flames lick up a little higher?"
Ron leaned his head to one side, considering. "Nah," he declared finally. "It's not a pyramid at all - it's the Sorting Hat!"
Harry and Hermione laughed a little, but agreed willingly that there was something hat-shaped about the flickering flame.
"I'll never forget how nervous I was the day when we were sorted," said Hermione softly. "More than two years ago..."
"Me too," put in Ron. "I was sure it was going to put me in Slytherin!" He made a face. "My parents would have disowned me."
Harry smiled, but said nothing about his own fears on that day. Perhaps some other time... "I think we were all scared," he said quietly. Even Malfoy looked uncomfortable, and that pale little girl, Sally-Anne Perks, looked like she was going to faint..."
Hermione frowned. "Sally-Anne? Who's that?"
Harry looked at her curiously. "Sally-Anne Perks, the girl who was sorted right before me. She was sorted into Hufflepuff, remember?"
But the look of recollection and recognition he was waiting for never came. Hermione merely shook her head, baffled. "What are you talking about, Harry? There was no Sally-Anne."
"Of course there was. How can you not remember her? You usually remember everything." Suddenly a thought struck him. "Wait, how odd - I don't recall seeing her much after that... How strange, I never thought much about her. I noticed her when she was getting sorted, because her last name was right before mine, and I knew that my turn would be coming soon. But I don't actually remember seeing her since that day. She was a Hufflepuff, but she was never in any of our classes. She must have left school shortly after the sorting... I wonder why."
Then he noticed a very odd look on Ron's face.
"What? What is it, Ron? Oh... Did you hear what happened to her? Was it something - something bad?"
Harry felt a stab of pity for the long-forgotten Sally-Anne. He remembered a thin, little face, so pale it seemed almost translucent, light blue eyes widened in fear, a sprinkling of freckles over her nose, hands clutching the edges of the stool as she sat down, waiting for the sorting hat to descend upon her head. He hoped that nothing bad had happened to her, no sickness or terrible accident. Perhaps she had simply been so homesick that her parents had taken her home?
"Harry, what are you talking about? There was no Sally-Anne." Ron was looking at him with an expression of concern, but suddenly Harry realized that it was for him, and not for Sally-Anne.
Harry began to wonder if he was dreaming. "Oh, don't tell me that you don't remember her either! She was sorted right before me. Perks, Sally-Anne. And then me: Potter, Harry."
"Harry-?" Hermione's hand was on his arm now. Her voice was gentle. "Harry, what is this? What are you talking about? I remember the sorting as well as you do, every moment of it. It was the hour when our destinies were decided; how could I forget any of it?"
She took a deep breath. "Harry, what is happening to you? Are you hallucinating? There never was a Sally-Anne. You were sorted right after the Patil twins."
In spite of the heat from the fire, Harry felt an icy shiver. Something was terribly wrong.
He shook his head, stubbornly. What was wrong with Ron and Hermione? How could they have forgotten her, simply because she had left school after... after how long, exactly? He tried to remember if he had ever seen her again. No, they hadn't had any classes with the Hufflepuffs until the second year, and by then she was gone.
He got up abruptly.
"Where are you going?" Why was there such an anxious look on Hermione's face?
"To the Hufflepuff common room." Harry tried to keep his voice steady. "Someone there will remember her, even if she wasn't here for very long."
...
But the Hufflepuffs did not remember Sally-Anne.
Much to his surprise, Harry was able to enter their common room in the cellar without a password; he walked up to the door, and it opened before him. He looked bewildered around the cozy circular room with the deep, comfortable armchairs and the gold tapestries on the wall. Wasn't something supposed to stop him from entering?
Then he heard a soft silvery laugh. Susan Bones was looking at him with amusement.
"It's all right, Harry. There is no password."
"No password? But what keeps unwelcome visitors away, then?"
Susan smiled, dimples showing in her round, pink cheeks. "What keeps them away are their own assumptions. Like the assumption that there is a password."
"Oh." Harry began to feel a growing respect for the Hufflepuffs.
Susan closed her book. "Some things," she said softly, "are too difficult to comprehend. But more often, people don't understand because things are too simple. Like our password."
Her smile grew mischievous. "What can I do for you, Harry, now that you have broken our secret code by wandering in through the door?"
A few of the other Hufflepuffs had gathered round them by now. Ernie MacMillan, Hannah Abbot, Justin Finch-Fletchley...
Harry looked around at the friendly faces. He drew his breath deeply. "I was wondering if you remember a girl called Sally-Anne?"
A look of gentle confusion spread over their pleasant faces. They shook their heads, asked a few curious questions and answered his in return. No, no one had ever heard of Sally-Anne Perks. Yes, they remembered the sorting, of course they did; who could forget?
Harry grew exasperated. He wasn't mad, she had existed... But the Hufflepuffs were looking at him with expressions of innocent bewilderment; they knew nothing of Sally-Anne.
"Tell me," he said finally, "how many girls were sorted into Hufflepuff in our first year."
It was Hannah Abbot who answered, the sweet girl with pigtails. "Four. There were four of us, Harry. Susan Bones, Leanne Robinson, Megan Jones, and me."
Harry studied her face. No, there was no deception in it. "But weren't there five girls and five boys sorted into each house?" he asked, desperately. "Gryffindor had five girls, Ravenclaw had five, and Slytherin had five as well. Why would Hufflepuff have four girls and five boys?"
Hannah looked baffled. "I don't know," she said slowly. "Coming to thing of it, that really wasn't fair, was it? Perhaps it was yet another example of people shortchanging the Hufflepuffs."
There was a murmur of agreement, and Harry gave up. He thanked the Hufflepuff students and went back to Gryffindor Tower.
Ron and Hermione were still sitting on the floor in front of the fire, but a few feet apart now. Had they had an argument? Hermione looked up at him as he entered.
"What did you find out, Harry?"
He shook his head. "Nothing much. They don't remember her either. But they do think it odd that there were only four Hufflepuff girls in our year, and five in the other houses."
Hermione looked thoughtful, but Ron simply stretched and yawned: "Well, if the Hufflepuffs don't remember her, then she didn't get sorted into Hufflepuff, did she? You just imagined her, Harry. Don't worry, mate, it's easy to get confused - that first day at Hogwarts was overwhelming for all of us. Hard to keep things straight."
"I did not imagine her!"
But Ron merely shrugged at Harry's outburst of anger, shook his head and wandered off. Soon, he had engaged Neville in a game of exploding snap in the far corner of the common room, and by the looks of Neville's singed robes, Ron was winning by a good margin.
Harry turned his glance away from Ron and stared into the fire. Why couldn't Ron try to believe him, just for a minute? His memory of Sally-Anne, so vivid a little while ago, began to blur in the face of Ron's blatant disbelief. Had he just imagined her? Was she a figment of his imagination, like the outline of the pyramid he had glimpsed in the fire?
"Harry, let's go and see McGonagall." Hermione's voice, intruding on his thoughts, had a determined ring to it.
Harry looked up at her, uncomprehending. "McGonagall? Why do we need to see McGonagall?"
There was a look of both exasperation and tenderness on Hermione's face as she answered: "Why? To ask her about Sally-Anne, of course."
"You believe me then-?" Harry's voice came out as a whisper.
"I don't know what I believe, Harry," said Hermione softly. "I don't know if there was a Sally-Anne or not. But I do believe that you have a vivid recollection of someone that the rest of us don't remember, and that is in itself very odd. And the number of girls sorted into Hufflepuff that year... I never thought about it before, but you are right: There should have been one more. Have you ever noticed that the new students are always sorted evenly into each of the four houses? There is something about the very magic of Hogwarts itself, and perhaps of the Sorting Hat as well, that strives for balance, for symmetry: The four houses need to be equal in strength, equal in number... There can't have been only four Hufflepuff girls." She swallowed. "And therefore, it makes sense that one must be missing... Let's see McGonagall, Harry; she was in charge of the sorting."
She reached out her hand, and Harry grasped it gratefully. They walked through the by now deserted ancient corridors in silence.
"Enter!" Professor McGonagall's brisk voice answered their hesitant knock.
"Ah, Mr. Potter and Miss Granger!" McGonagall's kind homely face lit up at the sight of them. "What can I do for you? Isn't it a little late for you two to be up?"
Then, as she saw their faces, she added quickly. "Sit down, children. Is something wrong?"
Harry and Hermione sank down in the chairs she offered them. Harry took a deep breath.
"Professor, do you remember the day we were sorted, Hermione and I?"
McGonagall put the quill she had been holding down on her desk and beamed at them. "Of course I do, Mr. Potter. How could I forget the day when Harry Potter was sorted into my house?" Harry felt himself smile at the pride in her voice. McGonagall added quickly: "And you too, of course, Miss Granger. Harry had been preceded by his reputation, of course, but you I did not know yet. But I pride myself on being able to read a child's character and ability in their face, and you have lived up to the promise your determined little face held that evening."
"Professor," Harry asked quietly. "Do you remember the Hufflepuff students? Do you remember a girl named Sally-Anne Perks?"
Was it his imagination, or did McGonagall's hand tremble for a second? No, it must have been an illusion; her hand was steady and her voice clear and firm as she answered, with a note of surprise in her voice: "Sally-Anne Perks? In Hufflepuff? No, there was no such student, Harry."
"But I remember her!"
McGonagall looked surprised at his violent outburst. "Remember her? No, you must be mistaken, Harry." She smiled at him, a tender, almost motherly smile. "Sometimes our minds play tricks on us, Harry. But I think I can put your mind to rest."
She got up and retrieved a heavy leather-covered book from a locked cabinet on the wall. "Look, Harry, these are the Hogwarts records; I am assigned as keeper of this book. The name of all students who ever enter Hogwarts are magically recorded here, along with their houses and their sorting dates, exam results, and so forth."
She opened the ancient volume and began to leaf through it. "Let us see now; you were sorted in 1991, on the first day of September. Ah, here we are. Patil, Padma. Patil, Parvati. Potter, Harry. Take a look, Harry. You can see for yourself that there was no Miss... Perkins, did you say?"
"Perks."
"Ah, yes. Perks. And as you can see from the Hufflepuff lists from 1991, there were only four girls sorted into Hufflepuff that year. And here are the class lists; as you can see, there was no Miss Perks in any of the classes offered that fall."
"Oh." Harry sank back in his chair, wondering whether to feel relieved or miserable. So it had all been an illusion, then. Why was there something so strangely melancholy about that thought? The pale Sally-Anne had never been real. But how could her face be so vivid in his mind?
"Thank you, Professor." Hermione exchanged a few polite phrases with McGonagall, then took Harry's arm and led him gently outside. As the office door closed behind them, Harry whispered: "Well, I guess that settles it, then."
"It certainly does." What was the strange light in Hermione's eyes? She dragged him around the corner, into a deserted corridor.
"She's lying! McGongall is lying! Now I know for certain that she existed, your apocryphal Hufflepuff."
"What? But we just saw the records..."
Hermione shook her head, impatiently. "Didn't you see it? Did you see how her hands were shaking when you mentioned Sally-Anne? And then she showed us the school records! Professor McGongall, the keeper of the secret Hogwarts records, showed the confidential Hogwarts books to two students, simply because one of them claims to remember a student who was never there. Why would she do such a thing? She could have shrugged the whole thing off. Or she could have worried about your false memory and sent you off to the hospital wing for some rest. But she did neither. Instead, she went out of her way to prove to you that Sally-Anne only existed in your dreams... Why?"
"I don't know." Harry felt his head spinning. "Hermione, you can't be suggesting that McGonagall is trying to conceal some kind of crime? If Sally-Anne does not exist in the school records, and not in anyone's memory, except for mine, then perhaps she was never real..."
Hermione shook her head. "School records can be falsified, even magical ones. Minds can be wiped, memories modified..."
"But why wasn't my mind modified, if everyone else's was?"
Hermione looked at him. "Perhaps..." she said slowly, "perhaps your mind is different somehow, Harry." She caught sight of his face. "Oh, I don't mean that you are crazy. But we know that your mind is different in certain significant ways. You can speak to snakes, for example. Perhaps whatever makes you a Parselmouth also protects you from memory modification."
She stood silently for a moment, a faraway look on her face. "I wonder..." she said dreamily, "I wonder if someone would actually remember to modify every single record of a person's existence. It would be hard to do, you know. You would remember the big things, like school records, and classmates' memories, but it would be easy to overlook something, something minor and insignificant."
She was lost in thought as they walked back to the Gryffindor common room. Ron looked up when they entered, but soon pretended to ignore them. Apparently, he was tired of the non-existent Hufflepuff. He headed upstairs with Seamus and Dean, and Harry and Hermione were left alone in the common room.
Hermione looked quickly around, then whispered to Harry: "I need some help with my homework."
Whatever Harry had expected her to say, that wasn't it. He simply stared at her.
"What-?"
"My homework, Harry." There was a little smile hovering around her mouth now. "I was wondering if you could call Dobby; he may be able to help with a particularly tricky part." She pulled out a piece of parchment and got a quill ready.
Baffled, Harry said into the empty air: "Hey, Dobby?"
And Dobby appeared with a crack, his huge gooseberry eyes watery with excitement. "Harry Potter called?"
"Hi, Dobby," Harry said gently. "Thank you for coming." He cut off Dobby's protestations of gratitude over Harry's great kindness in actually thanking him. "My friend Hermione needs some help with her...er... homework."
"Dobby," said Hermione kindly. "I am working on a particularly tricky independent study project for arithmancy, and I was wondering if you would be able to help."
Dobby squealed excitedly. "Dobby would be happy to help, Miss. Dobby is knowing a great deal about arithmancy, both gematria and runic numerology. All house-elves do."
"Really?" Hermione sounded surprised, but she hastened to add: "Dobby, I am studying a particularly obscure and little known branch of Muggle arithmancy known as statistics."
"Statistics?" Dobbby tasted the unfamiliar word thoughtfully. "Dobby is not knowing that word, Miss."
Hermione shook her wild hair out of her face and smiled at him. "Very few in the wizarding world have ever heard of this field, Dobby. But the principles are easy enough to understand: We gather numbers about all sorts of things, odd and arbitrary things, like the number of steps in a staircase, the height of children, the number of people falling ill from a particular disease. And then we study the patterns that emerge from these random numbers. And those patterns, Dobby, sometimes tell a story that individual numbers can't."
"Oh!" Dobby's eyes shone as he pondered the wondrous mysteries of statistics.
"So I was wondering, Dobby," Hermione said softly, "if you could help me gather some numbers?"
Dobby nodded eagerly, and she went on: "I would be particularly anxious, for example, to learn about the number of Hogwarts students who are served dinner in the Great Hall every night. I have noticed that there is precisely the right number of plates at each meal, never too many or too few. How can that be?"
"Enchantments, Miss," Dobby was delighted to share what he knew with Hermione. "The number of plates required always appears in the magic fire in the kitchen, along with vital information about special dietary requirements and so forth."
Hermione smiled gently at him. "Dobby? It would be so tremendously helpful to me if you could give me some numbers about the Hogwarts dinner service for an arbitrary time period. Say for example..." She glanced down at her parchment. "For example the month of September 1991. Could you tell me how many students ate dinner at Hogwarts each night in September that year?"
"Yes, of course, Miss!" Dobby nodded happily and disappeared with a little bang.
They waited in silence. It took Dobby less than half an hour to get back.
"Harry Potter and Miss Granger, Dobby's got statistics!" He held out his notes proudly and began to recite in a solemn voice: "Student dinners served at Hogwarts. September 1, 1991: 412. September 2: 412. September 3: 412. September 4: 412. September 5: 412. September 6: 412. September 7: 412. September 8: 411. September 9: 411..." He read out the numbers until the end of the month. After September 7, there had only been 411 students in the Great Hall for dinner every night.
"Thank you, Dobby," Hermione whispered. "That is exactly what I need..."
Dobby vanished with a smile and a puff, but Harry and Hermione stood frozen, looking silently at one another. Sally-Anne Perks had been at Hogwarts for seven days, before vanishing into thin air. What had happened to her during those seven days?By Saibal Chtterjee
Cannes, May 23 (PTI) A powerful new documentary film about former US vice president Al Gores sustained campaign to encourage renewable energy use across the world, gives Indias part in the climate change movement a starring role.
"An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power", directed by the American directing duo of Jon Shenk and Bonni Cohen, premiered at the 70th Cannes Film Festival yesterday.
At one point, the film shows Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his speech at the November 2015 Paris Climate Conference, insisting on continuing with conventional energy so as not to put up barriers in the path of development.
India is even referred to as "the biggest holdout in the negotiations." But by the end of the conference, the narrative undergoes a change, with India changing its stance and throwing its weight behind the Paris Agreement.
Gore, the central figure in "An Inconvenient Sequel", had a special word of praise for India.
"India is doing a commendable job in moving from coal to solar power to meet its energy needs," he said after the films world premiere in the festivals Special Screenings section.
Gores decades-long campaign culminated in the Paris Climate Conference in November 2015.
"An Inconvenient Sequel" tracks the progress made by him in the ten years since "An Inconvenient Truth" put the global spotlight on the question of climate change and what needs to be done to reverse it.
Talking to the press, co-director Jon Shenk said: "This film is about a truly epic battle between all those who have got us into the mess we are in today and those who want to do things in a new, sustainable way."
For Al Gore, it has proven to be a powerful medium. "When An Inconvenient Truth premiered in Cannes, I learned something I did not know before. Film is the most effective medium to deliver a message. The news environment is so messy and chaotic today that it is difficult to get focussed attention," he said.
While in the film he laments the distortions that have crept into democracy, he asserted that the climate change fight is now "a hopeful cause because we have the solutions".
"The solutions are available. It is important to summon the political will to identify and apply them," Gore added.
He said that "the influx of big money" is posing a real threat to US democracy. But he was quick to add: "I have a great deal of hope that democracy will be revivified." PTI CORR BKDogs rescued from South Korean meat farm brought to S.F.
Dr. Kate Kuzminski (left) and Adam Parascandola transport Delilah, a Tosa mix, to a crate in San Francisco. Dr. Kate Kuzminski (left) and Adam Parascandola transport Delilah, a Tosa mix, to a crate in San Francisco. Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 10 Caption Close Dogs rescued from South Korean meat farm brought to S.F. 1 / 10 Back to Gallery
Thirteen frightened young dogs and puppies arrived in San Francisco in a van Thursday, some trembling, tails between their legs, others with sad but hopeful eyes, and all of them unaware of how close they came to an agonizing, gruesome death.
They were the last of 57 dogs that were rescued from a dog meat farm in South Korea, part of a program by Humane Society International to bring awareness to and ultimately end the cruel treatment and consumption of canines.
The dogs were brought to the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, where clapping and cheers were heard when the first terrified canine, a 120-pound short-haired mastiff-type breed known as a Tosa, was carried out of his crate.
The muscular, droopy-eyed dog, whom humane society workers named Austin, sat back in his crate and silently resisted when workers put a leash on him and tried to lure him out.
“C’mon, sweetheart,” cajoled Adam Parascandola, the director of animal protection and crisis response for Humane Society International. Workers were forced to remove the top of the crate and carry the panting dog into his plush cage at the SPCA.
“This is very frightening for them,” Parascandola said. “These guys have never been out of their cages, let alone off the farm, so its very hard on them. He’s not a bad dog. He’s just terrified.”
The next pooch, named Delilah, was easier and some actually walked by themselves into cages. There were several puppies. Not a growl or a bark was heard, as the dogs had been bred to be docile, Parascandola said.
“It’s fantastic. I am so excited to see the dogs here,” Parascandola said. “The conditions on the farm are horrendous. It’s been very stressful but totally worth it.”
It hasn’t been easy work. The dogs were kept in small, dank, filthy and crowded cages in South Korea, where they were to be slaughtered and eaten. It is the fate of about 2 million canines per year in the Asian country. The animals, including beagles, poodles, Korean Jindos and Tosas ranging from lap-dog size to well over 100 pounds, were exposed to the weather and had never seen the light of day or felt a tinge of human kindness.
“Some of these dogs were in a terrible state both physically and mentally. They’ve been starved of love their whole lives, living in fear and deprivation,” said Lola Webber, the Humane Society Asia campaign manager and the director of the Change for Animals Foundation in South Korea. “As soon as we opened their cage doors and they realized we weren’t going to harm them, they wagged their tails and licked our faces. I felt very privileged to give these dogs the first-ever cuddle and kiss of their lives.”
Patience needed
The rescue marks the first time dogs bred and raised for food will be put up for adoption in California. The 57 pooches, all younger than 2, will be made available for adoption at the San Francisco SPCA, the Marin Humane Society, East Bay SPCA and Sacramento SPCA, after medical checkups, treatment and evaluations for aggression, psychological or social issues, officials said.
Anyone who adopts one of the dogs will need to be patient and dedicated to the cause, said Jennifer Scarlett, the co-president of the San Francisco SPCA. None of the dogs has been socialized or lived outside a cage, let alone house-trained.
“Many of them are shy, but we are confident they can live comfortable and happily in the United States,” said Scarlett, who expects to have some ready for adoption immediately after the three- to five-day quarantine. “There are some dogs that are ready to go and won’t even blink an eye and others that are quite frightened.”
Consumption of dog meat is not uncommon in several Asian countries, including China. It can be traced back thousands of years in South Korea, where dog bones have been excavated in Neolithic settlements. A fourth-century wall painting in the Goguryeo tombs, in South Hwanghae province, depicts a slaughtered dog in a storehouse.
Practice dwindling
The popularity of dog meat today has diminished. Only a small percentage of the population still eats it regularly, and a vocal group of Koreans wants it banned.
The San Francisco dog rescue operation marks the second time dogs being raised for their meat in South Korea have been rescued and brought to America. In February, Humane Society International brought 23 dogs to New Jersey for adoption. The farmer in that case agreed to relinquish his dogs in exchange for help transitioning to blueberry farming.
The farmer in this latest rescue, Tae Hyung Lee, agreed to give up dog breeding after 20 years because of criticism from his family. He closed his farm and plans to grow produce. The Humane Society has agreed to help him financially with the transformation.
“I think a lot of people want to get out of the dog meat trade,” Lee was quoted as saying to Humane Society workers. “People don’t like dog meat like in the past.”
Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @pfimriteIn a lengthy Facebook post (Facebook is turning out to be the preferred communication platform among Ukrainian leaders), Marchuk discusses the tactics the rebels may have taken with the bodies, and how that can interfere with the standard procedure of an aviation investigation. The Wire has translated his post to the best of our ability (our emphasis added):
Few words for those who are interested in airplane catastrophes. People who were involved in the investigation of such catastrophes (I was involved twice) will tell you immediately that prolonged storage of black boxes, should be two of them, can nullify importance of their evidence, or even can show false evidence. Specialists know it very well.
I can not and must not give any details. Forced removal of victims bodies 28 (?) by terrorists may show evidence that instructors had arrived and chosen which bodies should be removed immediately. It may be bodies on which, during visual checking of surface penetrating wounds, pieces of the missile or ammunition which shot the plane [were visible.] It is undeniable evidence. Metal and material expertise provide undeniable evidence.
Additionally, it is very easy to find the seat of each passenger based on sold tickets, and if he or she had seat belts fastened, and there were a lot of people like that, based on the character and angle of penetration of missile fragments, it is easy to establish the point of the explosion. And if such penetrating wounds were found in many passengers, and they established their seats in the airplane, and it is not a problem, then the starting point of missile and fragments (that is the point of explosion) it made be detected with precision to few centimeters. Besides that, all fallen parts of airplane must be found, especially parts of the fuselage.
Specialists will attach them on special frame. This frame, one to one, repeats the fuselage of the plane. It is a very important part of the investigation. As a result, the point and size of impact can be very easily and absolutely established. Later, they compared the angle of the movement of airplane and the angle of penetration of the missile (the body of the airplane) and the conversation between the crew members and the ground (one black box) and records of all telemetric aircraft systems (the second black box) and, further, the question of technique.
Based on the size of the destruction, establish strength of charge (BC,) and for BUK it is known, and the trajectory of the missile, and contents of this missile (if there are fragments of the missile in the bodies of victims, and in their belongings, and in different parts of the airplane.) Some ammunition has such a structure that they don't penetrate in the body of the airplane, but explode next to the airplane and in such a case, the whole body of the plane will be filled with pieces of the missile, maybe steel balls for ball bearings (as in the case of C-200.) But for this investigation, it is irrelevant.
I think the terrorists are not in vain to not allow our international experts full access to the site of tragedy (it is 25 square kilometers) and they removed the bodies of the deceased. Other specialists are working there, who know very well how crashes like this are investigated, and they know very well what to take away, what to destroy, or burn on site (well, everything burned already.)
They quickly removed the BUK [missile system], blocking access to site for experts, manipulation of "black boxes" (they are not actually black), this is evidence of attempts to hamper the investigation. Here I have outlined one-thousandth of what is being investigated in these cases. Russia has huge experience with such investigations. But international experience with such investigations is far superior to Russian. Russia understands if an international investigation will get everything everything to establish the truth, the results will be deplorable. Not to mention that Russia as a country gave into the hands of terrorists high precision weapons.Most people now look on unethical money as tainted, research has suggested, in a reversal of the stereotypical 1980s theory that "greed was good".
The study showed that this stems from fear of'moral contagion' and suggests that the source of wealth really does matter.
When people think of money as ill gotten gains - such as that earned from unfair work practices or unfair trading - they attached less value and purchasing power to it.
This could explain why there has been so many recent trends for both socially responsible investing and the boycotting of sweatshops, scientists from the University of California Berkeley have claimed.
Writing in journal Social Psychology and Personality Science, doctoral student Jennifer Stellar said: "Our work suggests morality is an important force shaping economic decision-making.
"Though we often think $50 is $50, these results demonstrate that when money takes on negative moral associations, its value is diminished."
The findings could also shed light on why companies go to great lengths to avoid the perception that they are accepting money from corrupt investors or are themselves profiting from illegal or unethical practices, said Professor Robb Willer.
He said: "People possess powerful motivations to view themselves as fundamentally good and moral.
"We find this motivation is so great that it can even lead people to disassociate themselves from money that has acquired negative moral associations."
In an experiment, 59 college-age participants were told they could enter a raffle for a $50 cash prize sponsored by one of two corporations.
They were then split into an "immoral money" group and a "neutral money" group.
The neutral money group was told that the raffle prize money was provided by a major supermarket.
Meanwhile, the "immoral money" group was told that the source of the prize money was another supermarket said to engage in unfair labour practices - and it was suggested the prize money might be linked to those practices.
Those in the second group entered less raffle tickets than those in the first. They were then asked to estimate how many items they could buy from each store with the $50.
Those in the immoral group estimated they could buy fewer items with the money.
"Money is often believed to separate individuals from their moral values," Prof Willer said. "However, our results suggest that, for most people, morality is a powerful force that shapes economic decisions and even alters how we perceive the value of money itself."Mediacom to cap internet usage at 250 gigabytes per billing cycle
Advertise on NIT • |
alternately for the even-offset bytes and the odd-offset bytes in the byte sequence. Each byte value is actually represented by two different words, depending on whether that byte appears at an even or an odd offset from the beginning of the byte sequence. The two lists are readily distinguished by the number of syllables; the even list has words of two syllables, the odd list has three. The two lists have a maximum word length of 9 and 11 letters, respectively. Using a two-list scheme was suggested by Zhahai Stewart.
Hex Even Word Odd Word 00 aardvark adroitness 01 absurd adviser 02 accrue aftermath 03 acme aggregate 04 adrift alkali 05 adult almighty 06 afflict amulet 07 ahead amusement 08 aimless antenna 09 Algol applicant 0A allow Apollo 0B alone armistice 0C ammo article 0D ancient asteroid 0E apple Atlantic 0F artist atmosphere 10 assume autopsy 11 Athens Babylon 12 atlas backwater 13 Aztec barbecue 14 baboon belowground 15 backfield bifocals 16 backward bodyguard 17 banjo bookseller 18 beaming borderline 19 bedlamp bottomless 1A beehive Bradbury 1B beeswax bravado 1C befriend Brazilian 1D Belfast breakaway 1E berserk Burlington 1F billiard businessman 20 bison butterfat 21 blackjack Camelot 22 blockade candidate 23 blowtorch cannonball 24 bluebird Capricorn 25 bombast caravan 26 bookshelf caretaker 27 brackish celebrate 28 breadline cellulose 29 breakup certify 2A brickyard chambermaid 2B briefcase Cherokee 2C Burbank Chicago 2D button clergyman 2E buzzard coherence 2F cement combustion 30 chairlift commando 31 chatter company 32 checkup component 33 chisel concurrent 34 choking confidence 35 chopper conformist 36 Christmas congregate 37 clamshell consensus 38 classic consulting 39 classroom corporate 3A cleanup corrosion 3B clockwork councilman 3C cobra crossover 3D commence crucifix 3E concert cumbersome 3F cowbell customer
Hex Even Word Odd Word 40 crackdown Dakota 41 cranky decadence 42 crowfoot December 43 crucial decimal 44 crumpled designing 45 crusade detector 46 cubic detergent 47 dashboard determine 48 deadbolt dictator 49 deckhand dinosaur 4A dogsled direction 4B dragnet disable 4C drainage disbelief 4D dreadful disruptive 4E drifter distortion 4F dropper document 50 drumbeat embezzle 51 drunken enchanting 52 Dupont enrollment 53 dwelling enterprise 54 eating equation 55 edict equipment 56 egghead escapade 57 eightball Eskimo 58 endorse everyday 59 endow examine 5A enlist existence 5B erase exodus 5C escape fascinate 5D exceed filament 5E eyeglass finicky 5F eyetooth forever 60 facial fortitude 61 fallout frequency 62 flagpole gadgetry 63 flatfoot Galveston 64 flytrap getaway 65 fracture glossary 66 framework gossamer 67 freedom graduate 68 frighten gravity 69 gazelle guitarist 6A Geiger hamburger 6B glitter Hamilton 6C glucose handiwork 6D goggles hazardous 6E goldfish headwaters 6F gremlin hemisphere 70 guidance hesitate 71 hamlet hideaway 72 highchair holiness 73 hockey hurricane 74 indoors hydraulic 75 indulge impartial 76 inverse impetus 77 involve inception 78 island indigo 79 jawbone inertia 7A keyboard infancy 7B kickoff inferno 7C kiwi informant 7D klaxon insincere 7E locale insurgent 7F lockup integrate
Hex Even Word Odd Word 80 merit intention 81 minnow inventive 82 miser Istanbul 83 Mohawk Jamaica 84 mural Jupiter 85 music leprosy 86 necklace letterhead 87 Neptune liberty 88 newborn maritime 89 nightbird matchmaker 8A Oakland maverick 8B obtuse Medusa 8C offload megaton 8D optic microscope 8E orca microwave 8F payday midsummer 90 peachy millionaire 91 pheasant miracle 92 physique misnomer 93 playhouse molasses 94 Pluto molecule 95 preclude Montana 96 prefer monument 97 preshrunk mosquito 98 printer narrative 99 prowler nebula 9A pupil newsletter 9B puppy Norwegian 9C python October 9D quadrant Ohio 9E quiver onlooker 9F quota opulent A0 ragtime Orlando A1 ratchet outfielder A2 rebirth Pacific A3 reform pandemic A4 regain Pandora A5 reindeer paperweight A6 rematch paragon A7 repay paragraph A8 retouch paramount A9 revenge passenger AA reward pedigree AB rhythm Pegasus AC ribcage penetrate AD ringbolt perceptive AE robust performance AF rocker pharmacy B0 ruffled phonetic B1 sailboat photograph B2 sawdust pioneer B3 scallion pocketful B4 scenic politeness B5 scorecard positive B6 Scotland potato B7 seabird processor B8 select provincial B9 sentence proximate BA shadow puberty BB shamrock publisher BC showgirl pyramid BD skullcap quantity BE skydive racketeer BF slingshot rebellion
Hex Even Word Odd Word C0 slowdown recipe C1 snapline recover C2 snapshot repellent C3 snowcap replica C4 snowslide reproduce C5 solo resistor C6 southward responsive C7 soybean retraction C8 spaniel retrieval C9 spearhead retrospect CA spellbind revenue CB spheroid revival CC spigot revolver CD spindle sandalwood CE spyglass sardonic CF stagehand Saturday D0 stagnate savagery D1 stairway scavenger D2 standard sensation D3 stapler sociable D4 steamship souvenir D5 sterling specialist D6 stockman speculate D7 stopwatch stethoscope D8 stormy stupendous D9 sugar supportive DA surmount surrender DB suspense suspicious DC sweatband sympathy DD swelter tambourine DE tactics telephone DF talon therapist E0 tapeworm tobacco E1 tempest tolerance E2 tiger tomorrow E3 tissue torpedo E4 tonic tradition E5 topmost travesty E6 tracker trombonist E7 transit truncated E8 trauma typewriter E9 treadmill ultimate EA Trojan undaunted EB trouble underfoot EC tumor unicorn ED tunnel unify EE tycoon universe EF uncut unravel F0 unearth upcoming F1 unwind vacancy F2 uproot vagabond F3 upset vertigo F4 upshot Virginia F5 vapor visitor F6 village vocalist F7 virus voyager F8 Vulcan warranty F9 waffle Waterloo FA wallet whimsical FB watchword Wichita FC wayside Wilmington FD willow Wyoming FE woodlark yesteryear FF Zulu Yucatan
Examples [ edit ]
Each byte in a bytestring is encoded as a single word. A sequence of bytes is rendered in network byte order, from left to right. For example, the leftmost (i.e. byte 0) is considered "even" and is encoded using the PGP Even Word table. The next byte to the right (i.e. byte 1) is considered "odd" and is encoded using the PGP Odd Word table. This process repeats until all bytes are encoded. Thus, "E582" produces "topmost Istanbul", whereas "82E5" produces "miser travesty".
A PGP public key fingerprint that displayed in hexadecimal as
E582 94F2 E9A2 2748 6E8B 061B 31CC 528F D7FA 3F19
would display in PGP Words (the "biometric" fingerprint) as
topmost Istanbul Pluto vagabond treadmill Pacific brackish dictator goldfish Medusa afflict bravado chatter revolver Dupont midsummer stopwatch whimsical cowbell bottomless
The order of bytes in a bytestring depends on Endianness.
Other word lists for data [ edit ]
There are several other word lists for conveying data in a clear unambiguous way via a voice channel:
the NATO phonetic alphabet maps individual letters and digits to individual words
the S/KEY system maps 64 bit numbers to 6 short words of 1 to 4 characters each from a publicly accessible 2048-word dictionary. The same dictionary is used in RFC 1760 and RFC 2289.
the Diceware system maps five base-6 random digits (almost 13 bits of entropy) to a word from a dictionary of 7,776 unique words.
FIPS 181: Automated Password Generator converts random numbers into somewhat pronounceable "words".
mnemonic encoding converts 32 bits of data into 3 words from a vocabulary of 1626 words. [3]
what3words encodes geographic coordinates in 3 dictionary words.
References [ edit ]An Auburn man was charged with public indecency after a complainant called 911 on March 17 to report a man was masturbating in a vehicle at a Winder gas station, according to an incident report.
A deputy dispatched to Murphy USA on Atlanta Highway in front of the Winder Walmart observed the suspect sitting in the driver's seat with his hand on his genitals. The deputy ordered the suspect to stop what he was doing and place his hands on the steering wheel of the vehicle. The suspect then exited the car, was placed in handcuffs and was searched, at which time the deputy found a black baggie and a clear smoking pipe, both containing methamphetamine.
Toumua Lor, 23, of 205 Mount Moriah Road in Auburn, is charged with public indecency/indecent exposure, illegal possession of controlled substance and possession and use of drug-related objects.
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Subscribe to Barrow Patch's newsletters, follow us on Twitter and "like" us on Facebook.Eleanor de Freitas died days before she had to go on trial accused of lying about rape claim, despite lack of evidence
A young woman who said she had been raped went on to kill herself after the Crown Prosecution Service put her on trial for making up the allegation in a case originally instigated by her alleged attacker.
The woman’s father is calling on the CPS to explain why they pursued a charge of perverting the course of justice against Eleanor de Freitas, 23, despite being told by police that there was no evidence she had lied, [see footnote regarding a later statement from the DPP] and in the knowledge that she was suffering from a psychiatric illness.
De Freitas killed herself in April this year, three days before her trial was due to start at Southwark crown court. In notes left for her family she described her overwhelming fear of giving evidence as a motive for taking her life.
An inquest into the death of De Freitas, an A-grade student who suffered from bipolar disorder, is due to open in west London on Friday. Lawyers for her family are calling on the coroner to postpone the hearing in order to carry out a wider inquiry in front of a jury to examine whether the CPS decision to prosecute was a contributing factor in her death.
David de Freitas, her father, said: “Eleanor was a vulnerable young woman, diagnosed with bipolar, who made a complaint of rape as a result of which she herself became the subject of legal proceedings. This was despite the fact the police did not believe there to be a case against her.
“There are very serious implications for the reporting of rape cases if victims fear that they may themselves end up the subject of a prosecution if their evidence is in any way inconsistent. It is of the utmost importance that the CPS consider very carefully whether such cases are in the public interest.”
He added: “I feel that the system of fairness in this country has let me down terribly, and something needs to be done so that this can never happen again.”
The CPS had pursued De Freitas for allegedly making up the rape allegation after the man at the centre of the claims spent £200,000 on a private prosecution, documents submitted to the inquest say.
Lawyers for the CPS were told by the detective who investigated the rape allegation that there was no evidence that she had lied, they would not be investigating her for perverting the course of justice and the crime had been recorded as rape.
De Freitas’s death has echoes of the suicide of Frances Andrade, who killed herself after being accused of lying in court about the abuse she suffered at the hands of Michael Brewer, the former director of music at Chetham’s school in Manchester.
Victim Support and Justice for Women have both written to the director of public prosecutions Alison Saunders expressing their concerns at the wider implications of the De Freitas case for rape complainants coming forward in future if alleged rapists are able to use the law to intimidate them.
In a statement, Saunders said she was concerned about the case and was investigating it personally. “I have asked the team which dealt with this case for a full explanation which addresses all of the De Freitas family’s concerns. I appreciate the family’s unease which is why I am looking at this personally in order to satisfy myself of the detail surrounding all the stages of the case.”
She added that she would welcome the opportunity then to meet her family and said the circumstances regarding the case were “rare, extremely difficult and always complex and sensitive. This case was one of the most difficult I have seen.”
Director of public prosecutions Alison Saunders. Photograph: David Levene/Guardian
De Freitas reported to police on 4 January 2013 that she had been allegedly drugged and raped by a male associate shortly before Christmas in 2012. The police investigated the case, interviewed De Freitas and arrested the alleged perpetrator. But the police eventually told De Freitas they could not proceed further as there was not a realistic chance of a successful conviction, partly due to the fact she had reported the alleged rape some time after the event and as such no forensic evidence had been collected to support her claims. The alleged perpetrator was told there would be no further action and the case was closed.
De Freitas’s father said his daughter had accepted the police’s decision and tried to get on with her life. But the man at the centre of the rape claim began a private prosecution against her saying she had lied about the rape. Some months later lawyers for the CPS announced they were taking over the case against De Freitas. Her trial for perverting the course of justice was due to open on 7 April. On 4 April she took her own life.
On Friday Harriet Wistrich, of Birnberg Peirce and Partners, acting on behalf of the De Freitas family, will call for the West London coroner Chinyere Inyama to widen the inquest to consider whether the Crown Prosecution Service breached Article 2 of the Human Rights Act – the right to life – by failing to abide by their own code and consider whether there was a public interest in prosecuting De Freitas before going ahead with the prosecution.
Deborah Coles, co-director of the charity Inquest, said: “This case raises serious issues of concern regarding the prosecution of rape complainants. In addition, Eleanor had severe mental health issues which do not appear to have been taken into account by the Crown Prosecution Service. There must be robust scrutiny at the inquest to explore how these issues of public interest impacted on her life.”
Adam Pemberton, assistant chief executive of the charity Victim Support, said the “tragic and troubling case” raised broader concerns about the use of private prosecutions against rape complainants.
“We are concerned in principle about someone who has been accused of rape being able to bring a private prosecution against the complainant because this allows that individual to use the law to do something guaranteed to intimidate their accuser,” he said.
9 January 2015. Since publication, it has been pointed out to us that on 9 December 2014, the CPS issued a statement in which the DPP stated that the evidential and public interest tests were both met, and the evidence against Ms de Freitas was strong.
• In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 08457 90 90 90. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255.In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here. The UK’s Rape Crisis helpline can be reached on 0808 802 9999.WASHINGTON — Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, is taking the next steps to unwind Obama-era rules and other regulatory efforts that had restricted the abilities of telecommunication companies and broadcasters.
With two items up for vote on Thursday that are expected to pass, Mr. Pai is carrying forward a swift Republican attack on telecom rules. The rollback will empower big telecom and media firms that have lobbied aggressively for deregulation, but consumer groups say it may also eventually put consumers at risk of higher prices and fewer options for services and media.
Since being appointed by President Trump in January to lead the commission, Mr. Pai has abolished a plan to open the cable box market, suspended several participants from a program for low-income broadband subsidies, and chipped away at net neutrality, which guarantees consumers equal access to all internet content. A proposal to roll back net neutrality rules is expected as soon as this month.
“In just three months, he’s taken many steps to reduce choices for consumers, make services more expensive or roll back the rights people thought they had online,” Phillip Berenbroick, the senior policy counsel at Public Knowledge, a left-leaning consumer group, said of Mr. Pai.In an apparent concession to authorities warning pro-democracy protesters to clear Hong Kong's streets by the beginning of the work week, students occupying the area outside city government headquarters agreed Sunday to remove some barricades that have blocked the building's entrance during the weeklong demonstrations.
Across the harbor in Hong Kong's Mong Kok district, protesters appeared divided about whether to stay put or decamp to the city's Admiralty area, the main protest site.
"The government and the police have the duty and determination to take all necessary actions to restore social order so the government and the 7 million people of Hong Kong can return to their normal work and life," Leung said.
Police said they had arrested 30 people since the protests started Sept. 28, and that 27 police officers had been injured while on duty in the protest areas.
The government said Sunday that it was happy to talk to the students, and that it hoped protest leaders would cooperate and allow the reopening of the roads outside the government's headquarters.
...WASHINGTON Israel and America are intensifying a clandestine war against Iran that has run hot and cold since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 but has grown more urgent as Iran races to obtain an atomic bomb.
That is a central claim in a new book, "The Secret War with Iran," by an Israeli journalist, Ronen Bergman, who also details a series of mishaps during the past 2 1/2 years that have likely delayed Iran's efforts to go nuclear.
While President Bush and other Western leaders have warned of the seriousness of the threat that Iran may obtain a nuclear weapon, little reporting has surfaced in the West on the efforts in the shadows to stop the Iranians. Mr. Bergman himself has had to skate a close line in this area, in part because of military censorship in Israel, where some of his reporting has been withheld from publication pending rulings from the Israeli Supreme Court.
Nonetheless, the Israeli journalist compiles a picture that suggests that the West has had some successes in the war to stop the Iranian bomb. Mr. Bergman reports, for example, that in January 2007 Iran determined that some of its nuclear suppliers in Europe were fronts for Western intelligence services, specifically Britain's MI6.
And Mr. Bergman writes that between February 2006 and March 2007, at least three planes "belonging to the Revolutionary Guards crashed in Iran, while carrying personnel connected with the security of the nuclear project." Specialized pipes for centrifuges sold to Iran have been modified, he writes, and specialized computers sold to Iran for its nuclear laboratories contained viruses that sabotaged the code.
The secret efforts appear not to be limited to modifying equipment: On January 18, 2007, an Iranian expert on electromagnetics who worked in an Isfahan enrichment facility, Ardeshir Hosseinpour, died in his apartment, Mr. Bergman writes.
The author quotes the deputy director of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, Eli Levite, as saying in a closed forum that operations against Iran "gained time for us" and have "doubtless caused significant delays in the project. The process has led to the revealing of large parts of the program in the areas of sources of supply, of the infrastructure, and of the goals, which were not known or were known at a different resolution."
While Israel's Mossad and military intelligence have targeted Iranian terrorists almost since the 1979 revolution, the Jewish state was relatively slow to pick up on the full extent of Iran's nuclear program. Mr. Bergman reports that Israel first learned of the nuclear facility in Natanz in 1996, a full six years before the facility was first disclosed to the public, but several years after the Iranians began their initial work there. Two Israeli operatives, posing as tourists, arrived at the site and took soil samples, which they brought back to Israel in their shoes and which showed some radiation.
Mr. Bergman also details a success for the CIA in the shadow war against Iran, when General Ali Reza Askari defected to the American side in February 2007. Mr. Bergman reports that General Askari was closer to the reformist President Khatami and felt threatened by his old rival in intelligence when President Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005.
General Askari, for example, warned Mr. Khatami after the attacks of September 11, 2001, that Iran's Revolutionary Guards had given shelter to key Al Qaeda operatives fleeing American troops in Afghanistan. He said in his debriefings, according to Mr. Bergman, that Iran had entered into joint nuclear projects with both Syria and North Korea.
The defector also claimed that Iran erected a secret enrichment facility near the known centrifuge area in Natanz.
Mr. Bergman finally comes close to saying outright that Israel was responsible for the assassination in February of a master Hezbollah terrorist, Imad Mugniyah. He writes: "Although Israel has denied responsibility for the assassination, the Mugniyah hit was exactly the kind of thing needed to restore the country's faith in, and more importantly the enemy's fear of, Israel's intelligence services."
Mr. Bergman then quotes an Israeli intelligence official, who recalls the exact model of the vehicle Mugniyah was driving when he was attacked. "Pity about that new Pijero," he said.Brazil’s Sports Minister insists that Rio de Janeiro is prepared to host the Olympic Games in two months, despite a litany of heavily publicized potential setbacks.
Leonardo Picciani, who was appointed to the role less than three months ago, told the BBC that those attending the Games would “have a great experience.”
It has been an arduous few months for the South American country, where President Dilma Rousseff faces an impeachment trial in a sweeping national corruption scandal, and an outbreak of the Zika virus has prompted more than 200 scientists to ask officials to delay the Olympics.
Read More: Here Are the 4 Challenges Rio de Janeiro Must Meet to Host a Successful 2016 Olympics
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Meanwhile, there remains work to be done in preparation for the Games themselves. The BBC reports that there are concerns over unfinished construction, and in late April, two people died after the collapse of a bike path built in a wave of pre-Olympic municipal renovations.
Picciani, however, said “all precautions” had been taken to prevent the spread of Zika and that the Olympics team was running “seamlessly.”
“I would say to any athlete, to any visitor planning on coming to Rio, you do not have to worry, Rio and Brazil have prepared for this moment.”
[BBC]
Contact us at editors@time.com.NEW DELHI: In a direct hit to India of a far-away conflict that is threatening Russia’s relations with the western world, a batch of Indian Air Force military transport aircraft are stuck in Ukraine due to the ongoing border conflict and internal strife.Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar has revealed that the last batch of Indian Air Force AN 32 transport aircraft that had been sent to Ukraine as part of a larger $400 million deal to modernise the fleet and extend its service life are now stuck because of the conflict.The defence minister has said that officials are working on getting the aircraft back from the crisis-torn nation and that he is hopeful that things would be sorted out shortly. The Soviet-origin AN 32 aircraft are the transport workhorse of the Indian Air Force and are vital to maintaining and supplying troops located in the Eastern and Northern borders.As per a 2009 contract with Ukraine's state-owned Ukrspetsexport Corp, India was to send 40 aircraft for upgrade over four years, starting 2011.At least 30 of these have been returned. Another 65 of the aircraft were to be upgraded with Ukrainian help at an Indian facility in Kanpur. The upgrade would extend the service life of the transporters from 25 years to 40 years.While several batches of the aircraft have been refurbished and flown back to India since 2011, Parrikar’s statement indicates that the last batch of 5-10 aircraft that were to be completed by March 2014 are now stuck with efforts on the retrieve them.The conflict with Russia has severely affected Ukraine’s industry as large parts of the nation that provided equipment are now under rebel hands. Parrikar said efforts are on to find alternate sources for Ukrainian spares with efforts on to find suppliers in Israel and France.Also, flying of military aircraft has been restricted in Ukraine after the shooting town of Malaysian Airlines MH 17 last year.VICTORIA B.C. – B.C. Green Party leader Andrew Weaver is calling on Elections BC and the RCMP to launch an immediate investigation into allegations that Premier Christy Clark’s B.C. Liberals have been accepting illegal donations from lobbyists.
Media reports over the weekend allege that many donations to the Liberals are made fraudulently or in violation of the Election Act and that the Liberals are encouraging this behaviour by holding cash for access events. The Liberals raised more than $12 million last year, more than any provincial political party in power. The B.C. NDP, which also accepts both corporate and union donations, have also allegedly pressured lobbyists for donations. The NDP have not released fundraising figures for 2016 but raised $3 million in 2015.
“The report raises very serious questions about influence peddling and corruption of our democratic process,” Weaver says. “The police and Elections BC have a duty to investigate the flow of money through lobbyists to both the Liberals and the NDP.”
He called for urgent action, saying British Columbians have a right know if any laws have been broken before they cast their ballots in the May 9 election. Weaver also called for an immediate end to so-called “pay-to-play” and “cash-for-access” schemes, and that all monies raised in a questionable manner be returned to the donors.
The article published by The Globe and Mail on the weekend is the latest in a series of troubling reports on political fundraising in B.C. The New York Times in January described B.C. as the ‘Wild West’ for its fund-raising practices that are outlawed federally and in most other provinces. Clark accepts money from lobbyists, corporate and foreign donors and also engages in fundraising events at private homes where wealthy individuals and lobbyists pay thousands of dollars in exchange for exclusive access to the Premier.
The latest reports provide more disturbing detail on the fundraising practices; of the 53 frequent donors to the Liberals, 13 work for wealthy foreign companies or individuals. It also alleges donations are being hidden in violation of one of the few fundraising rules that do exist in B.C.
“These disturbing practices must end,” says Weaver.
He called on both the Liberals and NDP to follow the lead of the B.C. Green Party which in September stopped accepting corporate and union donations. While a ban on corporate and union donations is just one necessary part of reforming B.C.’s political finance laws, it has been received by B.C. voters with strong support. The B.C. Green Party raised $763,667 in 2016, nearly double what it raised in the previous fiscal year.
“B.C. must stop selling out to corporate and foreign interests that have exploited the province’s resources and left our cities unaffordable,” says Weaver. “It’s time for British Columbians to take back B.C.”
- 30 -
Media contact
Jillian Oliver, Press Secretary
+1 778-650-0597 | jillian.oliver@bcgreens.ca
Background articles
The New York Times
The Globe and MailFuck for the Heir Puppy Bear! (Russian: Ебись за наследника Медвежонка, tr. Yebis' za naslednika Medvezhonka) was political-artistic performance staged by Russian performance group Voina at the Timiryazev State Biological Museum in Moscow in February 2008.
Performance [ edit ]
On February 23, as a prelude to the event, members of Voina showed up at a meeting of the Young Guard of United Russia and displayed a white banner with the slogan "Fuck for the Heir Puppy Bear".[1]
On February 28, almost twenty people assembled in the Moscow Biological Museum. Five couples undressed in the museum hall "Metabolism and Energy of Organisms", and engaged in sexual intercourse[2] next to a glass taxidermy display case which contained a stuffed bear.[3] Participants included Vera Kondakova (from Ukraine), Alexandre Karpenko (from Ukraine), as well as other well known Voina members.
The performance was a protest of the election of Dmitry Medvedev in the 2008 Russian presidential election. It took place in front of a black flag with a slogan reading: "Fuck for the heir Puppy Bear!".[3] The title "Puppy Bear" is a play on words referring to Medvedev, whose last name derives from the Russian word medved, "bear".
The Voina's performance was photographed and videotaped by several spectators invited by the group. It was also described and photographically illustrated online, by Russian lexicographer and blogger Alexei Plutser-Sarno, who himself participated in the action.[4] Photos of the performance were also published by blogger adolfych.[5] Following these blog reports, the action was covered by the media and met with mostly conservative responses in Russian society.
On March 3, Voina reappeared with the same slogan and marched with the banner "I fuck the heir Puppy Bear" at the Dissenters March in St. Petersburg.[6]
Performance goals [ edit ]
The performance was announced as a ritual for the bear totem. Plucer-Sarno explained the reason for the action was "We do not have a goal to necessarily be radical instigators. We have a goal to be honest artists and tell what we think. We think that the government fucks the people, and the people like this. This is why the action 'Fuck for the heir Puppy Bear' was born".[7] He also said in the same interview that "This is a portrait of pre-election Russia: everybody fucks each other, and the puppy bear looks at that with an unconcealed scorn".
Plucer-Sarno published in his blog a commentary by artist Maria Perchikhina that described the performance as an "act of subversive affirmation".[8] According to this opinion, the stuffed bear symbolizes the Russian political system, termed "imitation democracy" by Dmitry Furman, and turns into the figure of the "chosen chief bear". The goal of the action then, following the analogy of archaic fertility rituals, is birth assistance for the new political system. The ideas of fertility and reproduction along with the national idea form the core of the new political system. The single transgressive feature in the performance was the publicity of sexual activity. Perchikhina interpreted that transgressive feature as subversive affirmation, in other words, a resistance to the system by outperforming it (similar to "trying to be a better catholic than the Pope"). She also quoted an article by Inke Arns and Sylvia Sasse where the principle of subversive affirmation was explained.[9]
Political science expert Ilya Prokudin commented that the action was clearly political: "The action in the Zoological museum had a political character. It was dedicated to the newly baked (we should not call him newly elected, who elected him?) puppy president, Medvedev, and mocked one of the 'national projects' curated by him, namely 'on the increase in birth rate'. For the least apprehensive, even a pregnant woman ('Nadezhda Tolokonnikova')[10] was part of the scene.
Response to performance [ edit ]
Faculty of Philosophy [ edit ]
One of the performers in phone interview with internet news agency Lenta.ru said that a student was expelled from the Faculty of Philosophy of MSU for participating in the action. However, the Dean of the Faculty, V.V. Mironov, stated that two or three students had been expelled long before the performance for poor grades.[11] Mironov condemned such performances and claimed that the majority of MSU students share his negative opinion.[12]
An unnamed organization gathered a collection of signatures under a document that condemned the performance. However, an alternative group collected signatures in favor of the performance.[citation needed]
Media response [ edit ]
Press and internet [ edit ]
Generally negative opinions of "Fuck for the heir Puppy Bear!" were published by the media. A number of publications focused on the amoral behavior of the performers. Newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda commented: "They are not unrecognized geniuses. They are losers and poseurs acting on the principle: 'come, trash the place, go away'. For the PR, they would dance on a grave, and even take off their panties in public. And they do not care that after such actions innocent people suffer - metro employees, museum keepers. These actions of urban psychos stink very badly."[13]
Mikhail Zhukhov, a lawyer from the attorney's collegium "Justice" commented that the performers' actions contained elements of crime described in Article 213, "Hooliganism", of Russian Criminal Code: "The action of the participants severely violated social order. Taking into account the place and the fact that people with photo-cameras and video-cameras were invited, a conclusion can be made about the existence or premeditation. All of this was done by a group of people by a prior arrangement. The participants might face harsh consequences - part 2 of article 213 of Russian Criminal Code makes a provision for a prison sentence for up to seven years. Museum staff should write a report to the Internal Affairs Department".[13]
A representative of the foundation for effective politics, Pavel Danilin, called the performers pornographers and jerks and claimed that they had put shame on the Faculty and the University.[citation needed]
Radio and television [ edit ]
Russian poet Dmitry Volchek, who participated along with Alexei Plucer-Sarno in the Radio Liberty program devoted to the performance, claimed that the action had not been radical enough. He had also commented that the essence of conceptual art is in targeting the most vulnerable spot in the subconsciousness. In Volchek's opinion, that spot was accidentally hit by the action, making the stroke so painful.
Television covered the performance in several programs that described Voina's activities.
Videos of the action and of its media coverage can be found on the Internet.
See also [ edit ]Lost mannequins, toys and power tools found in Queensland Rail's eclectic lost property department
Posted
Dropping your phone, wallet or keys in the mad rush to get off the peak-hour train seems plausible.
Leaving behind your wheelchair, mannequin, or false teeth? Not so much, but it still happens.
Top items found over the past year: Mobile Phones
Wallets
Glasses
Sunglasses
Backpacks
Keys
Bicycles
Fitbits
Kindles
Umbrellas
Queensland Rail (QR) is holding onto a mixed collection of items lost by customers across the south-east Queensland network.
In the past year more than 18,000 items were handed in or found either on trains or at stations.
The amount of items coming in means the lost property office at Roma Street Station in Brisbane requires three full-time staff members to keep everything in order.
ABC News was given a peek inside to see what train customers were leaving behind.
The collection is impressive - ranging from everyday essentials such as wallets, phones, jumpers, and glasses to the bizarre such as vinyl records, pieces of art, a power saw and crutches.
Denise Brotherton, who has worked in the department for seven years, said it was always a good feeling to reunite someone with their lost item.
"It's always nice to give something back when something that might not be very valuable to us is very sentimental to them," Ms Brotherton said.
"They're always extra specially excited when they see it. Whether it be a piece of jewellery or their lunch box."
Ms Brotherton said wallets were easier to trace back to their owner.
"It's also nice when we can return their money to them... we've had one just recently a fellow lost a wallet with $800 in.
"It was handed in by an honest customer and returned the same day."
Uncollected items passed on to charity
Lost items of no great personal value are held for two months before going to QR's charity partners such as the Salvation Army, St Vincent de Paul, DV Connect, The Men's Shed, Guide Dogs and more.
In recent months QR have donated 23 unclaimed bikes to Milpera State High School in Brisbane, which caters for students who are newly arrived immigrants or from a refugee background.
More than 500 pairs of glasses have gone to Lions Recycle for Sight, while two van loads of household items and clothing were given to families starting new lives after experiencing domestic violence. Warm clothing and blankets were also given to the 139 Club to support the homeless.
"The most common items to not get collected are mostly clothing and lunch boxes, people think they're just gone forever," Ms Brotherton said.
"People look for glasses and sunglasses because they cost a lot of money.
"Backpacks are generally collected by the end of the two months... people make the effort to come find it. Sometimes they don't realise they've lost it till they go to use something."
Sent |
Baghdad murders are not lies unless Lott knows them to be false, and, in the absence of reliable data we don’t know whether they are false or true. However, what Lott did was write with reckless disregard for the truth. Rumsfeld was actually comparing combat deaths of US soldiers in Baghdad with murders in Washington, DC, so Lott had absolutely no basis for his claim. The important point for someone reading Lott is that any event, you should not believe anything he writes unless you have an independent source for it.
Lawrence also writes:
Indeed. And, that would be a worthwhile critique of Lott’s analysis, which gets to the whole “causal mechanism” thing I discussed above. The best I can say for Lott (if you accept his claims about the dispensation of the survey data, which I find dubious but not entirely improbable) is that he’s a sloppy social scientist—albeit perhaps not an not extraordinarily sloppy one, given the pure sludge that often is passed off as strong evidence in many peer-reviewed journals. * Lott’s missing data only affects a small part of his overall argument; it may speak to his overall credibility, but the vast majority of his data is available and has been analyzed by other scholars.
/guns/Lott/baghdad | Add the first comment | link
Links
The Wyeth Wire takes Lott to task for his completely unsupported claim that Baghdad has fewer murders than Washington DC. Of course, Lott’s defence will be that he was just reporting Donald Rumsfeld’s claims and how was Lott to know that Rumsfeld was no criminologist?
/guns/Lott/baghdad | Add the first comment | linkIt took me years to figure out that markets work better than government.
I started out as a typical Ralph Nader-influenced consumer reporter, convinced that companies constantly rip us off. To me and most of my fellow left-leaning reporters, the answer was always: more regulation.
Gradually, I figured out that regulation causes many more problems than the occasional rip-off artist does. Companies that served customers well prospered, while market competition meant cheaters seldom got away with cheating for long.
Regulation, by contrast, lasted forever. It punished innovation, making it harder for good people to offer better alternatives.
How do I spare people the long learning process I went through?
A former producer of mine, Todd Seavey, has written a book called "Libertarianism for Beginners." It lays down a few basic principles that make it easier to understand what a free market is -- and how everything government does interferes with that market.
"Your body, like all your property, should be yours to do with as you please so long as you do not harm the body or property of others without their permission," writes Seavey. That means government can't tell people what to do unless those people threaten harm.
Seavey didn't come up with that idea himself, of course. In the book, he describes the history of philosophers and economists who've urged people to follow that rule for some 200 years.
That rule helped make America the most prosperous and productive country in the world.
Unfortunately, while those libertarian ideas allowed innovation to flourish, government and regulation grew even faster.
A century ago in the U.S., government at all levels took up about 8 percent of the economy. Now it takes up about 40 percent. It regulates everything from the size of beverage containers to what questions must not be asked in job interviews.
How can people be expected to keep up with it all?
Seavey points out that it's backwards to expect them to try. Instead of just looking at the complicated mess government makes, we need to review the basic rules that got us here.
Instead of the rule being "government knows best" or "vote for the best leader," says Seavey, what if the basic legal rules were just: no assault, no theft, no fraud? Then most waste and bureaucracy that we fight about year after year wouldn't exist in the first place.
To most people, it sounds easier to leave big policy decisions -- about complex things like wages, food production and roads -- to government. Having to make our own decisions about everything and trade for everything in the marketplace sounds complicated.
But Seavey argues that the "hands off other people's stuff" rule would feel like second-nature if we were more consistent about enforcing it. "Even chimpanzees are capable of being outraged if other chimpanzees take their food so the basic impulses to defend property and to resist assault," he writes, "no doubt predate human history."
It's when politicians convince people that those simple rules aren't enough that voters decide to let bureaucrats, lawyers and politicians make the decisions instead. Then the public loses track of the complicated rules. Even the full-time media can't keep up with all the trickery.
We can -- and should -- keep reporting on government's broken promises and endless scandals. But to teach people they shouldn't count on government to produce good things in the first place, they need some basic philosophy.
Seavey's book may help, which is why I wrote the foreword to it. I like that the book has cartoons, making it more fun than dull economics textbooks. I hope it provides a model for looking at the world to people confused by stupid things government does.
But Seavey is too much the open-minded intellectual. He writes, "It may turn out that the system of control and redistribution that we thought was working to solve our problems was the real problem all along."
No. There's no "may turn out" about it. Forty-five years of watching government "solutions" go bad has taught me that state control rarely works, and it usually makes problems worse. Government control and redistribution is definitely the real problem.
COPYRIGHT 2016 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COMDavid Cameron may yet campaign for Britain to leave the European Union, Business Secretary Sajid Javid said last night.
Mr Javid, one of the most Eurosceptic members of the Cabinet, said voters should not assume that the Prime Minister would recommend staying in the EU if negotiations to change the UK's relationship with Brussels go badly.
His comments came as a poll for the Daily Mail revealed that more than three-quarters of voters want Mr Cameron to reach a deal with Brussels to limit the number of EU migrants entering Britain.
'Nothing is off the table': Mr Javid, right, said voters should not assume that the Prime Minister, left, would recommend staying in the EU if negotiations to change the UK's relationship with Brussels go badly
Mr Cameron has repeatedly said he hopes to be in a position to campaign for Britain to stay in a'reformed EU' in the in/out referendum promised by the end of 2017.
Most observers believe there are almost no circumstances in which the Prime Minister would campaign to leave.
But, speaking to the Mail ahead of the Conservative Party conference this weekend, Mr Javid said: 'The right approach now is to put all our efforts into getting the changes that we want to see and increasing the chance of getting those.
'We will then look at what we have achieved and that's the time to make up our mind up. But remember, the PM has also said nothing is off the table.'
Asked whether this meant Mr Cameron could campaign for Britain to leave the EU if he fails to get significant concessions, Mr Javid added: 'He said nothing is off the table, those are his words.'
ENOCH POWELL STILL CASTS SHADOW OVER TORIES, SAYS JAVID Enoch Powell still casts a shadow over the Conservative Party’s relations with ethnic minorities, Sajid Javid has said. The Business Secretary, who is the first Asian man to serve in a Tory Cabinet, warned that some voters were still put off voting Tory by Mr Powell’s legacy 17 years after his death. Powell’s notorious Rivers of Blood speech, which was delivered in Birmingham in April 1968, sparked widespread condemnation. He called for the ‘repatriation’ of non-white immigrants, claiming the racial mix in Britain would lead to city riots. Mr Javid said: ‘I still come across ethnic minority voters who refer to Enoch Powell. Some of them were not even born but they have heard about it. Sometimes it is used against Conservatives by people who say, “look, your party had someone like this”.’ He said he would still like to see the Prime Minister publicly repudiate Mr Powell’s views, but insisted it was ‘not a priority’.
Mr Javid, who went to Redcar, near Middlesbrough, yesterday to unveil an £80million package to help workers hit by the closure of the local steelworks, said the Tories would use next week's conference to try to seize the political centre ground.
He said Labour was now in 'disarray and not offering a serious alternative government'.
'They have taken all the wrong lessons from the election,' he said. 'From our point of view, in a business sense, if a competitor is having trouble at the top I am not interested in attacking the personality of the chief executive, I am much more interested in pinching their customers. That is going to be this government's focus – showing people, including those who didn't vote for us last time, that we are on their side too.'
Mr Javid, the son of an immigrant bus driver, ducked questions about his own leadership ambitions.
But he insisted he would not use his humble background as a weapon in any future contest against more privileged rivals such as George Osborne or Boris Johnson – saying he rejected Labour's 'class war' approach to politics.
The ComRes poll for the Daily Mail found that 78 per cent want Mr Cameron to make a reduction in the number of people moving to the UK from the continent a priority in his renegotiation agenda.
He has all but accepted he is unlikely to succeed in persuading his European partners such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel to impose any limits on the numbers who can come to Britain.
Obstacle: Angela Merkel (left) is among those Mr Cameron (right) will have to win over in his renegotiation
But asked whether they thought it was important that Mr Cameron secured curbs to free movement, 54 per cent said it was very important.
Even more popular was restricting the benefits EU citizens entering the UK can receive – listed as very important by 55 per cent.
The poll also found that 58 per cent want to stay in the EU, far higher than the 35 per cent who would opt to leave if the referendum were held now.Spring Training stats don’t matter. Right? Right. Well, mostly. It’s true — you shouldn’t be paying attention to things like batting average, ERA, or even home-run figures in the spring. There’s just too little time, too much volatility in the statistics, and too much uncertainty surrounding the quality of opposition for those numbers to have, well, any meaning. But last year, Dan Rosenheck’s excellent work in The Economist, later nominated for a SABR Analytics Conference Research Award, revealed that certain peripheral Spring Training statistics actually can have some predictive value for the regular season.
It needs to be stressed: even then, the effects are small. Nothing that happens in Spring Training should drastically alter your perception of a player. And for most guys, nothing should change. But, for the few players at the very end of each spectrum in these particular statistics, it’s okay to move your expectations up or down a tick or two.
You should read Rosenheck’s article and also view the slides he used to present his research at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, but I’ll briefly summarize his findings here anyway:
For batters, the three most predictive statistics that stabilize most quickly are: strikeout rate, walk rate, and isolated power on contact.
For pitchers, the three most predictive statistics that stabilize most quickly are: strikeout rate, walk rate, and ground-ball rate.
Each player’s Spring Training figures should be compared against his own projections to find the largest outliers.
We can learn the most in the spring about younger players, who have less major-league playing time, therefore less significant data to fuel the projections, therefore more uncertainty within those projections
Using those four basic principles from Rosenheck’s work, we can fairly easily use the Spring Training leaderboards from MLB.com and our depth chart projections here on the site (a mix of ZiPS and Steamer projections with author-updated playing-time estimates) to find the players who changed their outlook the most this spring (though still not that much!).
The Hitting Winners
Jake Lamb
2016 projections: 25.6 K%, 8.4 BB%,.200 isolated power on contact
25.6 K%, 8.4 BB%,.200 isolated power on contact 2016 spring stats: 24.2 K%, 19.7 BB%,.405 isolated power on contact
By this measure, Arizona’s third baseman Jake Lamb has had the single most encouraging spring of any batter in baseball. He’s still striking out more than the average batter, but he also has the highest walk rate of any qualified batter in the spring — more than double his projected rate — and he’s doubled his power output, perhaps thanks to a change in his swing path, inspired by his teammate, A.J. Pollock.
Phil Gosselin
2016 projections: 17.2 K%, 4.5 BB%,.126 isolated power on contact
17.2 K%, 4.5 BB%,.126 isolated power on contact 2016 spring stats: 11.5 K%, 9.8 BB%,.375 isolated power on contact
Well, I guess Diamondbacks hitters have had a fruitful spring. Phil Gosselin seems likely to open the year as a reserve in Arizona, but that could change if he keeps this up. And while there’s no fancy swing change with Gosselin (that I know of), it’s really just an extension of what he did last year in Arizona, after being acquired from Atlanta for Touki Toussaint. Gosselin exceeded expectations at the plate with surprising power (granted, in 24 games), and he’s showed that same pop again in the spring.
Ketel Marte
2016 projections: 15.0 K%, 5.9 BB%,.134 isolated power on contact
15.0 K%, 5.9 BB%,.134 isolated power on contact 2016 spring stats: 7.1 K%, 12.5 BB%,.244 isolated power on contact
Ketel Marte burst on the scene as a 21-year-old rookie in Seattle last year and has now positioned himself as the team’s shortstop of the future. He posted a high on-base percentage in 2015 thanks to a plus walk rate, though the projections didn’t see that as sustainable, seeing as he walked more than he ever had in the minors. Well, Marte did everything in his power to change that perception this spring, walking nearly twice as often as he struck out while hitting for some added pop, as he makes his case for Seattle’s leadoff man this year.
The hitting losers: Joc Pederson, Jon Singleton, Oswaldo Arcia.
The Pitching Winners
Aaron Sanchez
2016 projections: 16.9 K%, 11.0 BB%, 61.8 GB%
16.9 K%, 11.0 BB%, 61.8 GB% 2016 spring stats: 25.3 K%, 4.0 BB%, 63.2 GB%
No young pitcher had a more encouraging spring than Aaron Sanchez. Sanchez put on 25 pounds in the offseason in an effort to smooth out his mechanics that led to such a high walk rate as a starter last year, and then had, by far, the largest positive deviation from his projected walk rate of any pitcher in the spring. He also had the third-largest uptick in strikeout rate. And he did all that without giving away any of his already-elite ground-ball rate, which was the highest of any spring pitcher. Doesn’t get much better than that. Now that’s how you earn back a rotation spot.
Shane Greene
2016 projections: 15.0 K%, 7.2 BB%, 46.6 GB%
15.0 K%, 7.2 BB%, 46.6 GB% 2016 spring stats: 30.3 K%, 5.3 BB%, 40.0 GB%
Speaking of earning back a rotation spot, here’s Shane Greene, who was aided in doing so by an injury to Daniel Norris, but may give the Tigers a difficult decision upon Norris’ return if his spring is any indication. Greene had the second-highest strikeout rate of any qualified pitcher in the spring and is reportedly touching 97 with his fastball, a year after dealing with diminished velocity, perhaps due to early-season elbow problems and an artery issue in his throwing hand that caused numbness off-and-on throughout the season. Greene looks to again be healthy, and is pitching a lot more like the exciting Yankees rookie in 2014 that the Tigers thought they were acquiring when they traded Robbie Ray for him.
Anthony DeSclafani
2016 projections: 19.2 K%, 6.8 BB%, 43.6 GB%
19.2 K%, 6.8 BB%, 43.6 GB% 2016 spring stats: 24.1 K%, 3.6 BB%, 48.4 GB%
Here’s a perfect example of why Spring Training ERA is meaningless: Anthony DeSclafani’s was 8.38. Don’t let that fool you; DeSclafani had one of the most impressive springs of any young pitcher. Unfortunately, a strained oblique has sidelined his progress, and he’ll open the season on the 15-day disabled list. Hopefully he’s able to regain his spring form upon his recovery.
The pitching losers: Jose Fernandez, Matt Shoemaker, Danny Salazar.
A couple caveats and clarifications:Text size
China may see its first local government bond defaults, Fitch has warned, amid concerns over the high levels of debt in the world's second largest economy.
However, the rating agency said widespread local government financing vehicle (LGFV) defaults are unlikely given that the authorities have various tools at their disposal to limit the contagion. The rating agency wrote:
The first defaults on public bonds by Chinese local government financing vehicles (LGFVs) are becoming more likely, and will probably trigger a repricing of the market, says Fitch Ratings. However, widespread LGFV defaults remain a tail-risk, given that the authorities continue to rely on local government investment - supported by LGFVs - to hit economic growth targets, and have a broad spectrum of policy tools to limit default contagion......
However, the authorities are in a position to prevent systemic defaults. In particular, the government's pervasive ownership and influence across the financial system provide other tools to limit contagion. The use of fiscal resources to bail out LGFVs would be a last resort, given recent policy efforts to break perceptions of implicit state support, but credit could be directed toward the LGFV sector if required, which would contain the risk of a market panic.
The move comes after S&P Ratings last week cut China's sovereign debt rating one notch to A plus from AA minus, its first such action since 1999, saying a long period of borrowing has increased China's economic and financial risks. S&P also lowered its long-term credit rating to A plus from AA minus on three foreign banks.Wladimir Klitschko, the heavyweight champion of the world, was trying to rescue a news conference that was supposed to be promoting a title bout at Madison Square Garden.
Save for a few camera clicks, the room was quiet when he stepped to the microphone.
“Guys, you are lame,” Klitschko said, smiling. “We’re not at a funeral.”
The line drew a few laughs. Klitschko stretched out his arms and greeted New York the way that he would have liked to be welcomed. Over the next eight minutes, he spoke about his love of New York and the significance of fighting at the Garden. Klitschko, who holds a doctorate in sports science from the University of Kiev, could have been across town at the United Nations delivering an impassioned plea for his native Ukraine.
In Europe, Klitschko fights fill soccer stadiums. But he has trouble selling out the Garden despite a 63-3 record with 54 knockouts and 17 successful heavyweight championship defenses, the third-highest career total.As a geographical and cultural entity, and as a nation, Albania has often been enigmatic and somewhat misunderstood. In the eighteenth century, English historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) described it as "a land within sight of Italy and less known than the interior of America."
The present collection of texts endeavours to throw light on this corner of Europe, which is often ignored by historians and scholars. This website is not designed as a history of Albania or of the Albanians, but is simply a compilation of historical texts - some important and some less important - from the eleventh to the twenty-first centuries, which will add to an understanding of the history and development of Albania and its people. Many of these works have never appeared before in translation.
The Albanian people were originally a small herding community in the mountainous terrain of the southwestern Balkans. They were nomadic tribes in the interior of the country who seem only rarely to have ventured down onto the marshy and mosquito-infected coastline of the Adriatic. As such, they long went unnoticed, and their early history is thus shrouded in mist. Much has been written and speculated about their origins, in particular by the Albanians themselves who are passionately interested in tracing their roots and in establishing their autochthony in the Balkans. Unfortunately, we possess no substantial documents from the first millennium AD which could help us trace the Albanians further back into history. Although the situation improves dramatically in the course of the second millennium, one might nonetheless assert that there is a dearth of information on the Albanians which lasts all the way up to the late nineteenth century.
The documents provided on this website bring together texts focussing not only on the emergence of the Albanians as a people, i.e. early references to them, but also subsequent texts providing a broader view of the history and geography of Albania, and, in particular, of the life of the Albanians over the centuries. These included reports of travellers and chroniclers, many of whom offer fascinating, first-hand glimpses of what they experienced during their travels in the country.
It is to be hoped that the present collection of historical texts will provide food for thought as well as a stimulus for further research into the history and development of Albania and the southern Balkans.
It has often been said that an understanding of the past provides a key to an understanding of the present. This seems to be particularly true of the Balkans.
Robert ElsiePigs saved from barn blaze served to firefighters as sausages
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Firefighters in the UK received an unusual thank you for their help this week: sausages made from piglets they had saved from a barn fire.
"Exactly six months and one day since firefighters rescued 18 piglets from a fire, we got to sample the fruits of our labours from that February night," Pewsey Fire Station staff posted on Facebook.
"Huge thank you to Rachel Rivers for dropping them off for us to sample. Highly recommended by Pewsey fire station crew and if any one of our followers is having a bank holiday BBQ this weekend then check out these sausages, they are fantastic."
While the gift may raise eyebrows, Ms Rivers said the pigs led a good life on the farm.
"I gave those animals the best quality of life I could ever give until the time they go to slaughter and they go into the food chain," she told the BBC.
"You do feel sad at the end of it... but to bring them down for [the firefighters] was a good way of saying 'thank you'."
Animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) called the move "disturbing".
"These poor piglets were no better off for escaping the fire only to be put back into it six months later after being subjected to the horrifying experience of the abattoir," PETA's Mimi Bekhechi said.
"What if these firefighters had'saved' a human child or a dog? Pigs feel fear and pain in just the same way as they do."
Pewsey Fire Station has since removed their Facebook post about the sausages, and apologised.
"In regard to a recent post on this page. We recognise that this has caused offence to some — we apologise for this and as such have removed the post."
Topics: offbeat, animals, human-interest, englandEven in the countryside, it is worth thinking about mobile services. The mobile Internet on the mountain is not always a rocket, but there is good news: It’s getting better with the digital dividend!
With lower frequencies it takes less cell towers to cover a larger area. Not only in Austria but throughout Europe, the analogue TV has been replaced by digital TV in recent years. Thereby a lot of frequencies in the low range (700 to 900 MHz) are freed up and offered mobile carriers.
The crucial question is: When will rural areas benefit from fast LTE services? Already this year? We asked the three Austrian providers.
A1 Telekom Austria
Many in tourism are asking when there will be fast mobile internet in the countryside and especially in the Alps?
ARMIN SUMESGUTNER: Mobile broadband in the rural and alpine regions is already a reality. A1 has already more than 2000 LTE stations in the frequency range 800 MHz in operation throughout Austria. It may happen that very remote locations are outside of the service area. But we also have a solution for that – namely with directional antennas.
When will the frequencies of the digital dividend (700 – 900 MHz) be used?
SUMESGUTNER: By the end of 2014 the frequencies in the 800 MHz spectrum were auctioned and A1 secured a very attractive package. The expansion is currently in full swing. Overall, we have achieved approximately three quarters of the population with LTE and plan to the end of 2016 largely complete the expansion.
Will rural areas be better served with those lower frequencies?
SUMESGUTNER: Yes, the propagation characteristics of this frequency range are very favourable and therefore particularly well suited for rural and alpine areas.
If so, when can we expect higher bandwidths? Even this summer?
SUMESGUTNER: See questio 2.
Which mobile bandwidths can we expect this year in Alpine regions?
SUMESGUTNER: In areas with LTE we serve 150 Mbit/s per sector. At one site, we usually have three sectors, for a total of 450 Mbit/s. This bandwidth is shared by all customers in this area. In practice, the customer, depending on the number of other users and the distance to the mobile station can get approximately 30 to 70 Mbit/s.
Will EDGE finally be a relict of time?
SUMESGUTNER: The majority of base stations that previously only had EDGE supply were already complemented with 4G/LTE. In addition to the further LTE expansion we examine more ways to increase the capacity of stations with low bandwidths.
T-Mobile Austria
Many in tourism are asking when there will be fast mobile internet in the countryside and especially in the Alps?
RÜDIGER KÖSTER: Fast mobile Internet is there not only since the introduction of LTE, but ever since 3G. T-Mobile supplies around 94 percent of the Austrian population with its 3G network. We cover now more than 90 percent with LTE and by the end of the year even more than 95 percent. 2G, voice and basic internet is supplied to 99 percent. It is difficult at mountain huts, very remote houses, hills and valleys, where people indeed get on walks and excursions, but which are not inhabited in actually sense. In Austria’s difficult topography white spots will remain on the Internet map for a while. For such places, however, there is a viable alternative: broadband via satellite, whose prices are comparable with the mobile internet.
When will the frequencies of the digital dividend (700 – 900 MHz) be used?
KÖSTER: The 800 MHz frequency, the so-called digital dividend 1, is already being used for LTE. 900MHz has long been used for mobile communications, but so far only for 2G (voice and basic internet). The frequency around 700 MHz, the so-called digital dividend 2, must be advertised to use – this has to be decided by the regulator RTR. From the perspective of mobile operators: The sooner, the better.
Will rural areas be better and faster served with those lower frequencies?
KÖSTER: Basically yes, because these frequencies are longer, thus reach further and can better serve sparsely populated regions. Even in densely populated regions, they are very useful for better indoor coverage. But one thing even lower frequencies cannot do: penetrate mountains. Just as mountains cast shadows, they also make dead spots.
If so, when can we expect higher bandwidths? Even this summer?
KÖSTER: We are currently building 50 new cell stations per week and we could raise our LTE coverage to 90 percent last year. This constitutes the largest expansion program in the company’s history. On our website we offers a map in which you can check the availability for a specific address.
Which mobile bandwidths can we expect this year in Alpine regions?
KÖSTER: You cannot generalize. As I said, 90 percent of all Austrians are supplied from T-Mobile at their home, at work or on the go with LTE and 94 percent with 3G. Even more, if you are covered with 2G – displayed as an E – which is basically enough for Facebook, email or WhatsApp.
Will EDGE finally be a relict of time?
KÖSTER: Not so soon, because it’s still a backup for some indoor location, basements or in very remote regions. Even where there are very good LTE and 3G coverage EDGE will still be available, as a kind of safety net. Also, for example, for many applications of the Internet of Things, IoT short, where bandwidth plays not a great role.
Drei-Hutchison
Many in tourism are asking when there will be fast mobile internet in the countryside and especially in the Alps?
JAN TRIONOW: Since August 2015, Three covers 98 percent of Austrians with LTE and provides the largest LTE network of all Austrian operators. So, many rural areas – like most ski and tourist resorts – benefit for the first time from super-fast mobile Internet. Especially in ski and tourism areas, we will optimize our network continuously. Our victory in the lasst network test by the magazine connect is a particular satisfaction for Three. After two years of intensive network expansion, the engineering team has more than earned this recognition. Annually Three been investing a three-digit million amount in network expansion. Overall, the nationwide LTE expansion required some 1,100 man-years. The 3Network has been extended in recent years by 50 percent. Almost all broadcasting stations were thereby upgraded to LTE. Due to the challenging Austrian topography, it is very difficult to supply 100 percent of the population with LTE. Think of climbers: The emergency call can of course also be issued in areas where Three offers no coverage.
When will the frequencies of the digital dividend (700 – 900 MHz) be used?
TRIONOW: The frequencies of the 800 MHz frequency range (digital dividend 1) are already in use. A few months ago, the Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology has announced that the digital dividend 2 (700 MHz range) can be used from 2020 on.
Will rural areas be better and faster served with those lower frequencies?
TRIONOW: Lower frequencies have better propagation characteristics and require fewer stations to an area to be able to supply.
If so, when can we expect higher bandwidths? Even this summer?
TRIONOW: All three Austrian operators are expanding their networks in the frequency bands below 1000 MHz. Thus, the supply is being improved.
Which mobile bandwidths can we expect this year in Alpine regions?
TRIONOW: We have achieved as noted a huge milestone in our network expansion in August 2015. Now we are constantly optimizing. A network is alive and constantly evolving. Within the Alpine area we mainly focus on ski resorts.
Will EDGE finally be a relict of time?
TRIONOW: EDGE is currently offers a basic service in areas without LTE. Through ongoing optimization measures, the use of EDGE will continue to decline.
Digital dividend in tourism
Till the end of the year, so the three asked providers, the frequencies from the digital dividend will be set. But still, some blank areas will remain. That means for all the hikers, bikers and other mountain sportsmen: finally sharing pictures on Facebook directly on the top of the mountain. And tourist destinations have to ask themselves: What can I provide on the phone for my visitors?
You can find ideas on the possibilities in tourism here: Mobile information systems in tourism. And here you can read, how hotels can get fit for the digital turn.Scientists have observed what they believe to be the most distant and oldest galaxy ever detected — a discovery which could provide insight into the nature of the universe in its infancy.
“This galaxy is the most distant object we have ever observed with high confidence,” Wei Zheng, the leading astronomer of the team at Johns Hopkins University that noticed the galaxy on multiple images from both the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, told ScienceBlog. At 13.2-billion years old, we are technically seeing this galaxy when it was very young, but its light is only reaching Earth now.
In the big image at left, the many galaxies of a massive cluster called MACS J1149+2223 dominate the scene. (NASA / Space Telescope Science Institute)
According to DiscoveryNews, scientists have gauged that the overall age of the universe is 13.7 billion years, which would make this galaxy almost as old as the universe itself and born from a time dubbed "The Dark Ages." The universe is believed to have started building galaxies 500 million years after the Big Bang.
Galaxies this far away are nearly impossible to see even with advanced telescopes due to their low light. Zheng and his team banked on the Hubble telescope finding a cluster of young galaxies called MACS J1149+2223 that have a heavy gravitational pull able to bend and magnify light from a far more distant object than could be seen from Earth. According to ScienceBlog, this provides more evidence than any prior claims of similarly-aged galaxies.
Previously, the oldest-known galaxy discovered by NASA was unconfirmed but was also believed to be around 13.2 billion years old.
In June, a team of Japanese astronomers spotted what they claimed was the oldest-known galaxy at 12.91 billion years.
"We are likely just seeing the tip of the iceberg," University of Arizona astronomer Daniel Stark told DiscoveryNews.
Zheng's team's findings have been published in a paper available here.I. NAME OF SPONSORRothman Institute, WPVI-TV, its licensee ABC, Inc., 6ABC and 6abc.com (Hereinafter collectively referred to as "Sponsors"). Disney is not a sponsor or endorser of this Sweepstakes.II. ELIGIBILITYSweepstakes is open only to legal residents of PA, NJ and DE and entrants must be at least 18 years old. Employees of Sponsors, their respective parent, subsidiary and affiliated companies, advertising and promotion agencies and anyone involved in this Sweepstakes' production, development or handling, and immediate families/household members of anyone so employed are not eligible.By entering, participants agree to release, discharge and hold harmless the Sponsors, their parent, subsidiary and affiliated companies, licensees and assigns, advertising and promotional agencies and prize suppliers and their respective officers, directors, employees, agents and representatives from any and all claims, liabilities and damages arising from or relating to an entrant's participation in the Sweepstakes and/or acceptance or use of any prize including without limitation (i) any condition caused by events beyond Sponsors' control that may cause the Sweepstakes to be disrupted or corrupted and (ii) any printing or typographical errors in any materials associated with the Sweepstakes.By entering this Sweepstakes, you grant permission to ABC, Inc., to use your name, photograph, likeness, voice, prize information and/or biographical information (city and state only) for programming, publicity and promotional purposes without further compensation, unless prohibited by law. Void where prohibited. All federal, state and local laws and regulations apply. All submissions become the sole property of the Sponsors of this promotion, and will not be acknowledged. Participation in the Sweepstakes constitutes entrant's full and unconditional agreement to and acceptance of these Official Rules.Any individuals (including but not limited to employees, consultants, independent contractors, and interns) who have, within the past six months, performed services for Sponsor organizations or entities responsible for sponsoring, fulfilling, administering, advertising or promoting the sweepstakes or supplying the prize, and their respective parent, subsidiary, affiliated and successor companies, and immediate family and household members of such individuals, are not eligible to enter or play. "Immediate family members" shall mean parents, stepparents, children, stepchildren, siblings, stepsiblings, or spouses. "Household members" shall mean people who share the same residence at least three months a year.III. HOW TO ENTERNo Purchase Necessary.To enter, click on the link from the 6abc.com Promotional Carousel that will take you directly to the Disney On Ice presents Frozen sweepstakes page. This page will contain a registration box for viewers to enter the sweepstakes by providing the information in all available entry fields.IV. SWEEPSTAKES COMMENCEMENT DATE AND DEADLINE FOR ENTRYThe Sweepstakes begins 12:00am EST on December 1, 2014 and ends 11:59pm EST on December 21, 2014.Limit one entry per person. Entries remain the property of Sponsors and will not be returned or acknowledged. Sponsors are not responsible for mail that is lost, stolen, late, illegible, incomplete, damaged, mutilated, misdirected, altered, tampered with, or postage-due.V. HOW AND WHEN WINNERS WILL BE SELECTED AND NOTIFIEDFour (4) winners will be randomly selected on or about December 22, 2014 from among all valid entries received.Winners will be notified by e-mail, and/or phone. Winner must respond to Sponsor within 48 hours of being notified or the prize will be forfeited and may be awarded to an alternate winner, time permitting. If for any reason, prize is not claimed or winner is disqualified, prize will be awarded to an alternate winner, time permitting, selected at random from remaining valid, eligible entries timely submitted. Limit one prize per winner for this sweepstakes. Persons who have won any other prizes promoted by Sponsors within 90 days of entry are not eligible to enter this sweepstakes. If for any reason the Sweepstakes is not capable of running as planned, ABC, Inc. reserves the right at its sole discretion |
the Enfield branch of Barclays Bank in north London in June 1967. The first person to withdraw cash was actor Reg Varney, a celebrity resident of Enfield known for his part in a number of popular television series. An early deployment of this device outside of the UK took place in Zurich on November, 1967. It was called "Geldautomat".
The DACS machines used cheque-like tokens (which were guillotined to the size of a normal cheque inside the machine) which had been impregnated with a radioactive compound of carbon-14. The radioactive signal was detected by the machine and matched against the personal identification number (PIN) entered on a keypad. The short-range beta emission from carbon-14 could be easily detected, and he determined that the radiation hazard was acceptable as "you would have to eat 136,000 such cheques for it to have any effect on you".[3] Initially, a PIN length of six digits was proposed; Shepherd-Barron tested this system on his wife, Caroline, but found that the longest string of numbers that she could remember was four. As a result, four-digit PINs were chosen and as ATMs expanded across the globe, this became the world standard. Withdrawals from the first Barclaycash machines were limited to a maximum of £10, "quite enough for a wild weekend" according to Shepherd-Barron.[3]
Shepherd-Barron received the O.B.E. in the 2005 New Year's Honours list for services to banking as "inventor of the automatic cash dispenser".[7]
Various rival cash dispenser systems quickly began to emerge. Another Scottish inventor, James Goodfellow, who was working at Smiths Industries, was commissioned by Chubb Locks to work on a new cash machine. Together with Anthony Davies, he developed a new system whereby the user's PIN could be stored on a reusable bank card, rather than on single-use cheques. The system was patented as GB1197183 and US3905461 and was cited by subsequent patents as "prior art device". Goodfellow's PIN system resembled modern ATMs more than Shepherd-Barron's machine.[8] However, Shepherd-Barron's machine was the first to be installed, if only for a few days.
Personal life [ edit ]
His son, Nicholas Shepherd-Barron FRS, is professor of algebraic geometry at the King's College London.[9]
John died on 15 May 2010 after a brief illness at the age of 84 in Raigmore Hospital, Inverness, Scotland.[1][10]
References [ edit ]Even thought Bloody Disgusting exclusively reported this last summer, Wicker Man director Robin Hardy has revealed that he is finally moving ahead with new feature Wrath Of The Gods, which will complete a trilogy of Wicker films.
He spoke to ScreenDaily ahead of a 40th anniversary re-release of The Wicker Man, which has been digitally restored and has been labelled “The Final Cut”.
“I am just at the opening stages of financing it (‘Wrath Of The Gods’) and hope to make it next year,” said Hardy, who will also produce.
The writer-director added: “The first two films are all (about) offers to the Gods. The third film is about the Gods. I use the vehicle of the final act of Götterdämmerung (the last of Wagner’s Ring cycle).”
The new project, which is slated to shoot in the Shetlands, won’t be “heavily Wagner-esque” but is expected to explore similar themes to the previous two films.Donald Trump threw his first Hanukkah party as president on Thursday night, and by all accounts, it sounds like a pretty shitty affair.
For starters, exactly zero Democratic congresspeople were invited to the event, despite the fact that 28 of the 30 Jewish House members are Democrats. Also not invited: representatives from Jewish groups who happen to disagree with Trump.
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Jewish Republican congressmen Lee Zeldin and David Kustoff were, however, in attendance, hobnobbing with a who’s who of far-right Jews, including Zionist Organization of America president Mort Klein, who once proudly proclaimed President Obama a “Jew-hating anti-semite.”
One White House official dismissed charges of partisanship, telling the New York Times with a straight face: “I am not aware of the political affiliation of any of the guests, but I do know that this year was meant to be more personal than political.”
Upon entering the party, President Trump tooted his own horn about his disastrous, uninformed decision to unilaterally recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
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“I know for a fact there are a lot of happy people in this room,” Trump declared, adding: “Jerusalem.”
Trump then brought his grandchildren—both Jewish—to light a small menorah in front of the assembled crowd. According to participants, this may have been the only actual Hanukkah decoration at the entire party. There were, however, four large Christmas trees positioned around the room.
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After the official White House event concluded, revelers moved to the Trump International Hotel, for a second reception sponsored by the Sheldon Adelson-funded Republican Jewish Coalition. There, the Times reported:
Other boldfaced names in the Trump orbit, including David A. Clarke Jr., a former sheriff of Milwaukee County, and Jill Kelley, the Tampa socialite, mingled near the bar. Several guests clutched copies of the book “Let Trump Be Trump,” by Corey Lewandowski, the president’s first campaign manager, which he had been signing earlier in the lobby.
So, to recap: terrible guests, an emphasis on Christmas decorations, and lots of awful books. President Trump may like to insist that there’s a War on Christmas happening across the United States, but from the sound of things, Hanukkah’s not doing so hot this year either.Just days before Mother's Day, a source confirms to ET that Janet Jackson is pregnant with her first child.
The baby news comes after the 49-year-old singer -- who will turn 50 on May 16 -- announced last month that she will be postponing her tour to start a family with husband Wissam Al Mana. “We’re in the second leg of the tour and there actually has been a sudden change,” Jackson explained in a video posted to Twitter on April 6. “I thought it was important that you be the first to know. My husband and I are planning our family, so I’m going to have to delay the tour.”
Getty Images
“Please, if you could try and understand that it’s important that I do this now,” Jackson asked of her fans. “I have to rest up, doctor’s orders. But I have not forgotten about you. I will continue the tour as soon as I possibly can."
WATCH: Janet Jackson Steps Out for First Time Since Surgery, Preps for Tour Return
Jackson secretly wed Al Mana, 41, in 2012, but didn't confirm the news until early 2013. This is the singer’s third marriage.
In 2008, ET spoke with Jackson about whether she and her then-boyfriend, Jermaine Dupri, would be open to having kids. "I would love to have children of our own, but we also would love to adopt," she said. "So, we'll see what happens. It'll happen someday."
WATCH: Janet Jackson Surprises Fans by Pretending to Be a Statue -- and It's Adorable!
When ET correspondent Cojo gushed that she would "the greatest mother in the world," Jackson responded, "Well, I hope so. People say that, but I hope so."
Check out ET's behind-the-scenes look at Jackson's new music video for "Dammn Baby."
Related GalleryWith the release of his new book, The Good Room, David McWilliams chatted with the TheJournal.ie’s Christina Finn on why Ireland needs to stand up for itself.
MOST ECONOMISTS LOOK at the likes of GDP and inflation, but they actually don’t matter. The only thing that matters is people’s lives. Every little decision that people make, add them all together and that becomes the economy.
My new book focuses on this new way of looking at the economy. It is written through the eyes of a pregnant 32-year-old teacher, Olivia Vickers. I came up with the idea last October in a coffee shop in Dublin. I saw a pregnant woman come in and she seemed quite hassled at the time, but she seemed very happy too. She was patting her baby bump and almost seemed like she was chatting to her new baby.
We are in a baby boom at the moment and I couldn’t help but think that the people that are most in trouble are the people that are having kids. I interviewed a lot of people and the most important thing I found is that life goes on – people fall in love, people have kids, but if you listen to people talk about the economy, it is as if the world has stopped still, as if people’s lives stop. But the world never stands still, people’s lives go on despite it all. The book is really about the triumph of life and the defiance against the cold economics of it all.
The Good Room
The Good Room, which is the title of my new book, is an Irish thing. My granny had a good room and it was was a tabernacle where everything was to be untouched. The idea is a metaphor for how Ireland positions itself and negotiates in Europe. We don’t stand up for ourselves the way we should, because collectively the leadership, not the people, don’t have the self confidence to see ourselves as equals. Years ago, when I was working in the Central Bank during the negotiations on the euro and the Maastricht Treaty I used to watch how other countries like the Danes, similar small nations and population, they would always be arguing and saying “well what about Denmark, why is this good for the Danes,” and in the end they decided to not go into the euro. Other Scandinavian countries were the same. They stood up for themselves and they said “hold on, this isn’t right for us”. While we are like, “Oh thanks very much, thanks for letting us get into the good room – which is Brussels”. Now that is very evident, more so than before.
There is a huge disconnect with life on the ground for the people of Ireland and the people who are in the negotiating position for the country. As long as we play the good room game, the more we say, “don’t worry about us over here in the corner”, then the more suffering the people are going to go through. It is a bit like my granny, where she pretended that we ate off the good china all the time, that is not the reality of the situation.
Politicians say that we shouldn’t say certain things in case we damage the perception of Ireland abroad. It is all about reputation. But when a country is in an IMF situation, you don’t have a reputation – that is why the IMF is running the country.
80 per cent of of tracker mortgages given out over three years
The extreme urgency of now is a great expression to define where we as a nation are now. People have to get up and feel that tomorrow is going to be better than yesterday. They need hope but our leaders are all talking about four or five years away. Life goes on and it goes on quickly. Think of the the demographic of the people that read TheJournal, they are not reading newspapers anymore and are probably between the ages of 20-35. They are likely to be in terrible negative equity and these people cannot wait, they cannot wait indefinitely.
Ireland’s major issue is the mortgage debt crisis that is building up. There are over 120,000 people in arrears and 400,000 on tracker mortgages. 80 per cent of of tracker mortgages were given out between 2004 and 2007. The majority of those are in negative equity. When these interest rates rise, and they will, there is going to be a another wave of massive mortgage defaults and that could come in about four or five years time. In 2003, I said that the housing market was a scam, although not everyone believed me at the time. There is no evidence anywhere that austerity works, that is why I called it the scam of austerity. So if you are embracing policies that have never worked it is like being diagnosed with heart disease and prescribing chemotherapy.
I said that the housing market would fall, but it didn’t crash until a few years later in 2007. I think we have to prepare for this in advance rather than waiting for four years time and saying we should have done something. I can guarantee that is going to happen, I guarantee that if we don’t do something about it now we are going to wake up on the centenary of the 1916 Rising and have mass mortgage default on tracker mortgages.
Worried conversations
The anxiety of the people is what is being discussed around the kitchen table at night, not about whether Facebook is going to set up its headquarters here. People are talking about how much they have and what they are going to do to get by. Years ago, my father lost his job in the late 70s, around the same age that my own son is now. I remember listening at the top of the stairs, when my parents thought I was in bed, to my parents having really worried conversations about money and what they were going to do next and where he was going to find another job. That has had a lasting impact on me. Can you imagine how many of those exact same conversations are taking place every night around Ireland?
Hope is what we need. It is really what binds us all together. The character of Olivia is an amalgamation of people I have met and her story ends up being a hopeful one. It is a risk to write a book that is half economics and half fiction, but I think it is an uplifting story. Her child is born and life goes on. It is only money at the end of the day – unusual to have an economist say that, but it is only money.
David McWilliams is an economist, broadcaster and bestselling author. David’s new book, The Good Room, is out now.Transcript for Investigation: Inside Egg 'Factory Farm'
Now an investigation into one of the largest suppliers of the eggs you eat from supermarkets to McDonald's. Where they come from and how sanitary -- those conditions. Not very in some cases but due to the Brian Ross report you're about to see McDonald's made a radical change just last night. Maybe a case of putting that chicken before the year. For more than 35 years McDonald's has owned the fast food breakfast market. But the tank next month and now an American food icon and ham and cheese fresh -- eight. You hear McDonald's television and television commercials and the source of those legs and some idyllic place where chickens freely roam the Barnum -- the when he knowing that a hot and delicious memories. The reality is much -- Almost all the McDonald's -- -- come from huge closely guarded operations including this one in Iowa. It's marble farms a so called factory far. We're not a chicken is to be seen on the outside. Signs warn that no cameras are allowed inside. These factory farm industries would prefer to operate in secrecy without scrutiny but tonight a rare look inside that we have breakfast really comes from. An investigator for the animal rights activist group mercy for -- Pierce the -- -- -- secrets providing this undercover video to twenty foot. Showing what appears to be unsanitary conditions and mindless animal cruelty. That's far -- facilities in three states. I saw workers do horrendous things to birds. They are thrown their grabbed by the neck there's slammed in and out of cages the animal rights activists who made the but inside. After being hired sparkle last summer. He asked that we not show his face and call him Scott so this is the scene and this is the scene -- never caught on to who he was and at one point. He sat in -- a company wide conference call that warned of possible infiltration -- animal rights activists. But the fox with the undercover camera was already in the hen house. At squabble like most major equities the chickens are kept in what -- called fabricated. Six to a case. Stacked high -- rose twice the length of a football field and producers say they are cost efficient and scientifically accepted. They literally lived their entire lives. Laying a future for McDonald's for their consumers. In these battery cages. Where they do not have the states the -- spread their wings and walk around. Workers cut the peaks of young -- and prevent them from packing the others in their crowded -- The video also shows workers. Cleaning out dead birds apparently left for days or weeks to block in the cages while other hands laid their. There were. Fly is still swarming. The the battery cages. There were rodents running around the you know in and out of the walls and underneath the cages. Scott said his bosses seemed unconcerned. About possible contamination of the food -- by the insects and rodents what food safety experts say is a primary way that Salmonella and other diseases can be -- With a special orders make sure the food -- has kept clean. Free of bugs and rodents. No not that I ever heard anybody nothing like that now I never heard anybody ask as -- clean the future is an hour. We showed the tape to David Acheson who is the head of food safety for the FDA in the Bush Administration. That's a public health threat flies -- that -- And that's that me and should be gone and then flies. Moves -- though aren't exactly as do rodents he's gonna deposit that into. It's the -- when the chickens at the feet and then from the against the human and you get Salmonella and in a worst case that human. Even those who survive can suffer -- Salmonella in eggs from another -- producer almost killed Sara Lewis of Santa Cruz California. Mother of two still on heavy medication a year and a half later at missed a lot -- just. It just takes a toll on you Sarah got sick after eating dessert at a graduation dinner for her sister at a catering hall one of several dozen to fall ill. It was an egg custard tart and come to find out that's what I -- getting him -- The Aggies used to make the custard were contaminated with Salmonella attacking -- -- justice system. Leading to massive infection internal bleeding and near cardiac arrest at his wife -- a ghost and my children and you really recognizing and they were just crying and they saw me at my worst. Several. Inspectors discovered -- the bad -- used in the -- came from an Iowa company Wright county eggs with a long record of health problems. The conditions at your facility were not clean. They were not sanitary. They were filthy. It was the big story of the summer of 2010. More than 2000 people across the country got sick from Wright county -- we've been reporting all week here on that massive recall now -- a half a billion eggs and still growing. And there was a nationwide health scare about the safety of all addicts. The Salmonella operate from that company a year and a half ago led to a long overdue crackdown and promises of stepped up federal enforcement. Which is why this new undercover videotape at a second Iowa company is so important. Calling into question whether enough is still being done to keep America's -- eggs safe. Smart move produces hundreds of millions of legs and claims it has never discovered Salmonella in a single -- it not been -- -- -- around the world. This is state of the art when it comes to a production company invited 20/20 for a one hour tour of its huge facility in Vincent. Acquiring all of us to Wear protective gear sanitation five. Inside -- executive -- clip and showed us around. Saying the filth and -- seen on the undercover tape was an aberration. Just -- network -- -- battery cages provide plenty of room for chickens even though they abandoned Tuesday. So you don't think these -- cruel. That's enough and Clinton's survivalist techniques have been widely -- and lead to the safest Xbox. Sure create similar report customers are safe and calls the best quality possible -- But that was called into question this week. With the Food and Drug Administration the FDA coming down hard on -- -- in what is said was a rare company wide warning letter. That cited serious significant violations. With sanitary conditions at five different sites. That the FDA said could lead to contaminated a former FDA official David Acheson was not surprise based on what we're seeing him and -- not in compliance with the law so that breaking the law. As to the ugly acts of animal -- many too graphic to be broadcast. It's marvelous said it too was shocked at the scenes since it said all violated its animal welfare problems forced people -- That breaks this policy. -- zero. Very effusive in. But it was all too much for McDonald's which relies on -- both farms for -- for all of its restaurants west of the Mississippi. McDonald's announced today it is dumping -- -- as a supplier and we'll get the eggs for its net -- somewhere else. McDonald says its eggs or cook it well enough to kill off any Salmonella. That customers have nothing to worry about. But it said it took the action to drop sparkle farms because of concerns about the company's management and the scene shown to them by twenty to a what he called the disturbing and unacceptable treatment of -- Animal rights groups tonight -- -- any major. As we watch this story a lot of people on our staff and U2 no doubt. Had questions about the safest way to prepare acts -- go to our website abcnews.com slash 20/20 to find out.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.Starting Tuesday, rideshare drivers who are willing to take an extra step toward proving they have a clean criminal background will receive a $25 gas card provided by the San Antonio Police Department, Centro San Antonio, and Tech Bloc.
“As rideshare drivers choose to sign up for this incentive program, you are telling your customers that safety is important to you, too,” SAPD Chief William McManus said at the incentive program’s launch party at Paramour on Tuesday.
SAPD and the City have been encouraging drivers for months to take 10-point fingerprint background checks in addition to the third-party state and federal name background checks already required by so-called “rideshare” companies like Uber and Lyft. Dozens of drivers that have taken the 10-point checks carried out by SAPD attended the event and received their gas cards.
The event doubled as a launch and recruitment event for the local startup ride-hailing company DRIV, which will require all of its drivers to take the 10-print check and eliminate busy night surge pricing common with main competitors Lyft and Uber.
The first 600 drivers will receive a $25 Valero gas card. At least 50 cards were handed out before 6 p.m. at the event, according to a City spokesperson. SAPD will host three raffles throughout the year to further incentivize new and current drivers to go through the 10-print verification before Fiesta in April, with gas cards in the amounts of $100, $250, and $500.
The four-year plan approved by City Council with a 9-2 vote in December 2016 made the 10-point test optional for drivers. The plan was approved after years of opposition from the traditional vehicle for hire industry – whose drivers are required to take the 10-point test – and some Council members’ concerns about public safety.
McManus was unavailable for further comment on Tuesday, but during City Council’s deliberation of the rideshare plan in December he said that the third-party state and federal background checks automatically performed by transportation network companies (TNCs) are sufficient in ensuring public safety.
Ultimately, those arguing in favor of rideshare and citing San Antonio’s goals of workforce recruitment and public safety in terms of drunk driving, won the day. Tech Bloc and Centro San Antonio were among the organizations that rallied support for rideshare: as tech industry and downtown advocacy organizations, both financially backed the incentive program at $7,500 each.
Bonnie Arbittier / Rivard Report
Centro San Antonio President and CEO Pat DiGiovanni said support beyond this year will be based on how the pilot incentive program performs.
The other $15,000 of the program’s total $30,000 cost will be funded by the operation fees collected by SAPD from rideshare companies, Assistant Police Director Steven Baum told the Rivard Report.
To date, SAPD has received 446 applications from TNC drivers willing to take the 10-point test, approved 332 of those, and issued 295 verification cards. In November last year, 371 drivers had applied to take the fingerprint check, and 280 had been approved. No TNC driver applicant has failed the 10-point check yet, Baum said.
“I’d like to see 600 [SAPD-verified drivers] by the time Fiesta starts, and I’d like to see 1,000 before we get to the summer,” he added.
There is no guarantee on if, when, and where SAPD-verified drivers will be picking up passengers in the city, and it’s unclear how many TNC drivers total are operating in San Antonio: Many are part-time and some are inactive. Uber and Lyft have declined to release driver data. In order to identify drivers who have taken the 10-print check, passengers have to know to look for a “T number” next to their driver’s name. Rideshare company Get Me, on the other hand, includes a fingerprint icon for easy identification, giving riders the option of canceling a ride and waiting for an SAPD-verified driver to come online.
“SAPD has streamlined the process so that drivers only have to appear twice: once to present themselves for fingerprinting and a second time to obtain their City-issued ID and $25 gas card,” a City news release stated.
SAPD-verified drivers will also receive stickers for their car windows to increase visibility of the program.
“It’s easier than ever before, and your customers will see you are an SAPD-verified driver,” McManus said.
Bonnie Arbittier / Rivard Report
Bonnie Arbittier / Rivard Report permalink Bonnie Arbittier / Rivard Report permalink
Meet DRIV
The five DRIV co-founders hope to launch their app in early April, just in time for Fiesta.
Beyond requiring the 10-print and setting a standard rate for miles, DRIV co-founder Matthew Grimley told the Rivard Report that DRIV will offer live 24/7 customer support and randomly drug test its drivers.
“[DRIV is] everything we wish we’d had when we were drivers,” he said, noting that most of the founding team members are former Lyft or Uber drivers.
Grimley said DRIV will give its drivers a bigger share of the customer’s fees, which will reduce the need for surge pricing. DRIV will take a 20% commission per fare.
Lyft raised its commission from 20% to 25% on Jan. 1, 2016. Uber also takes 25%, according to an online forum and has experimented with 30% in some markets, according to media reports.
Bonnie Arbittier / Rivard Report
The biggest challenge for DRIV so far has been time, Grimley said. “We want this now.”
The local rideshare is working on finalizing both its technology and its agreement with the City, he said. “We want everything to work smoothly before we press ‘Go.'”
Meanwhile, two bills filed in the Texas Legislature this session would take away local governments’ ability to regulate TNCs. Neither would require fingerprint background checks if passed.The automation of jobs is expected to accelerate in the coming years, and it's likely to play out differently across metro regions.
Generally speaking, regional economies with more highly-educated workforces in technology, healthcare and similar industries are expected to be more resilient to any job displacement. Economists have offered varying predictions on automation's effects on the economy. One highly-cited paper by University of Oxford professors Carl Frey and Michael Osborn estimates about 47 percent of total U.S. employment is at risk. For the study, a probability of automation was calculated for each occupation by evaluating the extent to which its work activities required “creativity, social intelligence and perception, and manipulation.”
Governing utilized the Oxford study definitions to calculate the share of jobs that could potentially be automated within the 50 largest metro areas. Automation probabilities for each individual occupation were compared with corresponding metro area occupational employment statistics published by the Department of Labor. Approximately 65 percent of Las Vegas area jobs were found to be susceptible to automation, the highest of any metro area. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, Calif., Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C., and other regions with large tech industries registered the lowest shares of employment vulnerable to automation.
Larger markers represent regions with higher percentages of jobs at risk of being automated
About the data
University of Oxford researchers calculated the approximate automation potential for 702 occupations, which are listed in the report appendix. These estimated probabilities were compared with the Labor Department's most recent Occupational Employment Statistics, current as of May 2016. A small number of jobs, less than 10 percent of metro area employment, were not assigned probabilities in the Oxford study and were excluded from our calculations. Please note that these estimates refer to jobs thought to potentially be automated given their work activities, not actual numbers of jobs expected to be lost.(See bottom of the story for a response from the City of London Corporation)
London’s ‘smart bins’ are tracking passerbys by identifying their smartphones’ wi-fi connections. First reported by Siraj Datoo for Quartz, the scheme is currently being trialled around Cheapside, with the intention to sell the data to brands to create targeted advertisements. However, with the technology in its infancy there are still unanswered questions over the legality of the scheme.
Renew, the startup that build and sell the pod-like recycling bins, installed the bins in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics. They currently have 200 units spread across the City of London equipped with wi-fi and LCD screens. Advertisers then buy time on the screens, with local councils and charities receiving “up to a third” of the screentime.
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With each unit costing £30,000 to build and install and costing around half a million in maintenance costs over Renew’s 21-year contact, the bins are no small investment. However, these expenses are balanced out by the quality of the advertising space.
Broadcasting to ‘affluent AB professionals’ almost without competition, the bins can even offer live-updates to the displayed content. The decision to track individuals and offer targeted advertisement is a logical progression for the company.
The ‘Renew ORB’ technology looks for smartphones with their wifi turned on and logs their MAC address - a string of numbers unique to each device. From this it can calculate the “proximity, speed, duration and manufacturer” of each smartphone. Over the course of a week Renew reports that “4,009,676 devices captured with over 530,000 uniques acquired.”
The graph below shows the number of smartphones identified each day with repeated triple dips representing increases in foot traffic during morning, lunch and evening. Renew say that the data could allow them to track which stores individuals visit, how long they stay there (“linger time”) and how loyal customers are to particular shops.
The scope for new advertising methods offered by this data is remarkable. For example, If Costa Coffee knows that the iPhone with MAC address A8-23-RR-XX usually stops in around 8 in the morning for a coffee and a croissant (don't forget, this technology could be extended into the stores themselves) is now heading to Pret for a morning pick-me-up, then they might pay to flash an advert on a relevant bin just as the A8-23-RR-XX is approaching, reminding him of a loyalty scheme or a special offer.
This particular scenario may be overly elaborate, but the core concept of what this data could mean to companies is not unusual. This sort of tracking happens on the internet all the time, and similar technology is already used in the US in malls.
However, Renew are currently facing accusations that their scheme is violating individuals’ privacy and perhaps even UK law. Speaking to The Independent Renew CEO Kaveh Memari was keen to defend the technology: “The gist of it is that we are collecting anonymised, aggregated MAC details. We’re not really collecting a personal piece of data: we don’t know who anyone is.”
“This is just testing to see if the technology works. It’s been used before in indoor environments but not outdoors before. In fact, it’s actively used in a lot places and people don’t even know it.”
Whilst the collection of anonymised MAC numbers is legal, the UK and the EU have clear laws regarding cookies – tiny individual databases created by companies to track how individuals use their websites. As EU Directive 2009/136/EC states:
“Member States shall ensure that the storing of information […] in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned has given his or her consent.”
Essentially this means that websites that store cookies, that tracks users’ habits, have to tell people they’re doing so. The problem then is the grey area as to whether the information collected by Renew is the same as a cookie. It doesn’t help that the motto of Presence Orb, the company that provides the technology to track the smartphones, is ‘a cookie for the real world’.
Memari doesn’t think that the two are the same, stressing that the information collected by the trial schemes has essentially been a “people counter”. All the extrapolations from this data - about shopping habits and brand loyalty - would be processed by the brands.
“The data would be sold to advertisers in a raw form,” says Memari, “and then it would be their responsibility. Anonymised MAC addresses aren’t personal data but once you start enriching it - which we are not planning to do – that’s when you get into interesting [legal] areas.”
So far, this seems to be the consensus but there are still many unknowns. The Information Commissioner’s Office (the UK’s independent authority on information rights) have refused to comment until more details on the technology are known, and Renew too hope that they can establish themselves more firmly in the debate.
“We very much want to be involved in the privacy issue and be at the forefront because we know this is an area that isn’t well regulated,” says Memari. “We’re one of the first movers here, it’s all new.”
Update: The City of London Corporation has release the following statement regarding the bins:
“We have already asked the firm concerned to stop this data collection immediately. We have also taken the issue to the Information Commissioner’s Office. Irrespective of what’s technically possible, anything that happens like this on the streets needs to be done carefully, with the backing of an informed public.”Once you know what to look for, you might catch glimpses of California’s native bats, even around cities like Berkeley. I see bats near Tilden Park, flittering off into the dusk like tiny airborne scraps of leather. Others notice their pointy silhouettes in the light of the moon, sunset-painted sky, pond reflections, streetlights.
Field biologist Emilie Strauss holds fond memories of watching colonies of bats, fifteen years ago, when they flew out of exit holes in structures in and around UC Berkeley. One of their homes, fittingly, was the Life Sciences Building.
These days, fourteen different species of bat (including three California Species of Special Concern) are thought to live in and/or migrate through Berkeley, according to Cat Taylor, naturalist and bat expert from the East Bay Regional Park District. That’s about 60 percent of California’s native bat species.
All of our local bats eat nothing but insects and other crawlies. Some even specialize in hunting wasps and yellowjackets.
The pallid bat (shown above and left) flies low to the ground, pouncing on beetles, crickets, potato bugs, centipedes, even scorpions. Its large sensitive ears can detect the footsteps of a cricket from 16 feet away!
The Mexican free-tailed bat (shown below) flaps as high as 10,000 feet into the night’s sky to feast on moths. It also munches mosquitoes, especially in the spring, before big, juicy moths take to the air.
Many of the insects that our city’s bats eat are, in fact, agricultural crop pests as well. “Researchers have estimated that bats save U.S. farmers an estimated 22.9 billion dollars annually,” says Dave Waldien, Co-Director of Programs for Bat Conservation International. This hankering for bugs, he adds, “is a great reason to work together to conserve our amazing bats.”
Indeed, Joseph Grinnell (1877-1939) — famed first director of UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and pioneering California field biologist — wrote enthusiastically about bats a full century ago. In his article, “Bats as Desirable Citizens” (Pacific Rural Press, vol. 85, no. 11, 15 March, 1913), he asked human citizens for compassion.
Bats, he wrote, are “as deserving of just as much consideration as the most beneficent of birds.” They do the same bug-devouring work as sunshine-loving warblers, swallows, and sparrows, he explained. Only, bats take the night shift.
This time of year, many, but not all bats migrate south to warmer and buggier habitats. Bats in Southern California may wing their way into Mexico. Others, like the seldom scene hoary bat (shown below), visit our own area from the north.
Scientists are now learning that bats also migrate laterally, in the east-west direction. Coastal areas, like Berkeley, seem to provide them with a respite from the hard freezes in the Central Valley, according to Corky Quirk, founder of the Davis-based rescue and education group, Northern California Bats (NorCalBats).
By summer, bats will return to their regular haunts, flying and feeding by night, clinging to elusive shady gaps (as narrow as one inch!) by day. Some of these furry nocturnes will snuggle into tree bark and rock crevices. Others will hang out in Spanish roof tiles and wooden rafters — free rent for those that keep their feet up, chins down.
Summer is busy, buggy bat season
Check back later with NorCalBats and the East Bay Regional Park District for fun bat activities for the family.
Bat species list
The following native bats are thought to live in and/or migrate through Berkeley:
California Bat: Myotis californicus
Fringe Bat (aka Fringe-Tailed Bat) – Myotis thysanodes
Little Brown Bat – Myotis lucifugus
Long-eared Bat – Myrotis evotis
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– with adorable kittens from the Humane Society of New York. What happened next, was of course one of the cutest beauty shoots you could ever witness, so we had to catch some behind-the-scenes footage to let everyone in on the action.
MORE: 5 Last-Minute Halloween Ideas You Can DIY
Above you’ll see kittens making their way through Halloween props and taking on some scary skeletons and pumpkins (who are at times larger than they are) in order to model like professionals for their first photo shoot. Enjoy the video above and make sure to check out the full Halloween nail art editorial for all of the details on the nail looks (and more up-close-and-personal kitty time)!
Credits:
Tiffany Hagler-Geard, Photographer, SheKnows
Angel Williams, Opus Beauty
Casey Herman, Kate Ryan Inc.
Yan Jin, New York Models
Melissa K, New York Models
Rachel Adler, Beauty Director, Beauty High
Sam Lim, Producer, StyleCasterTimothy C. Draper, a venture capitalist, is funding a push to carve up California.
Mike McPhate CALIFORNIA TODAY
Good morning.
California, home to nearly 40 million people, has commonly been declared ungovernable.
That’s why some people think we should carve it up.
In contrast to the so-called Calexit movement, which aspires to secession, these proponents see California’s salvation in greater local autonomy within the union.
A few years ago, a bid to create six states out of California drew wide media attention but ultimately fizzled.
Now, the architect of that effort, a tech billionaire named Timothy C. Draper, is back with another idea: three Californias. He submitted paperwork that would put the question before voters in 2018.
“No one can argue that California’s government is doing a good job governing or educating or building infrastructure for its people,” Mr. Draper said in an email. “And it doesn’t matter which party is in place.”
The three Californias would have roughly equivalent populations and wealth. A state of Northern California would include almost the entire upper half of the state, including San Francisco; a Southern California would contain most of the rest.
A third state, called simply California, would fold in Los Angeles and extend up the coast to Monterey.
The proposal’s odds are extreme. Even if voters got behind it, the state Legislature would have to approve it, and then the U.S. Congress, which would have to be convinced to let blue California add four additional senators.
Still, it’s irresistible to ponder the idea of multiple Californias.
Martin W. Lewis, a geographer at Stanford University, said Mr. Draper’s plan was striking in its seeming disregard for regional identities. Monterey, for example, which looks toward San Francisco, would be unlikely to welcome its absorption into a state whose epicenter is Los Angeles.
“That just seems wrong to me,” he said.
As an intellectual exercise, Dr. Lewis last year created a map of his own that plots 10 California regions, bound by an array of shared characteristics. Among them, “Sierra/Gold Country” has its common prospecting history, “Northwest” its boutique agricultural products, and “Imperial” a heavy Hispanic population.
In a two-California scenario, putting aside the water issues, it might seem logical to simply separate north and south.
But Dr. Lewis said that another division had become ascendant in the minds of many residents. He cited the alienation of Republican-leaning counties like those in the far north, where the breakaway movement State of Jefferson has wide allegiance
“It’s clear now,” he said, “that the real political divide separates the coastal counties from most of the interior counties.”
California Online
(Please note: We regularly highlight articles on sites that have limited access for nonsubscribers.)
A man suspected of being a Trump supporter was beaten in Berkeley on Sunday. Elijah Nouvelage / Getty Images
anti-violence program that pays young men to turn their lives around. [ • Sacramento is moving forward with a contentiousthat pays young men to turn their lives around. [ Sacramento Bee
BART defended its practice of giving free rides to workers and their families — “Public transportation isn’t meant to operate like a profit-making enterprise.” [ defended its practice of giving free rides to workers and their families — “Public transportation isn’t meant to operate like a profit-making enterprise.” [ San Francisco Chronicle
Beachgoers sought relief from the heat in Venice on Tuesday. Mike Nelson / European Pressphoto Agency
Sweltering temperatures across California are expected to linger through the Labor Day weekend. [The Associated Press] across California are expected to linger through the Labor Day weekend. [ Los Angeles Times
Tim Cook sees a seemingly perpetual state of gridlock in Washington, so he wants Apple to step up on social issues. [ sees a seemingly perpetual state of gridlock in Washington, so he wantsto step up on social issues. [ The New York Times
Dara Khosrowshahi is the new C.E.O. of Uber. The inside story of power plays, negotiations and wild swings in support. [ is the new C.E.O. of Uber. The inside story of power plays, negotiations and wild swings in support. [ The New York Times
Cade Metz of The New York Times testing the Neurable prototype. Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times
simply with a thought. But they are likely to be met with skepticism. [ • Companies are working on ways to control machines. But they are likely to be met with skepticism. [ The New York Times
Kathy Bates: “One of the worst things you can be in Hollywood is old. Ageism is alive and well.” [ : “One of the worst things you can be in Hollywood is old. Ageism is alive and well.” [ The New York Times
Bruce Lee’s life, when the martial-arts superstar battled a Shaolin monk in the Bay Area. [ • “Birth of the Dragon” focuses on an early chapter in, when the martial-arts superstar battled a Shaolin monk in the Bay Area. [ The New York Times
Lara Pia Arrobio at the LPA studio in downtown Los Angeles. Jake Michaels for The New York Times
Lara Pia Arrobio, is beloved by Lena Dunham, Emily Ratajkowski and, yes, the Kardashians. [ • LPA, a year-old label by bon vivant, is beloved by Lena Dunham, Emily Ratajkowski and, yes, the Kardashians. [ The New York Times
to camp — for free. [ • Public lands in California offer dozens of awesome places— for free. [ SFGate.com
And Finally...
Ishi, circa 1911. He was believed to be the sole surviving member of the Yahi tribe. California State University, Chico
It was this week in 1911 that Ishi, believed to be last living member of the Native American Yahi tribe, emerged from the Sierra foothills near Oroville.
He was semi-naked, malnourished and terrified.
For decades, the Yahi had been living on the edge, reduced in number by killing, starvation and disease after the arrival of settlers during California’s Gold Rush.
Ishi had survived the Three Knolls Massacre in 1865, when ranchers slaughtered dozens of Yahi tribespeople in retaliation for the purported theft of their cattle.
By the early 1900s, the tribe was thought to be wiped out.
So when Ishi walked out of the wilderness, he became a media sensation.
Two U.C. Berkeley anthropologists, Alfred Kroeber and Thomas Waterman, arranged for him to live in an apartment at a San Francisco museum.
They called him Ishi, the Yahi word for man, because he never revealed his name.
The anthropologists quizzed him about Yahi language and traditions. Newspapers dubbed him the “last wild Indian” and chronicled his reactions to modern wonders like streetcars and airplanes.
Visitors to the museum would gather to watch him demonstrate arrowmaking and other native arts.
After five years, in 1916, he died from tuberculosis at 54.
But the fascination with Ishi didn’t end with his death. An autopsy was performed and his brain was sent to the Smithsonian Institution.
Another eight decades passed before it was returned to a tribal delegation in California. The brain, along with Ishi’s ashes, were buried in a secret ceremony in the Mount Lassen foothills that he called home.
California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com
The California Today columnist, Mike McPhate, is a third-generation Californian — born outside Sacramento and raised in San Juan Capistrano. He lives in Los Osos.
California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.For decades, Germany’s role in Europe has been to supply the cash, not the leadership. With fresh memories of war, the continent was cautious about German domination — and so were the Germans themselves.
But the economic crisis has shaken Europe’s postwar model, and Germany increasingly calls the shots. As countries struggle to pay their debts, only Chancellor Angela Merkel has enough money to haul them out of trouble. And the price Merkel is demanding — more control over how they run their economies — is setting off alarm bells in capitals across the continent.
In Athens, protesters dressed up as Nazis routinely prowl the streets, an allusion to the old model of an assertive Germany. In Poland, accusations that Germany has imperial ambitions became a campaign issue in the recent presidential election.
And although German leaders have sought in recent weeks to soothe others’ fears in advance of high-level meetings in Brussels on Sunday and in coming days, the tone has sometimes sounded pugilistic.
“The question of who could accept a German model has been settled by the market,” said a spokesman for German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble. “We are really only talking about the details and the extent of the measures, not about their nature.”
At $3 trillion in 2010, Germany’s economy is now half again as large as those of its nearest rivals, Britain and France. Its banks are far less exposed to Greek debt than those in France, insulating it from the effects of a possible Greek default. It has thus far committed $290 billion to a European bailout fund for Greece, Portugal, Ireland and anyone else who needs it — significantly more than any other nation in Europe.
Misgivings about a larger German role in Europe have been apparent inside the country, as well, with Merkel facing tough debates about the extent to which the country should commit its money to helping others. And the rest of Europe remains cautious about taking German medicine, needing the help but worried about the side effects.
“That’s the predicament of leadership,” said Joschka Fischer, a former foreign minister who has urged Merkel to do more to support the euro. “When Germany acts, there is the fear that Germany will dominate. If Germany doesn’t act, it’s the fear that Germany will withdraw from Europe.”
Drawn into the euro zone
For nearly a half-century after World War II, West Germany operated out of the limelight, content to be an industrial power while leaving the politics to France, which didn’t have the same legacy of using force to get its way. If West Germany wanted something to happen on the continent, it whispered to its Gallic neighbor and let the proposal be presented jointly. Even the location of the rump state’s capital, in sleepy Bonn near the border with Belgium, symbolized a European orientation.
But when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Germany, long split between rival Eastern and Western blocs, announced plans to reunite, raising fears that a powerful nation at the heart of Europe would once again tower over its weaker neighbors. As a condition of French consent to the reunification, French President Francois Mitterrand demanded a steep price: that Germany give up its cherished stable currency, the deutsche mark, and bind itself to a common currency, and by extension to the broader tapestry of Europe.
That worked for years. But time and circumstance are conspiring to put Germany in the driver’s seat. Continental powers including France and Italy have faded in influence, while inside Germany the long caution about being assertive has mostly worn out. The German flag, long regarded with suspicion even inside Germany as a symbol of nationalistic pride, now flutters more and more across the country.
Pushed toward leadership
Until now, Germany has occupied a middle ground — critics would say it has shirked leadership — in addressing the economic problems that have gripped Europe for the past two years. Amid crises in Greece, Ireland and Portugal, Germany has resisted picking up the bill, and it has not articulated a clear vision for how to avoid the problems in the future.
In the long run, though, experts say Merkel has little leeway to turn away from Europe, even though that course might be popular with some German voters. Germany makes its money by manufacturing high-quality products and industrial machinery that it then sells outside its borders, so its success depends on those around it. A recession in the rest of Europe would quickly hit it, too.
At the highest levels of the chancellery, there is a sense that now is the time for grand plans, and Merkel this month called for far-reaching changes intended to impose greater economic policy coordination among the 17 countries that share the euro. A change could take years to take effect, but a first step could come at the G-20 meeting of world leaders Nov. 3.
Germany “has been in a constant reactive role,” said Fredrik Erixon, head of the European Center for International Political Economy, a Brussels think tank. Now, though, it “is at a place where it can largely dictate what it wants to see in other countries, and they have to go along with it.”
If embraced by Merkel’s fellow European leaders, the proposal probably will push the euro zone in a more German direction, a model that enforces low inflation, small deficits and strict curbs on borrowing. France appears likely to go along with this approach, at a time when its own dicey finances weaken its ability to push back.
Still, many economists — including those at the International Monetary Fund — question whether the German model is really the best way to dig out of a recession, given the country’s outsize reliance on exports. And the sense of a fait accompli is raising hackles around Europe. Slovakia recently held up a plan to bolster the bailout fund before it approved it under heavy pressure from Germany. Even longtime allies such as Austria are resisting.
“I can absolutely not accept” that Germany and France make decisions, then present them to the rest of the euro zone, Austrian Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger told Austrian television last week. “There’s no economic board or diktat. We have a euro zone with 17 countries.”
In Germany, the dissension is raising eyebrows.
“Everybody is calling for leadership,” said the country’s deputy foreign minister, Werner Hoyer, “but no one wants to be led.”This is well outside Wonkblog's normal bailiwick, but if nothing else, Sen. Rand Paul's (R-Ky.) filibuster against CIA director nominee John Brennan — launched as a protest against the administration's drone policy, which Brennan has steered for the past four years — uncovered a hunger for a broader conversation on the topic. So what does the drone program actually entail, and why are Paul and others criticizing it?
What is a drone?
A Predator drone. This is actually the less powerful of the two drones used by the CIA and military. (Eric Gay / AP)
Technically called "unmanned aerial vehicles" (UAVs), drones are just aircraft without human pilots onboard, encompassing everything from reconnaissance vehicles to unmanned crop dusters. In common parlance, though, "drone" has come to refer to unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), which are UAVs equipped with combat capabilities, most commonly the ability to launch missiles.
How long has the U.S. government been using them?
CIA director George Tenet (left) originated the use of armed drones following 9/11. (Eric Draper-Reuters)
The General Atomics MQ-1 Predator, the most famous UCAV in the U.S. arsenal, first saw combat in 1995 as part of the NATO intervention in Bosnia, but at that time was solely a reconnaissance tool and carried no payload. On Feb. 16, 2001, the Predator #3034 became the first to be successfully fitted with a Hellfire missile, and to fire it in a trial flight. Predators were deployed to Afghanistan almost immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and on Oct. 7, 2001 they conducted their first armed mission there.
In addition to the Predator, the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper, a larger UCAV capable of carrying a higher payload, has seen service starting in 2007. The current program is jointly administered by the CIA and the Joint Special Operation Command (JSOC).
Where do we send them?
So folks in Pakistan really don't like our habit of reigning death from the skies. (Getty)
Primarily Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. According to a Washington Post database, compiled with the help of the New America Foundation and Long War Journal, strikes in Pakistan have been occurring since 2004 and picked up in pace starting in summer 2008. Apart from a November 2002 strike in Yemen, the Somalia and Yemen campaigns began in 2011. There have been reports of strikes in the Philippines, though information there is sketchy.
Additionally, drones have seen service in Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the Unites States's more traditional military campaigns in those countries.
How powerful is a drone attack?
A home in Yemen that was destroyed in a drone strike. (Reuters)
Predator drones can carry up to two Hellfire missiles. Those have warheads of about 20 pounds, which are designed to pierce tank armor; their damage outside of the vehicle targeted is limited. An alternative warhead, which manufacturer Lockheed Martin touts as featuring "high lethality and minimum collateral damage," also is in service.
Reapers are another story. They feature a maximum payload of 3,000 pounds, or 1.5 tons. That means they can carry a combination of Hellfires and larger 500 pound bombs like the GBU-12 Paveway II and GBD-38 JDAM. Those have an "effective casualty radius" of about 200 feet. That means that about 50 percent of people within 200 feet of the blast site will die. Those odds improve -- or worsen, depending on how you look at it -- the closer you get, obviously.
So imagine if you took a football field and shrunk it by a third. A Reaper attacks one endzone with a GBU-12. If you're on the field, you have a 50 percent chance of dying. Update: I apparently forgot the distinction between yards and feet since middle school. Corrected.
How many drone attacks have we launched to date?
My Washington Post colleagues' visualization of the drone program from 2002 to the present.
According to the Post database, there have been 347 in Pakistan, 53 in Yemen and 2 in Somalia. From 2008 through October 2012, there were 1,015 strikes in Afghanistan, 48 in Iraq, and at least 105 in Libya according to the Bureau for Investigative Journalism. That does not include strikes in Libya past September 2011, strikes from 2001 to 2007 in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those since October 2012. The New York Times' Mark Mazzetti reported that at least one strike has happened in the Philippines.
What sort of people have we targeted?
Mullah Nazir, a pro-Taliban Pakistani militant, was killed in a drone strike in January. (STR/PAKISTAN/REUTERS)
Primarily al-Qaeda and its affiliates. That includes al-Shaabab in Somalia, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (which works in Yemen), and the Haqqani Network in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Philippines strike was intended to kill Umar Patek, a leader of the Indonesian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah who helped orchestrate the 2002 attacks in Bali that killed 95 people. Patek is now serving a 20-year sentence in Indonesia.
Have we killed U.S. citizens this way?
Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen killed by a drone strike in Yemen in 2011. (Tracy A. Woodward / The Washington Post)
We've killed four, at least. Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born al-Qaeda operative in Yemen, was killed in a drone strike in 2011, as was his American-born 17-year-old son (in a subsequent strike) and Samir Khan, a North Carolina native who died in the same strike as the elder al-Alaki. Ahmed Hijazi, also an American citizen based in Yemen, was killed in 2002. Note: paragraph updated to correct spelling of al-Awlaki's name and include Hijazi.
To clarify the Obama administration's exact policy on killing Americans without a trial, Eric Holder wrote the following letter to Sen. Rand Paul: "Dear Senator Paul: It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: 'Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?' The answer to that question is no." The dispatch followed an earlier, more equivocal note from Holder on the subject, which seemed to indicate Holder believes the president has the authority to kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil if he judges them a threat.
How many people have died in drone attacks?
The best information we have on how many people have been killed by drones may be a slip of the tongue from Sen. Lindsay Graham (above). (Jason Reed / Reuters)
Sen. Lindsey Graham estimated the death toll of the Pakistan/Somalia/Yemen program at 4,700. That's higher than most estimates; Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations puts the number at closer to 3,500.
How many of those were civilians?
Mourners carry the body of a civilian allegedly killed in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan. (Thir Khan / AFP / Getty)
Cora Currier at ProPublica helpfully compiled a number of estimates in January. New America puts the civilian death total in Pakistan and Yemen between 276 and 368, of which 118-135 were under the Bush administration. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism puts the number between 446 and 978, increasing to 993 if you include Somalia. Of those, 179 to 209 were children, BIJ estimates. A Stanford/NYU study suggests that the strikes have inflicted considerable psychological trauma on residents of Pakistan, and deterred relief workers from serving areas targeted. Funerals and rescue workers have been targeted in past strikes.
What's the process for deciding when and where to launch them?
Counterterrorism head John Brennan meets with President Obama. (Pete Souza / The White House)
As my colleague Greg Miller has reported, the administration uses something called the "disposition matrix" to determine targets for drone strikes. Miller describes it as a "single, continually evolving database in which biographies, locations, known associates and affiliated organizations are all cataloged. So are strategies for taking targets down, including extradition requests, capture operations and drone patrols…The database is meant to map out contingencies, creating an operational menu that spells out each agency’s role in case a suspect surfaces in an unexpected spot."
The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) will prepare lists of potential targets, which will be reviewed every three months by a panel of intelligence analysts and military officials. They are then passed along to a panel at the National Security Council, currently helmed by CIA director nominee Brennan, and then to Obama for final approval. The criteria for addition to the list are determined personally by Obama, who also must personally approve all strikes outside Pakistan. Pakistan strikes are approved by the CIA director.
What's the case for using drones?
There's some political science to suggest that "decapitation strikes," like these drone attacks, are actually quite effective at reducing the ability of terrorist groups to operate effectively. The RAND Corporation's Patrick Johnston and UCLA's Anoop Sarbahi have found preliminary evidence that the drone program specifically is effective at degrading the operations of targeted groups. Zack Beauchamp has a good overview of this literature here.
But that's a case for strikes, not for drone strikes specifically. There is, however, substantial evidence that the percentage of casualties borne by civilians is much lower with drone strikes than with just about any other kind of military intervention, even if one accepts high estimates of the percent of killed who are civilians.
Is Congress kept in the loop?
Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein was important in pushing for Congressional oversight over the drone program. (Ben Margot / AP)
To some degree. As part of Brennan's confirmation process, Senate Intelligence Committee members were granted access to Justice Department memos justifying the use of drones, and a similar white paper was shared last year. The Committee and its House counterpart are also allowed to review individual strikes, including the intelligence behind them and video obtained during their commission. But they have not tried to limit the program in any way. "I don't know that we've ever seen anything that we thought was inappropriate," one Congressional aide told the Los Angeles Times.
How about the courts?
Former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal has opposed giving the judiciary oversight over drones. (Richard Yu / The Dartmouth)
Nope. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) has proposed establishing a specialized court to approve drone strikes based on FISA courts that approve surveillance of suspected foreign intelligence in the U.S., but that is, for now, just an idea. Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general under Obama, has called for an oversight board placed within the executive branch.
Is this legal?
Harold Koh, formerly the State Department's legal adviser, was among the most involved parties in formulating the legal rationale for drones. (Zuma Press)
The Justice Department certainly thinks so, though the reasons why are classified, and lawsuits to expose them have proven unsuccessful. The clearest window we've gotten into their reasoning as relates to the killing of U.S. citizenscomes from a white paper leaked to NBC News last month. It derives the authority for the strikes from the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed in the wake of 9/11, which grants the government broad powers against al-Qaeda. What's more, the white paper argues that drone strikes somehow don't run afoul of Executive Order 12333, the ban on assassinations as a tool of policy that has existed since the Ford administration, as they are used for "self-defense." See also Brennan's speech here defending the program more broadly.
Administration critics aren't impressed, with the ACLU's Jameel Jaffeer noting the white paper, "argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen."
Does it violate international law?
Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur for extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, has said that the drone program may constitute a war crime. (AP)
The Justice Department memo cites the UN Charter, which allows states to make war in the interest of self-defense, an interest also invoked by Brennan. Critics, like UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions Christof Heyns, say that this defense is a stretch, and the killings plainly run afoul of the laws of war and international human rights treaties.
Are other countries using drones this way?
An IAI Heron, one of the most prominent drones outside the U.S. (Israeli Aerospace Industries)
Only the United States and the United Kingdom (which assists in the Pakistan drone effort) currently use drones in combat, but many other countries have acquired drone technology, including China, Russia, India, Iran and Israel. The U.K. uses Reapers and Predators while most other countries use the Israeli Aerospace Industries Heron or similar Israeli models. Drones saw combat use in Israel during the Gaza war of late 2008. Even Hezbollah has acquired reconnaissance drones. All told, the GAO estimates that 76 countries, at least, have drone technology.
What do our allies think about it?
U.K. Defense Minister Philip Hammond (left) is among the few non-U.S. officials involved in the drone program. (Yves Logghe/Associated Press)
European allies other than Britain generally refrain from using drones to attack al-Qaeda, but frequently share intelligence that assists the drone program in selecting targets.
What about the countries where we send drones? What do they think?
Protests in Sanaa, Yemen. (Khaled Abdullah/Reuters)
They're very mad. The Pakistani government has condemned the drone strikes as a violation of sovereignty, though there's evidence they're tacitly allowing the strikes to happen. The Yemeni government quietly agreed to the strikes, though murmurs of opposition have emerged of late. Citizens in both countries deplore the campaigns.
Is it actually weakening al-Qaeda?
Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda since Osama bin Laden was killed. (AFP/Getty Images)
New America estimates that 1,967 - 3,236 militants were killed in Pakistan and Yemen, meaning the overwhelming majority of casualties were intended targets. That said, the share of deaths who were "high-profile targets" was 11 percent under Obama and 33 percent under Bush according to New America. And there are deeper doubts as to whether the strategy is recruiting more militants than it kills, by turning local populations against the United States. The attempted Times Square bomber, for instance, cited drones as a motivating force.
It could also be a bad idea even if it is weakening al-Qaeda. Many have noted that the money spent on anti-terrorism efforts might save more lives if devoted to tackling more mundane threats, like auto accidents.
Thanks to Zack Beauchamp for research help throughout.Marvel plans same-sex marriage while DC comics says established character is to come out
Comic book crime-fighters the X-Men are taking a break from saving the day in order to attend the first same-sex marriage in the superhero world, set for June.
Publishers Marvel said on Tuesday that Jean-Paul Beaubier, aka Northstar, a Canadian with piercing blue eyes and silver-streaked black hair who can move and fly at superhuman speeds, will propose to his longtime boyfriend Kyle Jinadu in the issue, Astonishing X-Men #50, due on sale this week in the US.
Also on Tuesday, the spotlight on homosexual heroes was turned up a further notch after a publisher at Marvel's rival, DC comics, let slip at the Kapow comic convention in London that one of its established characters would be revealed as gay.
The comments by Dan DiDio sparked speculation that a character previously thought to be straight would reveal themselves to be gay, with Batman and Wonder Woman among those under scrutiny.
Openly gay superheroes already exist in the form of the lesbian, flame-haired crime fighter Batwoman and the gay male couple Apollo and Midnighter.
More than a year ago, DiDio was interviewed in the Advocate talking about gay characters and the need to reflect society as it is. Then, the intention was to introduce new characters, who were gay. He said: "One of the things we're very focused on doing for these types of stories is rather than [change an existing] character, we want to make sure that this is the basis of who that character is right from the start."
Marvel's editor-in-chief, Axel Alonso said in a statement on Tuesday: "The Marvel Universe has always reflected the world outside your window, so we strive to make sure our characters, relationships and stories are grounded in that reality.
"We've been working on this story for over a year to ensure Northstar and Kyle's wedding reflects Marvel's 'world outside your window' tradition."
The pair will marry in the next issue of Astonishing X-Men #51, on sale in the US on 20 June, and some comic book retailers will be hosting wedding parties on that day, Marvel said.
Northstar and Kyle have been a couple since 2009, but Marvel is not promising the pair will live happily ever after. In fact, Marvel asks in its wedding announcement: "Will their path to wedded matrimony in New York City be smooth or are there hidden dangers around the corner?"I want to play poker with Harry Reid. Really I do.
Rather than call for a special election in Illinois, Reid sends a letter to Blagojevich signed by everyone in the Democratic caucus asking him to step down. They assert that they will not seat anyone he appoints.
Harumph.
Blago wipes his ass with it and appoints Burris anyway.
Burris holds a press conference and announces he will be in D.C. on Tuesday to be sworn in with the rest of the Senate. Bobby Rush plays the race card. Reid does not see the handwriting on the wall.
He counters by calling Secretary of State Jesse White, who has already said he won’t sign Burris’s certification, and encourages him. What White is doing is most certainly outside his legal authority — the Secretary of State doesn’t have veto power. But Reid not only gives White a high five, he tells him they’ll use this to keep Burris from being seated.
Then he smugly chortles about how he’ll manipulate Senate procedure and punt to the Rules Committee, and assures everyone that they will drag things out for months if necessary until Blago is impeached and his successor appoints someone else. And he does it in the press.
Upon reading this, Cornyn announces that Franken won’t have a signed certification either, and the GOP will use it to keep him from being seated,
Reuters: "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid yielded to Republican threats and agreed on Monday not to immediately seat fellow Democrat Al Franken."
Blago laughs out loud. This is amateur night in Dixieland. He leaks to the press that he spoke with Reid before the election, and that Reid didn’t think any of the African American candidates vying for the seat were "electable," while Tammy Duckworth was. He stirs up the potential jury pool and makes Reid look like an idiot — the day before Reid is set to appear on Meet the Press.
Reid looks like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs on Meet the Press. Nobody knows how much Fitz has (not even Fitz, who is still trying to transcribe his tapes) or how much he’ll need to reveal to prove his case, so Reid says he "doesn’t remember" his conversation with Blago, but calls Blago a liar anyway. When asked if he supported Jesse Jackson Jr. for the Senate seat, he says he would support JJJ. And admits that there’s "room to negotiate" on Burris.
Burris appears at the Senate on Tuesday. Gets turned away. Could Reid look any worse?
Yes!
Obama stares down DiFi, appoints Panetta to the CIA, and the NYT breaks the story before she’s told (but Ron Wyden already knows). DiFi’s fuming.
Despite having been one of the 50 Senators who signed Reid’s letter saying Burris would never be seated, she announces that as the outgoing head of the Rules Committee she thinks the Senate has no choice but to seat him. (Good timing, because Charlie Rangel is already complaining about the Rules Committee dragging its feet, and Jesse White is complaining that Reid made him the fall guy.)
Reid can’t hold his own caucus in line. Blames Rahm. Gives interview saying "I don’t work for Barack Obama."
Smooth.
WaPo: "Burris Backs Reid Into a Corner."
A seventy-one year old dude who hasn’t held office for 14 years, appointed by a crook, takes the Senate Majority Leader to the cleaners.
Reid is a red state senator, up for re-election in 2010 and under pressure from the right, who is already making noise about appeasing Republicans who aren’t going to be appeased. He’s a hazard to Obama’s agenda, which is why leading Senate Democrats tried to ease him out as Majority Leader last year.
See: Daschle, Tom.
Burris will be seated. He’s not gonna deal.
Why should he?
He’s playing poker with Harry Reid.A mysterious and mythical motorcycle racer, Luke, (Ryan Gosling) drives out of a traveling carnival globe of death and whizzes through the backstreets of Schenectady, New York, desperately trying to connect with a former lover, Romina, (Eva Mendes) who recently and secretly gave birth to the stunt rider's son. In an attempt to provide for his new family, Luke quits the carnival life and commits a series of bank robberies aided by his superior riding ability. The stakes rise as Luke is put on a collision course with an ambitious police officer, Avery Cross, (Bradley Cooper) looking to quickly move up the ranks in a police department riddled with corruption. The sweeping drama unfolds over fifteen years as the sins of the past haunt the present days lives of two high school boys wrestling with the legacy they've inherited. The only refuge is found in the place beyond the pines. Written by StudioCanalSoapUI 4.6 – The REST in Progress! Matti Hjelm
We’re happy to let you know that we today are releasing SoapUI 4.6 – The REST in Progress! This is the first of several releases which aims at improving the REST-testing capabilities of SoapUI and SoapUI Pro.
When we added REST-testing support in SoapUI all the way back in 2008 and version 2.5, REST wasn’t nearly as popular as it is today. Since 2008 we’ve seen boom in the API-industry. In terms of public APIs, ProgrammableWeb went from having 750 public APIs in 2008 to today having more than 9,900. While SOAP is continuing to grow, REST has been outpacing adoption in terms of public APIs – more than 60% of the APIs listed in ProgrammableWeb’s directory are REST-based.
In SoapUI 4.6 we begin our journey to creating a more easily understandable and more powerful REST-testing experience in SoapUI. This first release makes the time-to-test for REST-projects much faster, due to improvements in both GUI and methodology. It is now much easier and quicker to set up a REST-based project, and we’ve started the swtich of SoapUI’s approach from an academic REST approach to a more pragmatic approach to REST.
But this is only the start, we are planning on further improving the REST-testing capabilities and we want your feedback! What do you like/dislike with the new REST-testing features? What do you feel is missing? Is there something you would like to see added in the upcoming REST-testing improving releases? Let us know your thoughts!
Read more about the new features in SoapUI 4.6, or head on over to soapui.org to download this latest version.
See also:
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5). When Walker had two or more sacks against FBS foes this year, FSU was 5-0 and allowed 17 points per game. When he didn't, the Seminoles were 3-3 and allowed 33 points per game. -- David M. Hale
John Ross III
Washington Huskies
Junior | Wide receiver
Score: 8.9
Previous rank: 27
The Huskies' offense was a hallmark of efficiency throughout most of the regular season, thanks in large part to Ross' speed. Now Washington faces its biggest test against Alabama in the College Football Playoff. Ross has successfully stretched every defense that he has faced; he leads the Power 5 with 17 touchdown catches. -- David Lombardi
Pat Elflein
Ohio State Buckeyes
Senior | Offensive line
Score: 8.85
Previous rank: 40
Most of the to-do list he made when the senior decided to come back for another season with the Buckeyes has already been accomplished, including winning the Rimington Trophy. But the hardware Elflein really wants will require two more Ohio State victories, and it's safe to assume the anchor of the offensive line will do everything he can to be at his best against Clemson in the College Football Playoff. -- Austin Ward
Tim Williams
Alabama Crimson Tide
Senior | Linebacker
Score: 8.8
Previous rank: 34
Washington's Trey Adams earned his status as first-team All-Pac-12, but he hasn't seen an edge rusher with Williams' speed this season. The senior outside linebacker is tied for the team lead in sacks (8.5) and could bolster his résumé as a first-round pick with a big game. -- Alex Scarborough
Cam Robinson
Alabama Crimson Tide
Junior | Offensive line
Score: 8.75
Previous rank: 47
Neither Myles Garrett, Arden Key nor Carl Lawson could get the best of Alabama's franchise left tackle, so don't expect first-team All-Pac-12 defensive lineman Elijah Qualls of Washington to cause a ruckus. Robinson has passed every major test he has faced this season on his way to being potentially the first offensive lineman taken in next year's draft. -- Alex Scarborough
Budda Baker
Washington Huskies
Junior | Defensive back
Score: 8.7
Previous rank: 25
The Huskies' secondary has proven itself as one of the nation's most talented units, and Baker is its field general. He delivered more spectacular anticipation and closing speed in the Pac-12 championship game. Now, can he win the chess match against Alabama quarterback Jalen Hurts while offering the same level of suffocating run support? -- David Lombardi
Donnel Pumphrey
San Diego State Aztecs
Senior | Running back
Score: 8.66
Previous rank: 10
This will be fun: Pumphrey, who has rushed for 2,018 yards this season, is 108 yards shy of breaking the FBS career record. Pumphrey will face Houston, the nation's No. 2-rated run defense (allowing only 2.9 yards per carry) in the Las Vegas Bowl presented by Geico. -- David Lombardi
Raekwon McMillan
Ohio State Buckeyes
Junior | Linebacker
Score: 8.65
Previous rank: 14
There will be some familiar faces lining up on the other sideline in the PlayStation Fiesta Bowl, and Ohio State's junior linebacker will no doubt be fired up to make a good impression on the Clemson Tigers. McMillan's individual numbers were slightly down this season, but make no mistake: He is playing at a high level and will be in the middle of the effort to slow Deshaun Watson. -- Austin Ward
James Washington
Oklahoma State Cowboys
Junior | Wide receiver
Score: 8.6
Previous rank: 44
Although Washington will have Colorado's attention, Oklahoma State's improved rushing attack figures to set up opportunities for the receiver downfield in play-action against an aggressive Buffs defense. -- Jake Trotter
Leonard Fournette
LSU Tigers
Junior | Running back
Score: 8.55
Previous rank: unranked
Assuming Fournette follows through on his plan to participate in the Buffalo Wild Wings Citrus Bowl and his gimpy ankle holds up, he'll have his work cut out in his final college game. LSU's star running back will go up against a Louisville defense that is one of only four in the FBS to allow fewer than 3 yards per carry (2.99). -- David Ching
Desmond King
Iowa Hawkeyes
Senior | Defensive back
Score: 8.5
Previous rank: 29
King, last year's Thorpe Award winner as the nation's best defensive back, has only two interceptions this season because teams largely avoid targeting him. Even so, he could produce a big game against the Gators in the Outback Bowl. Florida quarterbacks tied for 95th in the country with 13 interceptions. King's ability to impact the game as a kick returner also shouldn't go unnoticed. -- Jesse Temple
Christian Wilkins
Clemson Tigers
Sophomore | Defensive line
Score: 8.45
Previous rank: 24
In last year's playoff semifinal against Oklahoma, Wilkins proved to be Clemson's secret weapon, catching a pass on a fake punt that served as a turning point in the game. This year, there's no secret about what Wilkins brings to the table. He's one of the most athletic linemen in the country, and he'll be tasked with stuffing Ohio State's big-play ground game. -- David M. Hale
T.J. Watt
Wisconsin Badgers
Junior | Linebacker
Score: 8.4
Previous rank: 28
Watt has been a disruptive force in the backfield and might present Western Michigan quarterback Zach Terrell with problems he hasn't seen all season. Watt has 3.5 sacks, a forced fumble and an interception return for a touchdown the past three games, which means he's on a hot streak entering the postseason. He won't be too keen on watching the Broncos row the boat. -- Jesse Temple
Jake Butt
Michigan Wolverines
Senior | Tight end
Score: 8.35
Previous rank: 35
Besides Amara Darboh, Butt is Michigan's favorite receiving threat. The Wolverines can run the football with multiple players, so if Florida State gets sucked up to the line of scrimmage, Butt's route running and catching ability could be key in the Orange Bowl. -- Jesse Temple
Ethan Pocic
LSU Tigers
Senior | Center
Score: 8.33
Previous rank: 37
The All-American center will go head-up in the bowl game against a veteran and longtime starter, Louisville nose tackle DeAngelo Brown. Fifth-year senior Brown made the All-ACC team this season, posting 11 tackles for loss and three sacks while anchoring a defensive front that ranks 10th nationally against the run. -- David Ching
J.T. Barrett
Ohio State Buckeyes
Junior | Quarterback
Score: 8.3
Previous rank: 42
Maybe the offense wasn't as explosive through the air this season as the junior might've liked, but as far as down seasons go, accounting for 33 touchdowns doesn't leave all that much to complain about for Ohio State. The Buckeyes have complete trust in Barrett to run the power spread offense and have long bought what he sells as the unquestioned leader. Both will be vitally important heading into the biggest games of Barrett's career. -- Austin Ward
Mike Williams
Clemson Tigers
Junior | Wide receiver
Score: 8.25
Previous rank: 30
Ohio State allowed just three red zone touchdowns to wide receivers this year, but Williams presents a different type of target. At 6-foot-3, 225 pounds, he is both fast and physical and happy to go over, past or through a defender. He finished the regular season second in the nation in both targets (27) and touchdowns (9) in the red zone. -- David M. Hale
Saquon Barkley
Penn State Nittany Lions
Sophomore | Running back
Score: 8.2
Previous rank: 23
With a month of rest, Barkley should be primed for a big day against USC in the Rose Bowl. USC's run defense has been stingy and ranks 29th nationally. But if any player can break through, it's Barkley, who is one of the most exciting, dynamic runners in college football. -- Jesse Temple
Teez Tabor
Florida Gators
Junior | Defensive back
Score: 8.18
Previous rank: 26
Tabor might not have been as active as he was last season, but he's still considered a first-round draft pick, thanks to his shutdown corner skills. He has four interceptions and has defended nine passes on the season, and he has plenty of postseason motivation after not being named a Jim Thorpe finalist. -- Edward Aschoff
Sam Darnold
USC Trojans
Freshman | Quarterback
Score: 8.15
Previous rank: 41
Darnold ranks second nationally with an 87.0 QBR. His excellent play is a huge reason USC is in the Rose Bowl. Now the freshman has a chance to showcase his versatility in the Granddaddy Of Them All, in which a solid Penn State pass defense awaits. The Nittany Lions have allowed 6.2 yards per attempt, which ranks them 14th nationally. -- David Lombardi
Jake Browning
Washington Huskies
Sophomore | Quarterback
Score: 8.1
Previous rank: 17
A large portion of the Huskies' chances against Alabama rest on Browning's shoulders. He is throwing a touchdown pass once every 8.4 attempts -- an NCAA record -- but he has also experienced struggles against the better defenses Washington has faced. The Crimson Tide give Browning the opportunity to address some nagging doubts. -- David Lombardi
Tre'Davious White
LSU Tigers
Senior | Cornerback
Score: 8.05
Previous rank: unranked
Defending the nation's most explosive offense will be a major challenge for the LSU cornerback/return man, but White should have plenty of opportunities to make game-changing plays against Louisville. The Cardinals have turned the ball over 31 times, fourth-most in the FBS, and rank 83rd nationally in punt return defense, at 9.2 yards per return. -- David Ching
Dorian Johnson
Pittsburgh Panthers
Senior | Offensive line
Score: 8
Previous rank: 37
Pitt will face a tough winter test in the Bronx against Northwestern and its stingy run defense. That will be a fitting finale for Johnson, who is as strong a reason as any for the Panthers' ground success. He's Pitt's first first-team All-American O-lineman in 22 years, and he's positioning himself for a nice payday come spring. -- Matt Fortuna
Samaje Perine
Oklahoma Sooners
Junior | Running back
Score: 7.95
Previous rank: unranked
If Oklahoma can get up on Auburn in the second half, expect the Sooners to turn to Perine to put the game away. Perine is just 82 yards away from breaking Billy Sims' Oklahoma record of 4,118 career rushing yards. -- Jake Trotter
James Conner
Pittsburgh Panthers
Junior | Running back
Score: 7.9
Previous rank: 36
Conner announced over the weekend that he is NFL-bound, so he will be making his collegiate finale against Northwestern. After another 1,000-yard season, numerous ACC touchdown records and more inspirational speeches and hardware than anyone can count, the cancer conqueror will take a curtain call at Yankee Stadium, which is no stranger to chilling moments. -- Matt Fortuna
Ben Boulware
Clemson Tigers
Senior | Linebacker
Score: 7.85
Previous rank: unranked
Boulware leads the Tigers with 113 tackles, and he is the emotional leader of the team. He will be at his best in the final game (or games) of his career. Also, let's not forget Boulware was named defensive MVP in the Capital One Orange Bowl semifinal against Oklahoma last year, after he recorded eight tackles, a sack and a fourth-quarter interception in the 37-17 victory. -- Andrea Adelson
Ejuan Price
Pittsburgh Panthers
Senior | Defensive line
Score: 7.8
Previous rank: 33
The Hendricks Award finalist and sixth-year senior overcame numerous injuries to post a ridiculously efficient final two seasons of production. He'll take his 12 sacks and ACC-leading 21 TFLs this season into the finale against Northwestern, which has surrendered 35 sacks on the year and will have its work cut out for it in the New Era Pinstripe Bowl. -- Matt Fortuna
JuJu Smith-Schuster
USC Trojans
Junior | Wide receiver
Score: 7.75
Previous rank: 32
Penn State's pass defense has delivered solid numbers this year, but Schuster and his fellow Trojans receivers will test that unit in the Rose Bowl. Schuster's production -- 63 catches for 781 yards -- is down from last season, but quarterback Sam Darnold is spreading the ball around well, so don't read too deeply into the smaller numbers. -- David Lombardi
Curtis Samuel
Ohio State Buckeyes
Junior | Running back
Score: 7.7
Previous rank: unranked
The most versatile weapon on the Ohio State offense has become the one it might not survive without, and Samuel will be in for a heavy workload against Clemson's defense in the College Football Playoff. With a month to cook up new ways to get the H-back involved, there's really no way to predict just how Samuel might be unleashed to add to his total of 15 touchdowns this season. -- Austin Ward
Corey Davis
Western Michigan Broncos
Senior | Wide receiver
Score: 7.65
Previous rank: unranked
Wisconsin's secondary struggled in the second half of the Big Ten championship game against Penn State. That means Davis, the FBS leader in receiving yards, could replicate his success against the Badgers in the Cotton Bowl. He is quarterback Zach Terrell's favorite target for a reason. -- Jesse Temple
Carlos Watkins
Clemson Tigers
Sophomore | Defensive end
Score: 7.6
Previous rank: 50
Ohio State's best offensive play right now might be J.T. Barrett on the keeper, which means Clemson will need Watkins to plug the middle when the Buckeyes quarterback takes off. On passing downs, Ohio State might task center and Rimington Award winner Pat Elflein with stopping Watkins one-on-one, which might mean Watkins adds to his 8.5 sacks. Double Watkins, and it frees up Clemson's myriad pass-rushers. -- Jared Shanker
Austin Carr
Northwestern Wildcats
Senior | Wide receiver
Score: 7.55
Previous rank: unranked
Carr terrorizes even the best defenses, and Pittsburgh doesn't even remotely qualify for that category. Pitt ranks 109th in the FBS in scoring defense (35.6 points per game) and 127th out of 128 in pass defense (343.1 yards). If a 4-8 Syracuse team can throw for 440 yards and score 61 points against Pitt in the regular-season finale, imagine what Carr and the Wildcats can do against the Panthers in the Pinstripe Bowl. -- Jesse Temple
Arden Key
LSU Tigers
Sophomore | Defensive end
Score: 7.5
Previous rank: 49
LSU's star edge rusher has to be licking his chops over the opportunity that awaits in the bowl matchup against Louisville. Chasing down Lamar Jackson isn't much fun, but Louisville has surrendered 39 sacks this season, more than all but two Power 5 teams, including 11 in a blowout loss to Houston. -- David ChingThe billion dollar company are based across Europe and designs, manufactures, and sells civil and military aeronautical products worldwide. They've had very little experience with esports previously, but a Tweet on Friday October 27th appears to announce they've sponsored a new professional League of Legends team, who will go by the name of Out Of The Blue.
Proud to announce that #Airbus enters #Esport world by sponsoring “Out Of The Blue” the new professional team of @LeagueOfLegends #lol pic.twitter.com/5qG8VA89Cf — Airbus Careers (@AirbusCareers) October 27, 2017
x
It's unclear if this is an actual announcement or something that has been posted on the wrong account, at the wrong time. Rather than being posted by their main account, it was Tweeted by the @AirbusCareers profile, which normally advises on the latest job roles available in the company. There's also confusion about who they're referring to with no current professional LoL team going under the name of Out Of The Blue.The move would be the first time that Airbus would have sponsored a team, having only previously beenas part of a trade fair announced in June 2017. We've reached out to Airbus for comment.Apologies for not checking in sooner. I’ve been out of commission today, sick and sleeping off what I assume to be a touch of food poisoning. Was it the curry ramen? A fried oyster? The lychee sake that tasted like dish washing soap? I’ll avoid a Murder on the Orient Express gag here out of respect for spoilerphobes, but let me be clear – it WAS one of them.
Anyway, following my four hour mid-afternoon nap, I jumped online and discovered the Dark Matter Council was in the midst of another fabulous twitter campaign, perhaps my favorite yet –
I’m amazed by all of you who were inspired by many of the same mainstays of sci-fi that led me down this road. Asimov, Clarke, Ellison, Alien, The Thing, Planet of the Apes, Star Trek: The Original Series…to name but a few.
I’m also touched and grateful to those of you who mentioned my name and my work, alongside those of my incredible cast and crew, as one of the things you love about Dark Matter.
Tomorrow night, we launch another tweet storm (9 pm EDT/6 pm PDT) to batter twitter…and whoever you care to tag with our deluge of ten of thousands of tweets! Who, hunh? Who, HUNH?! WHO?!! Follow @DarkMatterFTL for all the latest and tomorrow’s secret hashtag!
But before we storm the castle yet again, I’m going to dedicate this blog to you, the fans, and your healthy curiosity. Got some burning questions about the campaign, yours truly, or anything Dark Matter-related? Well post them in the comments section because I’ll be wading in with answer, ANSWERS, ANSWERS!!!
Dark Matter Playback Operator Greg Whiteside meanwhile (follow him here: @Videogreg1) has sent me a slew of Dark Matter-related graphics! I’ll be tweeting them out throughout the event!
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Like this: Like Loading...Man loses arm in beer keg explosion at Bar Beach bowls club
Posted
A man has lost his arm after a beer keg he was tapping exploded at a bowling club in Newcastle.
Police, fire crews and paramedics were called to the Bar Beach Bowling Club just after 8:00pm last night and quickly evacuated 40 staff and patrons from the venue.
Chief Inspector Dean Olsen said the 23-year-old staff member was releasing the air from a beer keg when it exploded.
"The information that we have got from witnesses is that an explosion occurred in the cool room or store room of the club," he said.
"Witnesses have said that the explosion was quite loud and rocked the premises."
The man was taken to John Hunter hospital where his arm was amputated.
He remains in a critical but stable condition in hospital.
Keg explosion like bomb going off: chef
The club's head chef, Nick Gaul, said the explosion sounded like a bomb going off.
"People were sort of a bit shocked and kind of getting out of the club not really knowing what caused the explosion," he said.
The first thing that came to my mind was some kind of bomb's gone off. Nick Gaul, Bar Beach Bowling Club chef
"[The] first thing that came to my mind was some kind of bomb's gone off; I didn't know what to think.
"The cops were there within five minutes and they kicked everyone out of the club.
"I just turned off the gas in the kitchen and basically left it how it was."
Work Cover New South Wales is investigating.
Topics: accidents, police, workplace, bar-beach-2300, newcastle-2300Why put the charity watchdog to sleep?
Updated
The Abbott Government plans to kill off Australia's first charities watchdog just as it starts to make some progress. Given the billions in tax concessions these groups get, why nobble the regulator? Sarah Dingle writes.
When it comes to giving to charity, Australians like to think of themselves as generous. We "dig deep". That's more true than we know.
As taxpayers, we give generously to charities, so much so that the charities and not-for-profit sector is now worth $55 billion. On top of that, we keep giving, in the form of billions of dollars in tax concessions - and we're just as lavish with the title of "charity" itself.
How many charities and not-for-profit organisations are there in Australia? Hundreds? A couple of thousand? Have a guess.
The answer is more than 60 thousand. And prior to 2012, you didn't have to do much to prove you were a charity. In the first instance, you had to be registered by the Tax Office. After that - absolutely nothing at all, according to Professor Ann O'Connell, a taxation expert from Melbourne University.
"They didn't have to do anything after that," she says.
"So they might have applied for endorsement back in 2000 and then simply have had no other contact or reporting obligations or the need to get in touch with any government body again."
Charities didn't have to file tax returns or even stay in contact with the ATO.
In return for charities enjoying tax concessions, Professor O'Connell believes there's a basic expectation that they will at least let the government know their current address.
"Well, I think it's of concern that those bodies were allowed to continue as income tax exempt, with no obligation to provide any details, even change of address details, that would enable them to be contacted," she says.
One of the problems with having tens of thousands of entities with no national regulator, no reporting obligations and generous tax concessions was no one knew just how big those concessions were.
In 2010, the Productivity Commission had a stab at it, estimating not-for-profit organisations could be enjoying annual tax concessions of anywhere between $4-$8 billion. And $8 billion is a lot of money. That's billions of dollars being taken out of the system. It may all be legitimate, but you'd think at the very least we would know how much that is.
The ACNC's total list of lost charities, which it may ultimately deregister, numbers in the thousands.
The other problem with charities not having to report to the Tax Office or to anyone is that no one knows if they're actually carrying out a charitable purpose, or if they even still exist.
On the December 3, 2012, the Australian Charities and Not for Profits Commission began operations. The ACNC is Australia's first charities regulator - the only national body checking up on whether charities are carrying out their stated charitable purpose.
One of their main initiatives is creating a national register. The aim is to create Australia's first up-to-date list of charities. It also includes basic information, including financial information, about each entity.
The ACNC has been trying to work out which of the country's 60,000 charities actually still exist - and carry out their charitable activities. It's a massive project that the Commission, appropriately, has called "Proof of Life".
Unfortunately, not all the signs are vital ones. From July 8 the ACNC is set to publish the names of charities it's about to strike off the register, which means they'll lose their tax concessions.
ACNC commissioner Susan Pascoe says her organisation has already identified hundreds of defunct charities - all still eligible for those concessions.
"What we will be doing in early July, is that we'll publish a list of charities... that we believe have ceased operating. We'll then, with a period of time for people to notify us, in case we've somehow managed not to locate them with all those efforts, but they then will be removed from the register," she says.
That's hundreds of charities the ACNC hasn't been able to even contact, despite trying to do so for one-and-a-half years.
But there's more - the ACNC's total list of lost charities, which it may ultimately deregister, numbers in the thousands.
"That could be anything in excess of five thousand charities," Susan Pascoe says. As to whether it's likely any of those five thousand missing charities are using their charitable status as a loophole to conduct scams: "It's possible," she says.
"This piece of work will definitively identify those that are operating, and operating for charitable purposes and therefore can legitimately continue to receive tax concessions, and those that can't."
However, time is running out for Proof of Life project itself.
That leaves Australia with a $55 billion charities and not-for-profit sector of about 60,000 registered charities, some 5000 of which may not be legitimate, in total collecting billions of dollars in tax concessions.
Axing the charities regulator was a policy the Federal Coalition outlined well before last year's election, as part of their wider agenda of cutting red tape. In March, on "Repeal Day", the Social Services Minister, Kevin Andrews, tabled legislation to abolish the ACNC.
The bill was referred to the Senate Economics Committee. A few weeks ago, that committee delivered a report recommending the ACNC be axed (with Labor and the Greens dissenting).
The bill will now go before the new Senate, and it's likely the PUP Senators will have the deciding vote. However, the Minister has already begun the consultation process about what comes after the ACNC. Andrews says he wants an organisation called the Civil Society National Centre for Excellence.
"That will involve an organisation that we set up and then eventually hand over the ownership and responsibility for it to the civil society sector, and that will be there to do things like encourage better standards of governance, of training of board directors, et cetera," he says.
The key word is "encourage" - the Minister says the Civil Society National Centre for Excellence won't be a regulator. Key functions, like registration, will go back to the ATO and ASIC.
"We believe that we should start from a point of trusting the sector, not distrusting the sector. That we should be removing regulation, not adding regulation to the sector," Andrews says.
That leaves Australia with a $55 billion charities and not-for-profit sector of about 60,000 registered charities, some 5000 of which may not be legitimate, in total collecting billions of dollars in tax concessions. And before the ACNC has finished Proof of Life, the ACNC itself may be killed off. So who can tell you where your dollar goes?
It's something to think about the next time you dig deep.
Sarah Dingle's full investigation "Who Killed the Charity Watchdog?" will air on Background Briefing this Sunday, July 6 on Radio National at 8:05am, and again after the news at 1pm on NewsRadio.
It will be re-broadcast Tuesday, July 8 at 2pm, with the Reverend Tim Costello as guest tweeter.
Sarah Dingle is a reporter for ABC Radio Current Affairs. View her full profile here.
Topics: government-and-politics, charities, charities-and-community-organisations
First postedMore details have come forth about Tuesday's child pornography arrest in St. John's, with officials saying they've never seen anything like a disturbing find in 20 years.
A St. John's man, 47, faces several charges after Canada Border Services agents intercepted a package at Toronto's Pearson International Airport in January destined for St. John's.
Authorities said the package contained a human-like figure, which turned out to be a child sex doll — illegal in Canada.
Police allowed the package to be delivered to the St. John's address. On Tuesday night, they went to the house, made an arrest, and seized the doll.
Darryl Hooper of the Canada Border Services Agency said, in 20 years, he's never seen an item like the child sex doll enter the country. (CBC)
Darryl Hooper is a long-time investigator with Canada Border Services. He spoke at Wednesday's media briefing, adding in 20 years he's never seen anything like this being brought into the country.
"Child pornography in its various forms is an ongoing worldwide issue, and we face it on a daily basis," said Hooper. "Whatever form it may fall into, whether it be a material, film, video or electronic means we see it on a daily basis."
It was also a first for police in the province — laying a charge in relation to a disturbing item seized in a child porn investigation.
Royal Newfoundland Constabulary Cst. Talia Murphy said the doll looked like a child, and was dressed in a school uniform.
RNC Cst. Talia Murphy, addressing the media Wednesday, said the doll looked like a child and was dressed in a school uniform. (CBC)
"This doll has been deemed to be child pornography, it's approximately four foot two [inches tall], it's made of a foam-like material, it comes with accessories that would be used for sexual gratification purposes," said Murphy.
Hooper said Canada Border Services is working very closely with the RNC, as well as local law enforcement on a national and international level.
"We're just very fortunate to be able to take an item such as this off the street," he said.
The accused is facing charges of possession of child pornography, the mailing of obscene material, smuggling and possession of prohibited goods. He was released, pending a court date in April.A fight between two rival groups of young men in Mill Woods Saturday night sent three people to the hospital, Edmonton police said.
Police responded to a weapons complaint in a field near 57 Street and 19A Avenue at approximately 8 p.m.
According to EPS, the meetup was between two rival groups in an ongoing feud, but they do not consider them to be gangs.
“There was a pre-arranged meet between at least a couple of the individuals, and how it escalated to what it did, we’re still investigating at this point,” Sgt. Ian Strom told CTV News.
An EPS officer described a gruesome scene where two young men were bleeding on the ground with deep slash wounds.
Police believe edged weapons were used in the fight.
Officers provided first aid until EMS arrived and treated them on scene before transporting them to the University of Alberta Hospital, police said.
“A short time later, another male turned up at a local hospital, and investigations lead us to believe that he’s involved as well,” Strom said.
The amount of people involved in the fight and their ages is still under investigation.
A youth is in custody and he is facing weapons and assault related charges, EPS said, and they are attempting to locate more suspects.
With files from Jeremy ThompsonSignup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
The Acting Chief Executive of Terrence Higgins Trust, Paul Ward, says he was personally inspired by Nelson Mandela’s “compassion” and advocacy when it came to the issue of HIV.
Tributes are pouring in for Mandela, who died on Thursday at the age of 95.
His death was announced yesterday evening by South African President Jacob Zuma.
Terrence Higgins Trust (THT), Britain’s largest sexual health and HIV charity, paid tribute to Mandela on Friday.
THT Acting Chief Executive Paul Ward said: “Nelson Mandela’s inspirational leadership has been as important in the fight against HIV as anti-HIV treatments. Whenever he addressed a World AIDS Conference, no one could fail to be moved to action. The ideals he stood for – freedom, compassion, and the universal human right to love, life and happiness – struck a chord at a time when people with HIV, myself included, were facing unacceptable levels of prejudice and discrimination.
“Nelson Mandela was one of the few world leaders who stood shoulder to shoulder with people with HIV, and the legacy of that will continue to be felt not only in South Africa, but in countries and communities worldwide.”
Along with pioneering today’s era of racial integration for his country, Mandela presided over the establishment of gay rights in South Africa.
The country’s post-apartheid constitution in 1997 was the first in the world to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation.
In later years, Mandela became known as one of Africa’s most important HIV campaigners.
But some commentators, including the Telegraph’s David Blair, say Mandela was initially slow off the mark in responding to South Africa’s HIV epidemic during his time in office.
After Mr Mandela left office in 1999, he campaigned for more research into HIV, for education about safe sex and for better treatment for those affected in his country.
His successors, presidents Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma for many years displayed widespread ignorance about HIV, hampering South Africa’s response to the epidemic and openly questioning the scientific logic of established effective anti-retroviral medication.
According to Medicine San Frontières, an estimated 5.6 million people are living with HIV in South Africa, the highest figure worldwide.
In 2005, Mandela announced that his only surviving son, Makgatho Mandela, had died from an AIDS related illness.
“I announce that my son has died of AIDS,” Mandela said in a news conference. “Let us give publicity to HIV/AIDS and not hide it, because the only way to make it appear like a normal illness like tuberculosis, like cancer, is always to come out and to say somebody has died because of HIV/AIDS. And people will stop regarding it as something extraordinary.”
Lord Chris Smith, the UK’s first openly gay male MP, announced he was HIV positive in 2005, citing Mandela’s comments about his son as inspiration.
Speaking at a BNP Paribas event in October, the former MP said that it was Nelson Mandela’s speech on HIV awareness that “tipped him over the edge” to eventually talk about his own HIV status.
He said: “The way we really can confront HIV and AIDS is by talking about it, and by telling people about.”
Lord Smith served as Culture Secretary for Tony Blair until June 2001. He retired as an MP at the 2005 general election.This 1962 Willys Jeep FC-150 (chassis 6554825012) has been used as intended over the years, and as a result is not without the odd ding, dent, or rusty patch. Still, the seller says it is substantially solid, with no structural rust and minimal cab through-corrosion. Further said to run and drive well, the ad includes a good quality, ~5 minute video of the truck operating on the farm and road, from outside and in the cab. Find it here on eBay in Los Angeles, California with reserve not met.
As the seller points out, front cab corners are known to trap water and rust, as can clearly be seen in the shape of a small hole in the above shot. This is matched by a similar patch on the opposite side, but otherwise the cab looks quite good throughout. Green is believed to be the truck’s original color, though the seller admits it’s probably been resprayed at some point in the past–wouldn’t the recessed grille/headlight area have been painted white from the factory?
The interior is very spartan, though surprisingly does wear what looks like a factory, black vinyl upholstered headliner in good condition. Neither the speedo nor horn work, though the former is thought to only need a simple cable replacement. The heater box is noted to be fully intact, though functionality isn’t mentioned. All lighting has been gone through and is functional however, though the driver’s window is cracked–a replacement is quoted at $90. Seat upholstery looks as it it could remain original, and shows no tears or rips.
The engine is a replacement NOS military crate 78 HP four-cylinder installed by a previous owner about 18 years ago. The seller says it runs well, as seems to be supported by the aforementioned video. The frame has plenty of surface crust and grime, but is said to be very solid with no serious rust–ditto the floorboards, bed, tailgate, and lower rockers.
The truck looks right at home among the cattle and open fields, and should ideally be kept working for another 54 years. Tend to the rusty cab corners, keep it well-maintained and it should easily be up to the task.FIFA president Sepp Blatter denied he is a ‘ruthless parasite sucking the lifeblood out of the world’ as he came to the governing body’s defence against the ‘thoughtless swipe of the pen’.
Sepp Blatter has defended himself and FIFA against recent criticism.
FIFA has come under attack in recent times as allegations of corruption continue to cloud football’s governing body, with several members of the executive committee departing while investigations continue into the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
But the 77-year-old believes the ‘unsung, good work FIFA is working to achieve’ is under threat from repeated attacks from the media that would paint FIFA as a ‘scapegoat’ and him as ‘The Godfather of the FIFA gravy train’.
“Perhaps you think you know who I am, what FIFA is, what we do,'' Blatter said in a prepared speech at the Oxford Union.
“Perhaps you think I am a ruthless parasite sucking the lifeblood out of the world and out of football! The Godfather of the FIFA gravy train! An out-of-touch, heartless schmoozer!
“There are not many names that the media haven't thrown at me in the last few years.
“You would have to have a heart of stone for it not to hurt. You ask yourself, what have I done? Why has it come to this?
“Is FIFA to blame for everything? Are we not just a football organisation working for the good of the game? How did it come to this?
“People like a scapegoat, of course, but how could things have become so twisted?
“As you can see, I am not some overbearing bully who can intimidate my |
religion ever–has ever been credibly demonstrated. I know the definitions around atheism, though, and clearly I know those definitions better than the guy who claims he was once a “militant” atheist.
To anybody reading this who maybe doesn’t know better yet: NO, atheism is not a belief system. It’s not a proven theory, either, because it can’t be, and I don’t know any atheists who would say otherwise. Mr. Hayes is making a strawman here to tilt at, and you know it’s because his strawman’s a lot easier to engage with than the truth. So here’s the truth: atheism is a reaction to religions’ lack of evidence for their claims. That’s it. You can’t “believe” in atheism, as in you physically can’t, as in it’s not something that anybody could believe in because it’s not structured as a belief and indeed it can’t be. And it doesn’t “offer” anything to those who identify as atheists because it can’t offer anything by its very nature. It’s the absence of belief, the null hypothesis. By definition it isn’t going to be able to offer anything to anybody.
That’s not a bug in atheism, folks. That’s a feature. That’s a good thing. He’s implying it’s a bad thing, but only Christians–with their manufactured need for a belief system that offers them benefits–could actually be bothered by that facet of atheism. I’ve certainly never met any atheists who had a problem with it.
And let’s face it: just because something makes adherents feel good doesn’t mean it’s true. Indeed, “faith in God” may offer all sorts of things to adherents, but that doesn’t mean those things are true, and it certainly doesn’t mean that those promises will be fulfilled. Promises and offers are cheap to make. Moreover, “faith in God” can offer me anything it wants, but I can’t just force myself to believe in something because it promises me lots of goodies. If anything, I could get myself to mouth belief, but it wouldn’t be real belief.
Part Two is apparently going to be about how he had a big “crisis of faith”–at seventeen years old–and was helped out of it by a Trappist monk. Wow. I’ve got no words. This sounds so damned insufferable and self-important to me already. But Trappists are pretty cool folks so that’s nice. Glad he ran into one. I knew some in Kansas and they were hoopy froods. Nothing like a “wise man in the desert” encounter to boost a story’s resonance. I understand that the idea has found its way into a few other popular narratives.
Part Three is going to tell us all about how he moved through “atheism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, to Pure Theism... and finally back to Christianity.”
Holy shit, so he was raised Catholic, then went through all those phases starting at around what, seventeen? Wait just a damn minute, how old is this guy? (Rushing to another window right quick on my Mac now.) Oh my gosh, this guy is really old. He comes off sounding like one of those arrogant college bros who reads a lot of Ayn Rand, but he’s apparently in his 70s. And that’s okay, obviously, people are allowed to be old, but finding out his age makes the shallow nature of his assertions seem all the more striking to me.
His website asserts that he was an “ardent Catholic (nearly a Trappist monk at seventeen), to militant atheist at twenty, to dilettante Hindu/Buddhist, to Pure Theist... to a Christian studying for the ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary.” He conspicuously doesn’t provide a timeline for anything after the atheism, so we don’t know how long that lasted, but at 24 he writes that he quit his job after college to try writing as a career, which didn’t pan out, so I’m guessing that all this religious bed-hopping didn’t last that long. If the order of religions is correct and we give him a year or so for each of the other ones, then atheism wasn’t more than a blip on the radar of his spiritual searching. That silly insertion on the cover–“FORMER atheist”–might as well have read “former Hindu” or “former Buddhist.” Or “former Catholic.” Sounds like he was Catholic more than just about anything else. But it says “former atheist.” I’m liking this whole book less and less. It really doesn’t sound like he really did much with the atheism; he certainly doesn’t seem to have learned much about it, as “militant” as he was.
By the way, it’s my personal impression and experience that when you see someone doing a lot of that religion-hopping, especially when it’s really disparate religions, that seems to me to be someone who is looking desperately for something and not finding it in those religions. That’s someone who thinks that religions can and do offer and promise things, and cycles through these religions trying each one on and discarding it as he or she realizes that the promises didn’t pan out–or that there weren’t enough promises. I’ve done it myself, and for me the cycle didn’t really end till I realized that what I was seeking in those external sources was stuff I needed to do for myself. I’d been going around to all these different religions and philosophies like a starving child with a begging-bowl looking for scraps, when all that time I had a feast in my own heart that I’d overlooked. Looking back, I don’t hold against those religions that they weren’t what I needed right then. Nothing could have been. What I needed wasn’t something you could have fed me from an external source. I eventually found what I sought, and I’m at peace now–and sufficient within myself. And I wonder if maybe that same problem is what I’m seeing in this list of religions–recited with such obvious pride, as if trying them all on in such rapid succession was some kind of positive distinction. I don’t know enough to say for sure but I’ve seen this kind of claim many times before, so I think it’s worth mentioning briefly now.
Okay, let’s head back to the introduction. Now it makes a lot of sense that he’d include quotes in this part about how “subtle” and “unsearchable” and “inscrutable” the Bible’s god is. Sounds like we’re getting set up for an argument from ignorance–“We can’t know this god’s ways, so therefore Jesus.” Oh yay, and apparently in Part Three we’ll be putting the problem of evil on trial in a mock courtroom. Not surprising, considering Mr. Hayes was a lawyer at one point according to that biography I dug up; when all you have is a hammer, then everything starts looking like a nail. But lawyers don’t determine the truth; they win arguments. And an argument can be won or lost and that has nothing to do with whether or not it’s true. It really sounds like Mr. Hayes has fallen into that very common apologetics trap of mistaking a good-sounding argument for evidence for a religion’s claims. He might be okay with wasting his life on something based on a good-sounding argument, but it matters to me if what I believe is true or false. And arguments don’t uncover truth. Observable, measurable evidence does. And I’m not thinking he’s got any, based on this bit. That’s why he’s printed those quotes there: because he needs to make wanting evidence sound like a bad thing, and more importantly to make not having evidence sound like a good thing.
Part Four is apparently a retelling of his mother’s life and death, which doesn’t really form an argument in favor of Christianity, but okay. Christians usually see great value in personal testimonies; I don’t think non-Christians do in general, but I’m the last person to tell someone he can’t write about his mother. The last bit is apparently about how a guy who sees himself as “philosophically agnostic yet passionately Christian” perceives his religion and his savior. That phrase sounds weird to me–sort of like saying “short tall person” or “plastic cotton tablecloth”–and doesn’t bode well. I knew a lady once who called herself a “Christian sorceress” and did magic rituals and stuff, and it made about as much sense as this guy being two things that are diametrically opposed. And if he’s using the word “agnostic” correctly, then he knows he really doesn’t have any proof for his claims–and that there may not be any proof at all–which means diddly divided by squat as far as persuading anybody with critical thinking skills.
Jesus Christ, this is long, sorry! I’m going to wrap this up and take on Part 1’s excerpt next time. Let me close this first part thusly, though:
Part of me really thinks that Christians give people like Mr. Hayes a soapbox because he tells them what they want to hear about atheists and about non-believers in general. But he is not telling them accurate things, as I can see already, and I wish it mattered more to his audience that those things aren’t accurate. He’s not being perfectly honest about just how long this atheist phase of his was, unless he outlines it elsewhere.
So basically this is another entry in the Cult of Before Stories. It really sounds like he’s blowing up his pre-Christian atheism to sound a lot more impressive and defining of an experience than it really was. It’d be just as dishonest for me to say something similar about the very brief time I sat zazen (seriously, didn’t most of us do something along those lines?) and bill myself as a former Zen Buddhist. His atheism sounds an awful lot like the atheism we’ve seen many times before in Christians’ testimonies: just a simple rumspringa, a bit of a walkabout from Christianity, some phase of anger or spite, that got itself corrected and sorted out and he came trotting home to Christianity once he’d gotten that blaze of anger out of his system.
And that doesn’t mean we say that he wasn’t a TRUE ATHEIST™. There are probably a lot more people like that than we want to think about. If he says he was an atheist for that short time, then fine, I’m not going to gainsay him. But so far it’s not looking like he was an atheist who cultivated critical thinking skills, and that’s what’s more important than the label. I don’t call myself an atheist, but I do try hard to cultivate those skills. He bills himself as a former atheist, but he didn’t bother. Once again we see that the label isn’t the important part. I admit, too, that I’m really bugged by this suspicion I have of the author’s self-centered dishonesty. I shouldn’t be surprised; I did after all write the “book” (well, blog series anyway) for Christians exaggerating their pre-conversion stories for personal gain. But it still bugs me.
Take this for what it’s worth, but a commenter over at Patheos who claims to know the author personally doesn’t believe a word of his breathlessly-earnest claim:
The man (Mr. Hayes) was NOT raised atheist. He was raised in an intensely Christian family. I know him well... I would also add, from personal acquaintance, that for most of his life he was a devout believer. The “atheistic” period was, I suspect, a relatively brief, sulky time-out–a personal argument with God. And who can blame him? God –“god”–let’s [sic] a lot of bad things happen.
So while I hesitate to doubt Christians’ stories of having been atheists, it seems quite clear that if this claim is true, then my suspicion is confirmed: the author was hardly deeply invested in disbelief; it was really just a short phase as I’m suspecting, and the skeptic community is right to hold his feet to the fire and not accept the label alone as a substitute for intellectual rigor.
But Christians will eat this shit up with a spoon and ask for more. OMG! A REAL LIVE ATHEIST CONVERTED TO CHRISTIANITY! WE FINALLY GOT ONE! They’ll flock to him and look up to him to tell them all about the dreaded tribe of atheism that he escaped. And he’ll tell them, all right.
A pity he won’t be telling them anything reliable.
This time around, we looked at Shane Hayes’ book’s introduction and examined some of his claims about his atheist phase, and I at least sure didn’t find either one very compelling. Please join me next time as we examine what this Christian actually thinks is a compelling argument for belief in his god–and what “belief” actually means in the real world. See you soon!
Related articlesThe community of Clearwater, B.C., is in shock and mourning after the mother of three young children was found dead.
No charges have yet been laid, but police are recommending a charge of first-degree murder against a man said to be the woman's estranged common-law husband.
Clearwater RCMP said the woman's body was found in her Stegg Road home at around 10 a.m. PT Monday morning, after police were called to check on her well-being.
Emergency response team members surrounded a home in Clearwater, B.C., Monday night. After a standoff with police, a man was arrested. Three young children who were also in the home were unharmed. (Daryl Huff/@firepebble/Twitter)
Police determined the death was due to homicide, and believe she was killed Sunday night. There was no sign of the children at the home.
The suspect, the woman's former partner, was arrested Monday night following a seven-hour-long standoff with police at a home just outside of town, where three young children were also taken into custody.
Police said the children, who are all under the age of seven, were physically unharmed.
Professionals have been called in to interview the children to determine whether they were witnesses to their mother's death.
A close friend of the dead woman, whose name has not been released by police, told CBC News that her friend separated from her partner about a month ago.
A police helicopter provided surveillance from the air during Monday's standoff. (Daryl Huff/@firepebble/Twitter)
Clearwater Mayor John Harwood said he knew the victim well, and news of the tragedy is hitting him and many others hard in the community of just over 2,300.
"When it seems to happen in small towns, it affects so many more people," he said. "There is only one school, so the child that is in school attends that school, so that affects the children there."
He said counsellors were being brought in to help teachers and students at the elementary school.
Clearwater is a district municipality in B.C.'s North Thompson River valley, approximately 130 kilometres north of Kamloops.Elderly women robbed at knifepoint at Buddhist temple in western Sydney
Updated
Police are searching for two men who broke into a Buddhist temple in Sydney's west and threatened two elderly women.
Officers said the men, who were armed with knives, forced entry to the Chua Phuoc Hue temple at Victoria Street, Wetherill Park, about 7:40pm on Monday.
Inspector Adam Bird said at this stage he understands the men were of Caucasian appearance.
He described the two women as nuns.
NSW Police spokeswoman Sonya Roberts said the men threatened the women, aged 81 and 87, who had been asleep in the temple's sleeping quarters.
"The men stole an amount of cash and an iPad they ran from the location and are yet to be located," she said.
"Both women were treated at the scene for shock, the 81-year-old has been admitted to Fairfield Hospital for further observation.
"Anyone who might have witnessed any suspicious activity around the area of the temple last night and is yet to speak to police should call Crime Stoppers."
Inspector Bird said the 81-year-old woman was pulled to the floor and suffered minor bruising to her back.
"Detectives from Fairfield Local Area Command are investigating, they're hoping to re-interview the victims later today, with the assistance of an interpreter, we're hoping to have a better description of the offenders later today," he said.
"The details are a little sketchy at this stage, due to the language barrier... but we believe they were both armed with knives."
He said the offence was alarming.
"The ages of the two victims, 81 and 87 years of age, they're elderly ladies, so it's quite worrying."
Topics: armed-robbery, community-and-society, crime, law-crime-and-justice, wetherill-park-2164, sydney-2000, nsw
First postedOn Wednesday night’s edition of “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow discussed this week’s revelations that former Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) bribed a delegate in the 2012 Iowa caucus to secure an endorsement. Maddow went on to say that the process in Iowa appears to be irrevocably tainted and that it’s time for the U.S. to let go of some aspects of its outdated presidential primary system.
“Running for president means starting in Iowa, right?” Maddow said. “Iowa’s first. Their caucuses have been first in the nation for 40 years now. So starting to run for president means starting in Iowa, which means first competing in the Ames, Iowa straw poll which is a scam. It is a total scam.”
The Ames straw poll, Maddow said, is a “fake, rigged, pay-for-votes, not-a-real-contest pretending to be a contest.” It costs $30 to cast a vote and some candidates freely spend money to buy ballots for people who they believe will support them.
“And, ta-dah!” she said. “It’s actual vote-buying in America in the 21st century. Democracy, faked!”
There are a lot of other places in the country that could use the attention, said Maddow, as well as the influx of cash that comes with hosting a deluge of candidates, their entourages and the attendant scrum of journalists.
“But, because Iowa is first, Iowa gets it all,” she said.
Then come the caucuses, which are run by the parties, not the candidates. In 2012, the chairman of the Iowa Republican Party announced on the night of the caucus vote that former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) had won. That turned out not to be true. Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) won the Iowa caucuses in 2012, which was only reported after the fact.
Because of the importance given to the Iowa caucuses, the state’s politicians become fought-over prizes as each candidate rushes to secure endorsements.
“That must feel like a million bucks,” said Maddow, “or maybe like 208,000 bucks, which is allegedly what Republican state Sen. Kent Sorenson charged the Ron Paul campaign to switch his endorsement from Bachmann to Paul.”
The politician denies it, but there is fairly persuasive evidence on the table, Maddow said, including audio tape of the deal being made by a representative of the Paul campaign and Sorenson’s wife.
Election officials have opened a probe of the Sorenson deal and the Federal Elections Commission is investigating whether Santorum donated a million dollars to an Iowa anti-LGBT group to secure their endorsement.
“Iowa gets a lot of benefit out of going first when we pick a president,” Maddow concluded. “The next election is still a long way off, thank god, but maybe it’s time for them to start explaining why they deserve to keep going first.”
Watch the video, embedded via MSNBC, below:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economyRussia's President Vladimir Putin attends an agreement signing ceremony with China's President Xi Jinping (not pictured) during a bilateral meeting at the Xijiao State Guesthouse ahead of the fourth Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) summit, in Shanghai May 20, 2014. (REUTERS/Carlos Barria)
By Stephen Grey, Jason Bush and Roman Anin
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A grand estate on the Black Sea, allegedly built for Russian President Vladimir Putin, was partly funded by taxpayer money from a $1 billion hospital project, a Reuters investigation indicates.
While the existence of the property is well known, this trail of funding has not been revealed before.
Two allies of the Russian leader profited from state contracts worth nearly $200 million, according to customs documents and banking transactions examined by Reuters. Nikolai Shamalov and Dmitry Gorelov owned a company that supplied medical equipment to a federal hospital project - initiated by Putin - at prices some medical specialists say were inflated.
Shamalov and Gorelov then sent some of the gains to Swiss bank accounts, the records show. From those accounts money was transferred to a Liechtenstein account linked to the construction of a luxurious estate on the Black Sea popularly known as "Putin's Palace," the same records indicate.
Sergei Kolesnikov, a former business colleague of Shamalov and Gorelov, said in 2010 the estate was built on behalf of Putin. The Kremlin has denied that Putin, who has held power in Russia as president or prime minister since 2000, has any connection to the property.
The money trail emerged from a Reuters investigation into how the Russian state spends public funds. In a $1 billion health project announced by Putin in 2005, Shamalov and Gorelov acted as intermediaries, documents reviewed by Reuters show. The documents indicate two men owned a UK-based company, called Greathill, and used it to buy high-tech medical equipment, mostly from the German manufacturer Siemens AG. They then sold the equipment on to Russia at a profit.
Shamalov, a former sales executive of Siemens in Russia, did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for Siemens said the company was not aware of Shamalov's connection to Greathill. Gorelov said the import operation had been transparent and that Greathill sold equipment to Russia at prices approved by Russian state experts.
Bank statements indicate that the UK company Greathill paid $56 million to accounts in Switzerland after 2006, when Russia began to implement Putin's $1 billion project to improve healthcare. Those Swiss accounts were controlled by a company called Lanaval, according to the bank records.
Documents reviewed by Reuters show that Lanaval then sent $48 million to an account in Liechtenstein controlled by Medea Investment, a company registered in Washington DC. Medea Investment is controlled by an Italian architect called Lanfranco Cirillo who designed the Black Sea estate, according to Kolesnikov. In a statement through his lawyer, Cirillo said he had been assigned work on the Black Sea property because of his experience and professional skills.
He did not respond to questions about the funding of the Black Sea estate and payments made to Medea.
A spokesman for Putin did not respond to questions about Kolesnikov's claims and Reuters findings. The Kremlin has previously dismissed Kolesnikov as an aggrieved man, saying he left Russia because of business disputes. Kolesnikov denies that suggestion.
(Additional reporting by Elizabeth Piper and Maria Tsvetkova in Moscow, Brian Grow in Atlanta, and Jens Hack in Munich; Editing by Richard Woods and Simon Robinson)Strategic Scala Style: Designing Datatypes
When programming in Scala, there are two main ways of avoiding repetition: you can define functions to represent commonly-used procedures or computations, and you can define data-types, e.g. using class es or case class es, to represent commonly-used bundles of data that you tend to pass around or use together.
Lots of people have opinions about functions: they should be "pure", not too long, not be indented more than this much, etc. etc. etc.. Much less has been written about what a good data-type looks like, even though they play just as important a role in your Scala codebase. This post will explore some of the considerations and guidelines I follow when designing the class es and case class es that make up my Scala programs, and how you can apply them to your own Scala code.
In Scala, as in Java, everything has to live in a class or object. However, there is a qualitative difference between the kind of class whose only purpose is a place to "put code", and the kind of class which represents a value that you instantiate and pass around your program. The latter is what I'm going to call a Datatype.
Examples of data-types include:
java.io.File
scala.Tuple2
scala.concurrent.Future
java.awt.Point2D
Versus classes which aren't data-types are things such as:
java.lang.System
scala.Predef
java.lang.Math
You instantiate data-types, pass them around, store them in values or fields and use them later. Just as defining functions lets you avoid copy-pasting the same logic all over your code, defining data-types lets you avoid copy-pasting the same groups of parameters or groups of values all over your code. Rather than passing around xPosition: Double and yPosition: Double everywhere, you can instead pass around a position: scala.Tuple2[Double, Double] or position: java.awt.Point2D.
Apart from the built in data-types, you will end up using data-types defined in libraries, and find yourself defining your own as your program grows. This post will explore some considerations and guidelines to remember when designing your own data-types, and help you sort through the over-abundance of ways that Scala lets you model your data:
This post is fourth in the Strategic Scala Style series, after Principle of Least Power, Conciseness & Names, and Practical Type Safety. Like the others, it focuses on Vanilla Scala, without any libraries or frameworks that would likely have their own conventions to follow. It's an intermediate-level post, and expects the audience to be familiar with Scala's language features, but doesn't need you to be familiar with Scala's fancy design patterns or fancy frameworks.
Many people who have been using Scala for a while might find much of this "obvious". Nevertheless, hopefully this post will still be useful in codifying this "obvious" knowledge for anyone who doesn't find it obvious, and form a basis for future discussion.
And on to the first consideration: should you make your data-type opaque or transparent?
Opaque or Transparent?
The first decision you have to make when designing a data type is: how opaque should the data-type be?
Should it hide/encapsulate it's internals?
Should it expose all its internals for external code to see and use?
The first case corresponds to "traditional" Java-style object oriented programming, while the second case corresponds to more a "functional" Scala style. Both cases have their uses in a Scala program.
For example, let's say we are trying to design a ParseError data-type to represent a syntax error when trying to parse some configuration file. Let's imagine we want the following things to be available:
The line and col the error occurred at
and the error occurred at Some kind of human readable message to explain what went wrong
We could imagine defining it as an opaque data-type, with a constructor, initialization logic, and the necessary methods exposed:
class ParseError(index: Int, input: String){... some computation... def line: Int =... def col: Int =... def message: String =... }
Here, we take an index and an input when constructing the ParseError, but neither of them are public. Rather, we only expose the line, col, and message as def s for people to use. I call this Opaque, because someone using ParseError has no visibility into how it actually works: they can only see the few def s it exposes. Whatever computation is happening is totally hidden within the body of the ParseError
Another way we could decide to do it is as a case class :
case class ParseError(line: Int, col: Int, message: String)
As a case class, all its constructor parameters line, col and message are automatically public. We do not do any computation in the body of ParseError ; computing the line and col and message from the index and the input will have to happen before the ParseError is created, outside of it. I call this Transparent, because someone using ParseError can from-the-outside can see all there is to know about it. There is no hidden data being stored, or hidden computation being performed. It is simply a bundle of two integers ( line and col, and a string msg.
In general, more internally-complex data-types with more internal invariants are better treated as opaque class es, while simpler data-types are better treated as transparent case class es. The following reasons illustrate why:
It is worth noting that Transparency and Opacity is a Spectrum: it's not an entirely binary decision to choose between either side, and you can choose a point on the transparency-opacity spectrum with the set of tradeoffs you want.
Opacity enforces Invariants
It's easier to enforce invariants with an opaque data-type: since construction of the computed def s from the "original" index / input data is done inside the constructor, there's no way for someone to construct a "bad" ParseError with nonsensical values for line, col or message. If message is always in some particular style, I can't accidentally make it return "I am Cow" instead. If line or col are always going to be greater than zero, I can be certain (if I trust the internals of ParseError itself) that they're never going to suddenly return negative numbers.
On the other hand, with a transparent data-type, I could easily pass in negative integers to line or col. I can pass in weird strings into message, and the transparent data-type will happily expose them.
Even in transparent data-types, some invariants can be enforced by the structure of your data-type. Other invariants can be validated using Self Checks. Nevertheless, in the case where the invariants are not easily enforced structurally, and adding lots and lots of self-checks is tedious, having the data-type simply be Opaque could be the right answer.
Opacity can save on Defensiveness
It is possible to enforce invariants in a transparent data-structure such as the case class above, but it requires additional steps. For example:
assert s to ensure that the message is not null
assert s to ensure that the line and col are not negative
(Possibly) assert s to ensure that the message obeys some format
In a transparent data-type, asserts are necessary if we want to enforce these things: who knows what random downstream code is going to try stuffing into our ParseError(line: Int, col: Int, message: String) constructor! However, in an opaque data-type, asserts are not as necessary: only the data-type itself is able to compute these values. So we can trust - without asserts - that it will do the right thing and no external code can interfere with it.
Transparency reduces Complexity
While encapsulating your logic within opaque data-types seems tempting, it can also be a curse: opaque data-types may be complex, but the complexity is hidden, so you often don't notice it until it causes subtle problems.
For example, from the outside we might not know whether the opaque ParseError holds on to a reference to the input: String after it is constructed. Given that the input to a parse is often far larger than any data included in the error message, that could cause a considerable memory leak if we unwittingly keep a number of ParseError s hanging around!
Another bit of uncertainty is how the line, col, and message are populated.
Are they pre-computed once during construction?
Are they re-computed every time you access them?
Are they lazy, meaning the first time you access them they may be slow to compute, but subsequent times become fast? Depending
How much memory they take and how long they take to compute?
These could be important questions! Certainly we could figure out the answer by digging through the code, but it may be non-trivial to do so.
With the transparent ParseError modeled as a case class, these questions are all answers from a glance at the signature. We can see at a glance that line, col and message are all eagerly pre-computed the first time. We can see at a glance that we don't keep any possibly-massive input: String hanging around using memory. While opaque data-types help you hide complexity and maintain invariants, transparent data-types help you remove complexity altogether. With a case class, there's data sitting in it's fields, and that's all there is to know about it.
Transparency and Opacity is a Spectrum
As with many things, Transparency and Opacity is not a binary choice. You can go half-way, by having part of your data-type's fields be "dumb" constructor arguments, while other "smart" fields are computed in the body of the class. You can even go beyond the amount of opacity in the above "opaque" example, e.g. by hiding the constructor as private and only letting people create instances through a factory method (e.g. apply on the companion object):
object ParseError{ def apply(...): ParseError = {... some computation... new ParseError(...) } } class ParseError private(index: Int, input: String){... some computation... def line: Int =... def col: Int =... def message: String =... }
In general, more internally-complex data-types with more internal invariants are better treated as opaque class es, while simpler data-types are better treated as transparent case class es, though there's no hard-and-fast rule. Next time you are picking a data-type, it's worth considering where on the transparency-opacity spectrum to place it!
Data-Types should be Total
When people say functions are Total, they usually mean that no matter what arguments you pass in to the function and satisfy the compiler, it will never give an "invalid" result at runtime: e.g. not blowing up with an exception. That's a handy property to have when reasoning about your code (e.g. "this code will never throw") and though hard to reach in reality, is still worth striving toward.
When I say a data-type is Total, I mean that no matter how the data-type is constructed, it cannot be "invalid": that is to say, I shouldn't be able to construct an instance of your class or case class that doesn't make any sense according to what you are going to use it for. For example, here are some example data-types which can possibly be invalid
case class URL(value: String) case class EmailAddress(value: String) /** * Represents a folder full of text files, without sub-folders, storing * the name of each file together with it's text content in a tuple */ case class FolderContents(value: Seq[(String, String))
While these may seem like plausible ways to model a URL, an EmailAddress, and a FolderContents, it is possible to construct invalid instances of them:
new URL("http:/www.google.com") is invalid; it needs a double // after the http
new EmailAddress("haoyi.com") as a email address, is invalid, as email addresses must contain an @ somewhere in them
new FolderContents(Seq("file.txt" -> "Hello", "file.txt" -> "World")), is invalid: you cannot have two files of the same name
For example, if someone was trying to make a HTTP request to http:/www.google.com, it would fail as a malformed URL. And since we don't find out until the URL is used, it could easily be stored in our program for minutes or hours before blowing up later on when we're not paying attention, maybe past midnight on Saturday at 1am. Not great!
If they were total we would be sure that if we had a URL object, it would be "well-formed" and not blow up due to its own malformed-ness when you try to use it. Sure it could still fail due to run-time problems (Wifi down?) but at least it won't fail due to "internal" problems, or if it does fail it'll fail early while we're trying to construct it, so we can fix the bug early and go home worry-free.
Now that definitely sounds like a nice property to have, but how can we achieve it? It turns out there are two main techniques to make data-types Total:
Self Checks
A simple way of enforcing that the data-types are never invalid is to add assertions to their constructors to ensure that if someone tries to make an invalid instance that violates whatever rules we have in mind, we throw an exception:
case class URL(value: String){ assert(value.contains("//")) } case class EmailAddress(value: String){ assert(value.contains("@")) } /** * Represents a folder full of text files, without sub-folders, storing * the name of each file together with it's text content in a tuple */ class FolderContents(value: Vector[(String, String)){ assert(value.map(_._1).distinct == value.map(_._1)) }
Now if we try to instantiate an invalid instance, it fails before we get our hands on it:
@ new EmailAddress("haoyi.com") java.lang.AssertionError: assertion failed scala.Predef$.assert(Predef.scala:156)
And we can be sure that if someone passes us EmailAddress as a function argument, or we're reading it from some field on some object, that EmailAddress satisfies at least some basic properties we expect all email addresses to have: in this case it must contain an @. If it didn't contain an @, it would have thrown an exception during construction, and we wouldn't be able to get our hands on it. That's a nice property to have!
Implementing totality in this way has some benefits:
It's really easy: just assert the things you know must be true in the body of your class, and you're done
It requires minimal changes to existing code: everyone can construct EmailAddress s and use their.value as they always did, except now if you try to construct a bad one it'll blow up on you.
It also has some problems:
These self-checks can be expensive to perform each time! For example, the self-check on the FolderContents class creates three brand new Vector s and compares them before throwing them away.
They can be incomplete; there are likely other constraints on a URL apart from the fact that they contain a //, but this won't catch them.
As your checks get more complex, they become both slower and easier to get wrong.
Thus, it's often worth considering the other way we can ensure totality: Structural Enforcement.
Structural Enforcement
Structural enforcement of totality is when you make sure a data-type cannot contain invalid data purely by how it is defined. For example, you may define the above cases as
case class URL(protocol: String, host: String, path: String){ def value = protocol + "://" + host + "/" + path } case class EmailAddress(prefix: String, suffix: String) def value = prefix + "@" + suffix } /** * Represents a folder full of text files, without sub-folders */ case |
by materials such as the nanoparticles' gold cores. The particles heat up slightly, producing detectable ultrasound signals from which a three-dimensional image of the tumor can be computed. Because this mode of imaging has high depth penetration and is highly sensitive to the presence of the gold particles, it can be useful in guiding removal of the bulk of a tumor during surgery.
The third method, called Raman imaging, leverages the capacity of certain materials (included in a layer coating the gold spheres) to give off almost undetectable amounts of light in a signature pattern consisting of several distinct wavelengths. The gold cores' surfaces amplify the feeble Raman signals so they can be captured by a special microscope.
To demonstrate the utility of their approach, the investigators first showed via various methods that the lab's nanoparticles specifically targeted tumor tissue, and only tumor tissue.
Next, they implanted several different types of human glioblastoma cells deep into the brains of laboratory mice. After injecting the imaging-enhancing nanoparticles into the mice's tail veins, they were able to visualize, with all three imaging modes, the tumors that the glioblastoma cells had spawned.
The MRI scans provided good preoperative images of tumors' general shapes and locations. And during the operation itself, photoacoustic imaging permitted accurate, real-time visualization of tumors' edges, enhancing surgical precision.
But neither MRI nor photoacoustic imaging by themselves can distinguish healthy from cancerous tissue at a sufficiently minute level to identify every last bit of a tumor. Here, the third method, Raman imaging, proved crucial. In the study, Raman signals emanated only from tumor-ensconced nanoparticles, never from nanoparticle-free healthy tissue. So, after the bulk of an animal's tumor had been cleared, the highly sensitive Raman-imaging technique was extremely accurate in flagging residual micrometastases and tiny fingerlike tumor projections still holed up in adjacent normal tissue that had been missed on visual inspection. This, in turn, enabled these dangerous remnants' removal.
"Now we can learn the tumor's extent before we go into the operating room, be guided with molecular precision during the excision procedure itself and then immediately afterward be able to'see' once-invisible residual tumor material and take that out, too," said Gambhir, who suggested that the nanoparticles' propensity to heat up on photoacoustic stimulation, combined with their tumor specificity, might also make it possible for them to be used to selectively destroy tumors. He also expressed optimism that this kind of precision could eventually be brought to bear on other tumor types.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute's Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence, the Ben and Catherine Ivy Foundation, the Canary Foundation and the Leon Levy Foundation.The Ritz Carlton hotel in Riyadh, the de facto royal hotel, was evacuated on Saturday, stirring rumors that it would be used to house detained royals. The airport for private planes was closed, arousing speculation that the crown prince was seeking to block rich businessmen from fleeing before more arrests.
That right there – from the New York Times – in many ways encapsulates the farcical nature of what’s going on in Saudi Arabia, where Mohammed bin Salman is essentially moving to consolidate all power in himself.
Only in Saudi Arabia would dozens of people who were just arrested be housed at the Ritz fucking Carlton. “Surrender you rascal! We’re throwing your ass in the Ritz Carlton.”
As this unfolded on Saturday evening, the news flow approximated a deluge and although there were some dots that could be connected immediately (e.g. it’s a purge, so MbS must be consolidating power), the moves raise all kinds of other questions, ranging from those that can be answered definitively to those that outsiders will never know the answers to with any degree of certainty.
Here’s who was arrested:
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, chairman of Kingdom Holding
, chairman of Kingdom Holding Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, head of National Guard
, head of National Guard Prince Turki bin Abdullah, former governor of Riyadh province
Khalid Al Tuwayjiri, former chief of royal court
Adel Fakeih, minister of economy and planning
Ibrahim Al Assaf, former finance minister
Abdulla Al Sultan, commander of Saudi navy
navy Bakr bin Laden, chairman of Saudi Binladin Group
Binladin Group Alwaleed Al Ibrahim, owner of MBC
Khalid al Mulheim, former director general at Saudi Arabian Airlines
Arabian Airlines Mohammed Al Tobaishi, former head of protocol at royal court
Amr Al-Dabbagh, former head of Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority
Arabian General Investment Authority Saud Al Daweish, former CEO of Saudi Telecom
Telecom Saleh Kamel, businessman
Prince Turki bin Nasser, former head of presidency of meteorology and environment
Fahd bin Abdullah bin Mohammed Al Saud, former deputy defense minister
Mohammed Al Amoudi, businessman
Obviously, the bin Talal detention is the headline grabber, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
The most important thing about this is the extent to which it represents an effort to consolidate power in Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. This of course comes just a little over four months after bin Salman replaced his cousin Muhammad bin Nayef as heir to the throne. 31 out of 34 members of the Allegiance Council supported that decision.
They put on a fun show for Saudi television which aired footage of bin Salman kissing Nayef’s hand, but here’s what we said about that at the time:
…it’s pretty clear whose hand (and ass) everyone is going to be kissing in Riyadh going forward.
Yeah. So given that, it wasn’t hard to predict what was coming when the following decree was handed down on Saturday (via Al Arabiya):
In a statement carried by the official Saudi news agency, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud decreed the following: “In view of what we have noticed of exploitation by some of the weak souls who have put their own interests above the public interest, in order to, illicitly, accrue money and as we have taken care, in this regard, since we assumed the responsibility to follow these matters out of our pledges towards the homeland and the citizen, we decided: First: To form a supreme committee chaired by the Crown Prince. Secondly, the investigation, issuance of arrest warrants, travel ban, disclosure and freezing of accounts and portfolios, tracking of funds, assets and preventing their remittance or transfer by persons and entities, whatever they might be.
There’s a “thirdly” and a “fourthly” and so on, but you get the idea: “weak-souled” bastards need to be brought to justice and the King knows just who to call on when it comes to doling out that justice: bin Salman.
“The breadth and scale of the arrests appears to be unprecedented in modern Saudi history,” Kristian Ulrichsen, a fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University said.
The move against Prince Miteb bin Abdullah is particularly notable. The son of the late King Abdullah, his ouster means the Shammar branch of the family will no longer hold any top positions. The National Guard – which he ran until yesterday – was given its own ministry four years ago and if you read a little bit about the history there, you can kind of start to get an idea of why bin Salman might have wanted to control it too. Here’s Reuters:
For decades [it existed] as a sort of parallel army, serving as a bulwark against any possible military coup and providing the country’s powerful tribes with their main link to the government. Its origins can be traced back to the kingdom’s founder, King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, who led white-clad “Ikhwan” tribal warriors in conquering much of the Arabian peninsula in the first three decades of the 20th century. After Ibn Saud’s death, Saudi authorities transformed the Office of the Jihad and Mujahideen, which managed the Ikhwan and other tribal forces, into the National Guard. It remains administratively distinct from the other two pillars of the Saudi security architecture, the ministries of interior and defense.
Essentially, bin Salman now controls the kingdom’s entire security apparatus and not only that, it kind of seems like Prince Miteb (who was once thought to be a contender for the throne) might have been one of the only people still in a position to challenge MbS. And indeed, there’s been no shortage of speculation since the June shakeup that Prince Miteb’s day was coming.
So there’s that.
And then there’s billionaire and social media “darling” Alwaleed bin Talal, who just a week ago was busy telling CNBC about how Bitcoin was the next Enron. You already know Prince Alwaleed, so I’m not going to give you the boilerplate background, but what you should note is his history with Trump which goes well beyond the following tweets:
There’s also this tweet:
The “photoshopped pics” bit there is a reference to the fact that Trump was duped by a fake picture of Megyn Kelly and the Prince. Here’s that fake picture:
And the “bail out” part is a reference to Alwaleed having participated in multiple deals to save Trump when he was in dire straits. Here are a couple of excerpts from a BuzzFeed story that details one of those deals:
Donald Trump has made a habit of criticizing the United States for allowing foreign countries to continue “eating our lunch,” a message he has pushed for nearly 30 years. In 1991, however, it was Trump’s lunch that was eaten by a foreign competitor, when the real estate mogul, in debt to the tune of $900 million, ceded his 281-foot super-yacht Trump Princess over to creditors. The yacht was then purchased by Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz al Saud, mogul and member of the Saudi royal family. He also happens to have a stake in another forsaken Trump property: the Plaza hotel in New York.
Just hours after Saturday’s purge, Trump called King Salman ostensibly to talk about arms sales, which is plausible considering the Saudis did shoot down a Houthi ballistic missile yesterday, but even that’s got ties to bin Salman because the Prince is running the war in Yemen (although recently, reports indicate he may be having second thoughts about that).
On Sunday, shares of Kingdom Holding (owned by Prince Alwaleed) plunged, falling nearly 10% at one point, the most since November 2014, to 9.26 riyals, the lowest since 2012:
You’re reminded that this comes just a week after we learned that Jared Kushner – who, like MbS, is a thirty-something who rose from political obscurity to a position of high influence with a sovereign – took an undisclosed trip to Saudi Arabia last month. Here’s Politico from an October 29 piece:
President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner returned home Saturday from an unannounced visit to Saudi Arabia — his third trip to the country this year. Kushner left Washington, D.C., via commercial airline on Wednesday for the trip, which was not announced to the public, a White House official told POLITICO. He traveled separately from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who led a delegation to Riyadh last week to focus on combating terrorist financing.
[…] The White House official would not say who Kushner met with in Saudi Arabia. But he has cultivated a relationship with the crown prince, Mohammad Bin Salman.
I’m sure there’s no connection there. It’s just a “big league” coincidence.
Speaking of “coincidences”, Donald Trump tweeted this on Saturday morning:
Well, I assume you know who the man pulling the strings behind the Aramco IPO is and in case you don’t recall, remember what we said last month when reports began to suggest that pressure was mounting to alter plans for an international listing:
As FT also notes, “it is unclear if this new proposal is backed by Prince Mohammed and there is no guarantee it will go ahead.” That right there is key. We’ll say it again: the obvious question here is what this means for bin Salman’s “Vision 2030” and for the crown prince’s economic reform platform more generally.
And wouldn’t you know it, the list of people detained on Saturday includes former finance minister Ibrahim al-Assaf, an Aramco board member.
In the same Saturday call mentioned above, the White House says Trump asked Saudi Arabia’s King Salman to “strongly consider listing Aramco on a stock exchange in the United States.” Again: I’m sure that’s a coincidence.
Broadly speaking, the consolidation of the kingdom’s entire defense apparatus in the hands of MbS raises new questions about an escalation with Iran. There’s no check on the Crown Prince’s power. On the other hand, the more power is consolidated in his hands, the faster reforms will move.
“The most recent crackdown breaks with the tradition of consensus within the ruling family whose secretive inner workings are equivalent to those of the Kremlin at the time of the Soviet Union,” Reuters quotes James Dorsey, a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, as saying today.
“Prince Mohammed, rather than forging alliances, is extending his iron grip to the ruling family, the military, and the National Guard to counter what appears to be more widespread opposition within the family as well as the military to his reforms and the Yemen war,” Dorsey adds.
Here’s a bit of additional color from Frank Gardner, BBC’s security correspondent:
The events of Saturday night in Saudi Arabia are nothing short of seismic for that country. In a bold, pre-planned move, the 32-year old Crown Prince has removed the final obstacles to his gaining total control over the world’s richest oil producer and home to the holiest shrines in Islam. Presented to the world as an anti-corruption drive, the arrests of princes, ministers and the billionaire tycoon Prince Alwaleed bin Talal have shocked Saudis unused to sudden change. The crown prince is largely popular, especially amongst young Saudis, but many older, more conservative citizens think he is moving too far too fast. He has started an unwinnable war in Yemen while still fighting the extremists of so-called Islamic State. He has also backed a damaging boycott of Gulf neighbour Qatar. But his supporters hail his efforts to modernise Saudi Arabia and, after decades of rule by old men, they welcome a fresh vision from a man who could well be king for the next 50 years.
The bottom line: bow down…Obama was warned, frankly, about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Given his status as a center-left president, the public's burgeoning disapproval of free-trade agreements, and the fact that he criticized such agreements when President Bush made them, he really should have known that such treaties were not for him.
And yet he chose to plow ahead. As I noted last year, the omens were not good. After the failed promises of NAFTA, a job-destroying trade deficit that has grown despite a long series of free-trade agreements, and ever-more-aggressive foreign mercantilism, it really should have been obvious that America needed a new trade strategy.
Now, thanks to a leak, we get to see that the Trans-Pacific Partnership really is as bad as feared. The text of the treaty had been kept from the public during two years of closed-door negotiations, and now we know why: It does not reflect any of the changes that Obama promised as a candidate. It's more Bush-era same-old, same-old.
The proposed agreement would embrace Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam to start. Eventually, its advocates hope, it will include every nation on the Pacific rim, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, Mexico, Russia, and China.
Yes, you read that right. China. (Recently, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said that he "would love nothing more" than to have China join TPP.)
The TPP probably would not have survived serious scrutiny by the press, the public, or even the larger community of policymakers. That's why Kirk was on TV last month explaining that all the secrecy was necessary because public disclosure purportedly killed another major regional trade pact, the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
You can read the text of the leaked document here.
The initial appalled reaction of the indefatigable Lori Wallach of Global Trade Watch was this:
The outrageous stuff in this leaked text may well be why U.S. trade officials have been so extremely secretive about these past two years of TPP negotiations. Via closed-door negotiations, U.S. officials are rewriting swaths of U.S. law that have nothing to do with trade and in a move that will infuriate left and right alike have agreed to submit the U.S. government to the jurisdiction of foreign tribunals that can order unlimited payments of our tax dollars to foreign corporations that don't want to comply with the same laws our domestic firms do.
(The rest of Global Trade Watch's analysis can be found here.)
Secrecy in trade agreements has, of course, been standard procedure for a long time. When George H.W. Bush announced finalization of the NAFTA text in 1992, he trumpeted the "achievement," but was so afraid of public reaction to the details that he would not release the text until after he had left office.
American trade negotiators have even been known to withhold details of these treaties from other U.S. government departments whose laws they would overturn, and from our legislators. In May, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chairman of the Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs and Global Competitiveness -- the committee that supposedly has jurisdiction over the TPP -- filed legislation to obtain information for himself and his staff. This is the stuff of comedy.
Despite the Trans-Pacific Partnership being nominally a "trade" agreement, it contains provisions that interfere with areas well beyond the bounds of trade. To wit, it would (again, Lori Wallach):
• Limit how U.S. federal and state officials could regulate foreign firms operating within U.S. boundaries, with requirements to provide them greater rights than domestic firms.
• Extend the incentives for U.S. firms to offshore investment and jobs to lower-wage countries.
• Establish a two-track legal system that gives foreign firms new rights to skirt U.S. courts and laws, directly sue the U.S. government before foreign tribunals and
• Demand compensation for financial, health, environmental, land use and other laws they claim undermine their TPP privileges.
• Allow foreign firms to demand compensation for the costs of complying with U.S. financial or environmental regulations that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this all ultimately amounts to the idea that the profitability of investments must be the supreme priority of state policy -- overriding health, safety, human rights, labor law, fiscal policy, macroeconomic stability, industrial policy, national security, cultural autonomy, the environment, and everything else.
While there is no justification for going to the opposite extreme and allowing governments to ride roughshod over legitimate property rights, these agreements thus rigidly mandate market-based, property-first solutions to questions where societies must strike a reasonable balance between public and private interests.
We are signing away not just our democratic right to make our own laws, but also the integrity of our judicial system and its ability to function according to our Constitution and legal norms.
What would a reasonable "21st-century" trade agreement, the kind Obama promised us as a candidate, look like? Well, it would probably embody the following principles:
1. Balanced Trade: Trade agreements must contribute to a national goal of achieving a manageable balance of trade over time.
2. National Trade, Economic and Security Strategy: Trade agreements must strive to optimize value added supply chains within the U.S. -- from raw material to finished product -- pursuant to a national trade and economic strategy that creates jobs, wealth and sustained growth. The agreements must also ensure national security by recapturing production necessary to rebuild America's defense industrial base.
3. Reciprocity: Trade agreements must ensure that foreign country policies and practices as well as their tariff and non-tariff barriers provide fully reciprocal access for U.S. goods and services. The agreements must provide that no new barriers or subsidies outside the scope of the agreement nullify or impair the concessions bargained
4. State Owned Commercial Enterprises: Trade agreements must encourage the transformation of state-owned and state-controlled commercial enterprises (SOEs) to private sector enterprises. In the interim, trade agreements must ensure that SOEs do not distort the free and fair flow of trade -- throughout supply chains -- and investment between the countries.
5. Currency: Trade agreements must classify prolonged currency undervaluation as a per se violation of the agreement without the need to show injury or intent.
6. Rules of origin: Trade agreements must include rules of origin to maximize benefits for U.S. based supply chains and minimize free ridership by third parties. Further, all products must be labeled or marked as to country(s) of origin as a condition of entry.
7. Enforcement: Trade agreements must provide effective and timely enforcement mechanisms, including expedited adjudication and provisional remedies. Such provisional remedies must be permitted where the country deems that a clear breach has occurred which causes or threatens injury, and should be subject to review under the agreements' established dispute settlement mechanisms.
8. Border Adjustable Taxes: Trade agreements must neutralize the subsidy and tariff impact of the border adjustment of foreign consumption taxes.
9. Perishable and Cyclical Products: Trade agreements must include special safeguard mechanisms to address import surges in perishable and seasonal agricultural product markets, including livestock markets.
10. Food and Product Safety and Quality: Trade agreements must ensure import compliance with existing U.S. food and product safety and quality standards and must not inhibit changes to or improvements in U.S. standards. The standards must be effectively enforced at U.S. ports.
11. Domestic Procurement: Trade agreements must preserve the ability of federal, state and local governments to favor domestic producers in government, or government funded, procurement.
12. Temporary vs. Permanent Agreements: Trade agreements must be sunsetted, subject to renegotiation and renewal. Renewal must not occur if the balance of benefits cannot be restored.
13. Labor: Trade agreements must include enforceable labor provisions to ensure that lax labor standards and enforcement by contracting countries do not result in hidden subsidies to the detriment of U.S.-based workers and producers.Speaking to The Indian Express, Sharma said: “This is an award given by writers to writers. It has nothing to do with the government. It is their personal choice to return it… we accept it.”
As more writers returned their Sahitya Akademi awards on Monday to protest against the silence of the central government and the Akademi over the threat to free speech, Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma struck back, saying, “If they say they are unable to write, let them first stop writing. We will then see.”
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Speaking to The Indian Express, Sharma said: “This is an award given by writers to writers. It has nothing to do with the government. It is their personal choice to return it… we accept it.”
Meanwhile, the Akademi called an emergency meeting of its executive board on October 23 to discuss the situation.
Kashmiri writer Ghulam Nabi Khayal, noted Gujarati poet Anil Joshi, Kannada writer Rahamath Tarikere and five writers from Punjab — Surjit Patar, Chaman Lal, Baldev Singh Sadaknama, Jaswinder and Darshan Buttar — on Monday joined the list of writers who have decided to return their Akademi awards, taking the total number to 23.
[related-post]
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Besides, two Kannada writers, G N Ranganatha Rao and D N Srinath, returned Sahitya Akademi prizes for translation, while theatre artist Maya Krishna Rao returned her Sangeet Natak Akademi award.
Booker winner Salman Rushdie also expressed solidarity with the writers and tweeted: “I support # Nayantara Sahgal and many other writers protesting to the Sahitya Akademi. Alarming times for free expression in India.”
Questioning the ideologies and motives of these writers, Sharma said: “Who are they, which ideology do they belong to should also be considered. This issue is also important. There have been so many riots earlier. When did they last return their awards?”
He said: “They are protesting against (Kannada writer M M) Kalburgi’s murder. We are with them in this protest. But they should know that law and order is a state subject. If they have any complaint, they should send it to the chief minister, home minister. They have not done that.”
In Vadodara, Joshi said: “The atmosphere has become hateful. There is no breathing space and no freedom of expression for literary writers. It is like losing oxygen because we are writers who wish for free breathing space. I do not need an oxygen cylinder in the form of awards… The attack on writers is unfortunate and has taken away the freedom of expression.” Joshi received the Akademi award in 1990 for his collection of essays.
“What is happening in India pains me. To return an award is the only way to express my resentment… As a person, I want live in a country that is secular, not one where freedom of speech and many religious identities are facing threat from communal forces,” said Khayal, who got the Akademi award in 1975.
“This is a wave of protest to safeguard the freedom to express our opinions… How can writers remain silent in this atmosphere of injustice,” said Punjabi writer Patar.
But some writers advised caution, saying they “may be playing into the hands of the government”. “I respect their sentiment. But if this (returning of award) happens for too long, the goverment may take over the Akademi. If the institution is gone, we are lost. We will lose everything we were fighting for. We may be playing into the hands of the government,” said Akademi awardee and senior Hindi writer Mridula Garg.
While she agreed that the Akademi needed to be strengthened, she questioned the method. “We are against the government, not against the Akademi. The Akademi has always been silent on such issues. Did it speak when Pash was killed or Man Bahadur Singh was killed. We insult the jury by returning the award,” she said.
The 27-member executive board, representing writers from 24 languages of the country, is set to discuss the Akademi’s response at its emergency meeting on October 23. “I will bring the issue before the board. I will act as per its directions,” said Akademi president Vishwanath Prasad Tiwari.
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Meanwhile, Konkani writer N Shivdas, who had returned his Akademi award on Sunday, today told The Indian Express that some Konkani writers who had received the Akademi award “have come together”. “On Wednesday, at least 15 recipients are expected to meet in Goa and decide the future course of action,” he said.
— With ENS inputs from Srinagar, Vadodara, Chandigarh and Pune.Kylie Minogue has said she made more money from her first perfume deal than from her entire music career. Beyonce puts out a new perfume more regularly than she does records. And the ever-expanding empires of Jay-Z and P Diddy make them the 'founding fathers' of personal brand development in the music industry.
But music artists’ interest and desire to associate with big brands has taken a sideways leap in recent years. And Kanye West had a very valid point when he told the Cannes Festival of Creativity: “Empower the best content creators, or fuck off."
When I worked as Kanye’s creative director for his 2008 Glow in the Dark tour, he was already more forward thinking than his peers. So his recent comments come from a real place of experience. Rather than building a company to compete with established brands, he identified the value of hooking-in with brands like Gap and Apple because it’s smarter to be a part of an already successful company that you love.
Back then he was faced with the beginning of a new drive of well-targeted celebrity endorsement. I sat in many meetings with the expectation of a true collaboration, only to see that all brands wanted was his signature of approval on an existing piece of hardware. Similarly, it was an eye-opener for me to see the 'R' logo I designed for Rihanna later splashed over a campaign for River Island.
More recently the fortunes of collaborations such as Topshop with Kate Moss have fuelled the frenzy for what Kanye was dreaming of. But these truly collaborative partnerships don’t grow on trees. And this situation is exacerbated by a new sideways leap: that of meaninglessly awarding creative directorships to music artists. These tend to be empty gestures from brands who want to exploit a celebrity name and fanbase, rather than intelligently integrating an artist’s creativity. Almost as a matter of course, consumers will see this as yet another shallow marketing ploy.
Whatever your opinion of Kanye, there is no denying he has continually pushed the boundaries in his own field of music, and has not been afraid to fail in his attempt to make a mark in fashion, film and now art. The difference between him and many of his peers is that he is overtly opinionated, but also willing to study. In fact, he went back to school before starting his fashion line. His argument is simple: an artist’s demographic may well fit the brand, but is the artist a true “tastemaker”? Do they deserve to be put in a situation of influence? Are they there because they have great ideas to share? Or are they there just for the money?
We know celebrity sells, but also that consumers can sense poor dilution very quickly. The end result can be embarrassing for both parties. An ailing brand like BlackBerry can also find it hard to attract a high-profile, right-fit endorsement when it doesn’t have its own forward vision. The thinking does not change. These so-called creative directorships come with their assigned 'ghost writers' who are let loose with endless toys, but no real understanding of the brand’s needs, and nothing to bring to the table except their paying-in book.
As an artist’s creative director, it is always baffling to have discussions with a top brand about my artist as 'their' creative director. I’m employed by an artist as their creative director to come-up with ideas because they may not have many themselves. This throws into question the validity of using such an artist as a brand creative director.
Brands entice musicians through the artist’s desire to be a 'quadruple threat' – singer, dancer, actor, and now creative. Thanks to the trailblazing success of Jay-Z and P Diddy, it’s become almost mandatory. And the results are mostly more tedious than creatively exciting. So regardless of whether you believe Kanye is a true tastemaker, his much-quoted Cannes soundbite is creatively sound.
Simon Henwood has worked as a creative director for Kanye West, Rihanna and Alicia Keys. He is also a director for creative content studio Squire and the author of ‘Working with First Class Superstar Artists’ (the contract term used in legal agreements).MONTREAL – A graduation ceremony for a private Muslim school was cancelled Saturday due to the radical views of two guest speakers, the mayor said.
The Academy of North American Sharia had planned to have Salah Alsawy and Omar Shahin speak at the ceremony, which was to be held in the Montreal suburb of Outremont.
"As soon as we received this information, we felt it was essential to cancel the booking," said Outremont Mayor Marie Cinq-Mars in a statement.
Shahin has garnered headlines for declarations that Muslims need to place priority on sharia law over western law.
Alsawy is the secretary general of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America, an organization that has voiced support for female circumcision.
In a tweet, Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre said that the decision to cancel the event was reached due to a report on Alsawy and Shahin on QMI’s sister TV station LCN.
The application to use the community centre had mentioned it was for a graduation ceremony but "there was nothing there that would alarm the area," said Outremont communications director Sylvain Leclerc.
The request had not mentioned the academy’s name.
"The word sharia would have set off bells," said Leclerc."Electronic Arts has confirmed that Need for Speed: Rivals, its upcoming racing game, will run at a 1080p (1920x1080) resolution on both the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One next-gen consoles, and at a locked 30fps framerate.
Need for Speed: Rivals uses the new Frostbite 3 engine to produce some remarkable visuals across many different platforms, ranging from PC to current-gen consoles like PS3 or Xbox 360, to next-gen ones like the PS4 and Xbox One.
In a special post on the PS blog, EA Community Manager Jessica Damerst confirmed that the new racing game would run at a 1080p full HD resolution and with a locked framerate of 30fps on both the PS4 and Xbox One.
She didn't say whether that resolution was a native one or it was upscaled from lower ones like 900p (1600x900) or 720p (1280x720), meaning a technical analysis is needed to determine just what the true resolution will be.Exploding head syndrome (EHS) is a condition in which a person experiences unreal noises that are loud and of short duration when falling asleep or waking up.[2][4] The noise may be frightening, typically occurs only occasionally, and is not a serious health concern.[2] A flash of light may also occur.[5] Pain is typically absent.[2]
The cause is unknown.[3] Potential explanations include ear problems, temporal lobe seizure, nerve dysfunction, or specific genetic changes.[2] Potential risk factors include psychological stress.[2] It is classified as a sleep disorder or headache disorder.[2][5] People often go undiagnosed.[5]
There is no high quality evidence to support treatment.[2] Reassurance may be sufficient.[2] Clomipramine and calcium channel blockers have been tried.[2] While the frequency of the condition is not well studied, some have estimated that it occurs in about 10% of people.[2] Females are reportedly more commonly affected.[5] The condition was initially described at least as early as 1876.[2] The current name came into use in 1988.[5]
Classification [ edit ]
Exploding head syndrome is classified as a parasomnia and a sleep-related dissociative disorder by the 2005 International Classification of Sleep Disorders and is an unusual type of auditory hallucination in that it occurs in people who are not fully awake.[6]
Signs and symptoms [ edit ]
Individuals with exploding head syndrome hear or experience loud imagined noises as they are falling asleep or waking up, have a strong, often frightened emotional reaction to the sound, and do not report significant pain; around 10% of people also experience visual disturbances like perceiving visual static, lightning, or flashes of light. Some people may also experience heat, strange feelings in their torso, or a feeling of electrical tinglings that ascends to the head before the auditory hallucinations occur.[2] With the heightened arousal, people experience distress, confusion, myoclonic jerks, tachycardia, sweating, and the sensation that feels as if they have stopped breathing and have to make a deliberate effort to breathe again.[4][7][8][9]
The pattern of the auditory hallucinations is variable. Some people report having a total of two or four attacks followed by a prolonged or total remission, having attacks over the course of a few weeks or months before the attacks spontaneously disappear, or the attacks may even recur irregularly every few days, weeks, or months for much of a lifetime.[2]
Some individuals mistakenly believe that EHS episodes are not natural events, but are the effects of directed energy weapons which create an auditory effect.[10] Thus, EHS has been worked into conspiracy theories, but there is no scientific evidence that EHS has non-natural origins.
Causes [ edit ]
The cause of EHS is unknown.[3] A number of hypotheses have been put forth with the most common being dysfunction of the reticular formation in the brainstem responsible for transition between waking and sleeping.[2]
Other theories into causes of EHS include:
Treatment [ edit ]
As of 2018, no clinical trials had been conducted to determine what treatments are safe and effective; a few case reports had been published describing treatment of small numbers of people (two to twelve per report) with clomipramine, flunarizine, nifedipine, topiramate, carbamazepine.[2] Studies suggest that education and reassurance can reduce the frequency of EHS episodes.[4] There is some evidence that individuals with EHS rarely report episodes to medical professionals.[9]
Epidemiology [ edit ]
There have not been sufficient studies to make conclusive statements about how common or who is most often affected.[2] One study found that 14% of a sample of undergrads reported at least one episode over the course of their lives, with higher rates in those who also have sleep paralysis.[11]
History [ edit ]
Case reports of EHS have been published since at least 1876, which Silas Weir Mitchell described as "sensory discharges" in a patient.[11] However, it has been suggested that the earliest written account of EHS was described in the biography of the French philosopher René Descartes in 1691.[12] The phrase "snapping of the brain" was coined in 1920 by the British physician and psychiatrist Robert Armstrong-Jones.[11] A detailed description of the syndrome and the name "exploding head syndrome" was given by British neurologist John M. S. Pearce in 1989.[13] More recently, Peter Goadsby and Brian Sharpless have proposed renaming EHS "episodic cranial sensory shock"[1] as it describes the symptoms more accurately (including the non-auditory elements) and better attributes to Mitchell.
References [ edit ]Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Big Urban Room of the Boston Central Library, and the lobby of the Vagelos Education Center. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, Bruce T. Martin, and Iwan Baan/Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
It’s the end of 2016, and I’m gaping at photos of the gargantuan $1.1 billion Spaghetti Junction that has just been completed east of downtown Louisville, Kentucky. This tangle of swooping lanes has a certain undeniable grandeur, but it also represents the worst in American building, the ceaseless, untroubled flow of money into cheap roads. How typical that a highway interchange the size of an Italian hill town, a scar on the downtown waterfront of an American city, is the awe-inspiring project of the day. It could be anywhere, because it’s everywhere.
Consider the following buildings a kind of collective antidote. Each one is an original work of architecture, newly constructed or newly |
of the series by pointing out that any explosion capable of knocking the Moon out of its orbit would actually blow it apart, and even if it did leave orbit it would take thousands of years to reach the nearest star. He did, however, praise the programme for the accuracy of the representation of movement in the low gravity environment of the Moon, and for its realistic production design (Asimov's responses were based on the pilot episode only). Subsequent episodes (such as "The Black Sun", third in production order, and "Another Time, Another Place", sixth in production order) suggest the Moon reaches the stars by passing through wormholes and hyperspatial tunnels, a plot point made more overt in second-season episodes, notably "The Taybor" and "Space Warp".[18] This issue is left somewhat enigmatic in the first season as episodes involving other planets invariably begin with the Moon having already reached a planet and in the first few episodes of this kind, such as "Matter of Life and Death" and "Missing Link", the episodes actually begin with the Alphans on their way back from a planet, an initial Eagle flight having taken place before the episode even begins.
Gerry and Sylvia Anderson were surprised and disappointed that the public (and critics) never granted them the suspension of disbelief given to other science-fiction programmes.[19] The characters seem aware of the apparent implausibility of their situation. In "Black Sun", Victor Bergman asserts the chances of their surviving the explosion which knocked them from orbit are "just about infinite." In "Matter of Life and Death", Koenig remarks "many things have happened since we broke away from our own solar system, unexplainable things." How they survived and are able to travel the Universe seems to be a central mystery to which the Alphans, and the audience, have no concrete answers.
In speaking about the show in 2010, Bain reflected: "We had some very good science fiction people as advisors who knew what they were talking about. For instance, they knew that sound up there wouldn't travel, and it would just be quiet up there. But then we wouldn't have a series, so we couldn't do that. There were various considerations that had to be made, but they were based on what is, or what was, known at the time. For all I know now it's out of date. I don't really know." [20]
She added that some of the technology on Space: 1999 has come to pass: "We made up a scanning device for Dr Russell. Someone would simply be lying on the floor half dead, and I would [scan them] with this funny little thing that was a prop. I could read all his vital signs. They can pretty much do that [with a medical device] nowadays. There were times that we were playing with props that didn't read anything — I just had a bunch of dialogue to say after. We had the Commlock. All of those things were on the verge of happening anyway. Now we're way past it. When we made it, 1999 seemed so far away." [20]
Cancellation and revival [ edit ]
Following the completion of the first series, the production team prepared for a second series to commence production in the autumn of 1975. Gerry Anderson had staff writer Johnny Byrne prepare a critical analysis of the first twenty-four episodes, assessing their strengths and weaknesses in order to mount a new and improved second year.[7] Byrne then commenced writing scripts in an improved first-series format: "The Biological Soul", "The Face of Eden", and "Children of the Gods". He engaged British writer Donald James to develop his first-series format story "The Exiles".
The largest stumbling block for the staff had been having all material vetted by ITC's New York office. ITC's compromise was to hire a high-profile American staff writer-producer. At this time, Sylvia Anderson left her role as producer when she and Gerry Anderson formally separated (and subsequently divorced). Fred Freiberger, whom Gerry Anderson had considered for the writing position, was then brought on board to help guide the series as a producer and acted as show-runner. Freiberger had produced the third and final season of Star Trek in 1968–1969 and eight episodes of the first season of The Wild Wild West (including one in which Martin Landau guest-starred) before being dismissed. Immediately after Space: 1999 he would go on to produce what would be the final season of The Six Million Dollar Man. His writing credits included Slattery's People, The Iron Horse, All in the Family, Petrocelli, and Starsky and Hutch. Though Anderson and Grade were satisfied with this choice, Abe Mandell had concerns about why he was unemployed and available at the time.[6]
Then ITC Entertainment President Sir Lew Grade abruptly cancelled the series' production in late 1975, when ratings in the United States had dropped during the later autumn months of the year. Grade had already been disappointed by the lack of an American network broadcast sale. Gerry Anderson and Fred Freiberger rallied and pitched the idea of a new series with the addition of an alien character to Moonbase Alpha, who would shake up the dynamic of interaction on the Moonbase and regain viewer interest in the United States. On the strength of Anderson and Freiberger's proposal of adding an alien character from the planet Psychon named Maya, Mandell approved a renewal of the series for a second year.
In addition to the alien Maya character, to be played by Catherine Schell, numerous other changes were made for what was branded Year Two. The most visible change was the absence of Professor Bergman (Barry Morse). Morse's departure was due to a salary dispute, but he later claimed that he was glad to leave, and he had told Anderson: "I would rather play with grown-ups for a while." [21] With Morse gone, the role of the boffin on Alpha was filled completely by Maya, whose people's science was far in advance of mankind's. Also, her character was conceived to be able to provide "outside observation of human behaviour" as had been provided by the character of Mr. Spock on Star Trek. Maya shared Spock's logical approach to problem-solving and advanced intelligence, but differed in that she was a charming, fully emotional person. Most importantly, however, her Psychon abilities as a metamorph with the power of "molecular transformation" allowed her to convert herself into any living thing for an hour at a time, were designed to add a certain "wow" factor to the newly revamped series. Maya had an impish sense of humour. When love-interest Tony Verdeschi offered her some of his home-brewed beer, Maya tried it, then turned herself into Mister Hyde. Schell had previously guest-starred as the Servant of the Guardian in the Year One episode "Guardian of Piri".
In addition to the cosmetic changes, the characters were "warmed up." Koenig and Russell went from a barely noticeable courtship to a physically passionate, full-fledged romance, in which the devotion ran so deep that they offered to die for each other ("Brian the Brain"). In addition to Bergman, Year One supporting characters Paul Morrow (Prentis Hancock), David Kano (Clifton Jones) and Tanya Alexander (Suzanne Roquette) were also removed from the cast (Paul and Tanya's disappearance is explained in the Powys Media book The Forsaken by John Kenneth Muir). Dr Bob Mathias (Anton Phillips) was present in the first two Year Two episodes, was mentioned in the third episode, and then also disappeared without a trace. His character was replaced by several recurring physicians. Alan Carter (Nick Tate) was to have been written out of the series, but he had become so popular with fans that he remained. Sandra Benes (Zienia Merton) remained with the series in an on-again off-again association, but the character only appeared in a fraction of the episodes, albeit more prominently in some than in many of those of the first series.
Security Chief Tony Verdeschi also joined as a new character, played by Tony Anholt. Verdeschi, who assumed the base's second-in-command role, neither appeared, nor was ever mentioned, in Year One. However, Moonbase Alpha personnel treated Verdeschi as if he had been in their midst since "Breakaway". His character was designed to serve primarily as a secondary male action hero, and became a romantic interest for Maya.
No on-screen explanations were offered for the cast changes. One scene in "The Metamorph" mentioning Bergman's death was scripted and filmed, but cut from the final edit. The Moonbase Alpha Technical Manual produced by Starlog magazine picks up this explanation, stating Bergman died due to a faulty spacesuit per the scripted scene. Likewise, it was mentioned in this publication that Morrow and Kano had died in an Eagle crash between seasons, and explained that Dr Mathias, supposedly Alpha's psychiatrist (although he seems to be more Russell's assistant) was on sabbatical doing research. Fred Freiberger felt that these characters were one-dimensional and had no fan support; he told Nick Tate that the audience would not remember them and that, as far as he was concerned, they were just "somewhere else" on Alpha, lost in the crowd of three hundred other people.[6] Freiberger failed to appreciate the value of the supporting characters to the show and its fans.
Other changes included the main titles and theme music. Year One's opening montage of events from "Breakaway" and the episode about to unfold was dropped in favour of a special-effects sequence depicting the Moon being blown out of orbit into space. With Morse gone, Schell was featured in his place as a regular alongside Landau and Bain, and all three were depicted in action-oriented images as opposed to the mannequin-like stances Landau and Bain had assumed in the Year One main titles. New series composer Derek Wadsworth's new theme dropped Barry Gray's alternation between stately, orchestral passages and funky rhythmic ones in favour of a more consistently contemporary piece.
Rudi Gernreich's minimalist costume was considerably modified from the original unisex design to include an optional skirt and leather boots for women and much more detail work on the tunic portion, including turtleneck collars, coloured stitching, patches and photo ID badges. In addition, colourful jackets (generally red, blue or green) became part of most characters' ensembles.
The expansive "Main Mission" set, with its balcony and windows revealing the lunar surface, was replaced by a more compact "Command Center" (they used the American spelling on the set), supposedly deep underground (again, this change was explained in the Year Two Writers' Bible and Technical Manual as necessary for security, but never explained onscreen). Medical Centre, Generator Section, Life Support and the Alphans' living quarters became smaller, while the interior of the Eagle command module was updated with additional buttons, flashing lights and television monitors, while the Eagle also lost a section of corridor (the galley/storage area) between the passenger module and the cockpit. (This was to accommodate its placement on Pinewood Soundstage "L", with the other standing Alpha sets; the Eagle was permanently affixed to the boarding tube/travel tube set and jammed between the travel-tube reception area and the Medical Centre.)[9]
The sombre mood created in Year One by the effective use of light and shadow in the filming of Moonbase Alpha interiors was abandoned in favour of a generally brighter cinematography, and even the lettering used in signage and costuming—most noticeable on spacesuits and Eagle Transporter doors—changed to a simpler, less futuristic style.
Production Designer Keith Wilson stated in an interview in Destination: Moonbase Alpha that he was always being ordered by Producer Fred Freiberger to make sets smaller, taking away the expansive (and expensive) look of the first series' interiors. Freiberger was very budget-conscious and, despite press releases to the contrary, the production team was working with less money this series.[6][7][22] If there had been a budget increase, the'stagflation' economy of the seventies would have cancelled it out. When interviewed, many of the actors state they were asked to accept less money, including Landau and Bain (who were the only ones with enough clout to be able to refuse).
Freiberger emphasised action-adventure in Year Two stories to the exclusion of metaphysical themes explored in Year One. Of Year One, he commented, "They were doing the show as an English show, where there was no story, with the people standing around and talking. In the first show I did, I stressed action as well as character development, along with strong story content, to prove that 1999 could stand up to the American concept of what an action-adventure show should be."[23] Since Year One was quite serious in tone, one of Freiberger's ways to accomplish this objective was to inject humour into Year Two stories whenever possible, but much of it seemed to the more vocal fans to be forced, especially at the conclusion of an episode, where the Alphans were seen as jovial and light-hearted despite whatever violent or tragic events might have previously befallen them. Freiberger had appropriated this approach from Star Trek; the endings of many of that show's episodes featured an upbeat discussion among the cast of the lessons learned during the episode and closing on a joke; this approach was copied for Space: 1999 with Koenig, Verdeschi, Russell, Carter and Maya enjoying a laugh in the Command Center. Given Landau's intensity and the brooding nature of the Koenig character, the approach did not fit the series.
Members of the Space: 1999 cast were disenchanted with the scripts. Martin Landau: "They changed it because a bunch of American minds got into the act and they decided to do many things they felt were commercial. Fred Freiberger helped in some respects, but, overall, I don't think he helped the show, I think he brought a much more ordinary, mundane approach to the series."[24] One particular episode ('All That Glisters', which dealt with the threat of an intelligent rock) was of such allegedly deficient quality that it sparked a confrontation between Freiberger and the cast. Landau disliked the story so strongly that he wrote the following notes on his copy of the script: "All the credibility we're building up is totally forsaken in this script."; "...Story is told poorly."; and "The character of Koenig takes a terrible beating in this script — We're all schmucks." Anholt revealed that, "the more the cast complained about a script's flaws, the more intractable and unyielding Freiberger became." Dissatisfaction on Landau's part about scripts was not new to Year Two, though. Sylvia Anderson remembers that he often voiced criticisms of scripts during production of the first series.
Series Two [ edit ]
With the last-minute renewal from Grade, the production team hit the ground running. Byrne's script "The Biological Soul", involving the Alphans' encounter with the unstable Mentor of the planet Psychon and his biological computer Psyche, which drew sustenance from the mental energy of intelligent beings, was re-written to include the new character Maya and the rest of the format changes. Production began on 26 January 1976 and was scheduled to last a mere ten months due to the already-late renewal order.
To fulfil the scheduling requirement, Freiberger came up with the "double-up script" solution. During "double-up" instalments, two first-unit production teams would film two episodes simultaneously. Landau and some of the supporting cast would be given expanded roles and would film an episode on location or on sets constructed for that story in Pinewood's Soundstage "M", while Bain and the remaining supporting cast (also in expanded roles) would film their episode in the standing Alpha sets on Soundstage "L". Landau and Bain would then be given minor roles in the opposing episodes. This cost- and time-saving measure was used to complete eight stories as four pairs: "The Rules of Luton" and "The Mark of Archanon"; "The AB Chrysalis" and "Catacombs of the Moon"; "A Matter of Balance" and "Space Warp"; "Devil's Planet" and "Dorzak". A ninth episode, "The Beta Cloud", was intentionally scripted with only one day's worth of work for Landau and Bain to allow their planned holiday to the French Riviera not to delay the series' production; the four supporting cast members (Schell, Anholt, Tate and Merton) were the recipients of much greater than usual exposure.
Relations between new producer Freiberger and the Year One veterans were strained. Landau complained about stories he felt were light-weight or absurd when compared to the previous year's efforts. He wrote on the cover of a script: "I'm not going out on a limb for this show because I'm not in accord with what you're [Freiberger] doing as a result... etc. I don't think I even want to do the promos—I don't want to push the show any more as I have in the past. It's not my idea of what the show should be. It's embarrassing to me if I am not the star of it and in the way I feel it should be. This year should be more important to it, not less important to it... I might as well work less hard in all of them."[25] Johnny Byrne said that Freiberger was a good man and good producer, but not good for Space: 1999. He had gotten them a second year after the cancellation, but the changes he made did not benefit the programme.[25]
Principal photography came to an end on 23 December 1976 with "The Dorcons". An article regarding a third series was printed in the trade papers: "Now entrenched in its successful second season boom, ITC is looking forward to a third season with more fantastic events and additions, although mum's the word at the studio. They will only say that Maya and Miss Schell will be kept in and that the budget may be raised again, but that's all until final preparations and an official announcement are made."[6]
Undeveloped Year Three [ edit ]
The producers and studio intended to continue the show with a third season. This was to be shorter than the previous two, with 13 episodes, for budget reasons. Maya was considered to be a successful character, and the producers began grooming her for a spinoff show that would run concurrently with the third series of Space: 1999. Had this project gone ahead, Maya would have been absent from Space: 1999. The "Maya" series was also intended to run for 13 episodes a year.[6]
As filming on Year Two came to its conclusion, it became apparent that there would be no third season, and the series ended with the episode "The Dorcons".
Broadcast [ edit ]
UK [ edit ]
The series premiered in September 1975, on the ITV network but was not broadcast nationally (this remained the case until a repeat airing on BBC2 in 1998). Most ITV regions (including Yorkshire, Grampian, Ulster, Scottish, Border, ATV, and Tyne Tees) premiered the series on Thursday, 4 September 1975 in a 7.00pm slot.[26] The London and Anglia regions screened the first episode two days later on Saturday, 6 September at 5.50pm.[27] The Granada region began showing the series on Friday, 26 September 1975, initially at 7.35pm before moving to 6.35pm a few weeks later.[28] The HTV region did not begin showing the series until October 1975, again in an early Friday evening slot. However, within a few weeks, various stations had moved the series elsewhere in their schedules.
The second series premiered on London Weekend Television (LWT) in a non-prime-time slot on Saturday 4 September 1976 at 11.30am, with ATV following on just a few hours later at 5.40pm. Granada, Westward and Ulster started to screen the series in early 1977, Grampian, and Tyne Tees did not screen the series until later in the year. STV started to screen the series on 9 April 1978 on Sunday afternoons. HTV did not pick the series up until 1984 and then only showed nineteen out of the twenty-four episodes from Year Two (the last episodes were not screened in Wales until the series was repeated in the 1990s). Southern Television was the other ITV region known not to have broadcast series two. Even its successor broadcaster, Television South, failed to screen any series two episodes when Space: 1999 was reshown in various other ITV regions between 1982 and 1985.
US [ edit ]
In the United States, efforts to sell the series to one of the three networks for the 1974–75 or 1975–76 television seasons failed. The networks were uninterested in a project over which they had no creative control, being presented with the accomplished fact of twenty-four completed episodes. Abe Mandell of ITC had secured a 'handshake' agreement with a network executive in 1974, but after the man's termination, all his projects were abandoned.[6] Undaunted, Mandell created what he called his own Space: 1999 Network[7] and sold the completed program into first-run syndication directly to local stations. Much of the publicity mentioned the then-staggering three million pound budget: as a part of the American promotion effort, a glossy magazine-sized brochure was produced, touting Space: 1999 as the Six-and-a-Half Million Dollar Series (an allusion to the then-popular American programme The Six Million Dollar Man) featuring American stars, American writers and American directors.[29]
In the months leading to the beginning of the fall (autumn) 1975 television season Landau and Bain participated in special preview screenings in select cities.[3] Landau is said to have personally contacted editors of the widely read and influential TV Guide magazine in some markets to secure coverage of Space: 1999 in its pages upon learning of ITC's somewhat poor promotional efforts.
While most of the U.S. stations that aired Space: 1999 were independent (such as powerful Chicago station WGN-TV, Louisville station WDRB-TV, Los Angeles station KHJ-TV, and New York City's WPIX-TV), a handful were affiliated with the major networks (such as Charlotte, North Carolina's WSOC-TV, at the time a strong NBC affiliate, and Fresno's KFSN-TV, at the time a CBS affiliate) and sometimes pre-empted regular network programming to show episodes of the series. Most U.S. stations broadcast episodes in the weekday evening hour just before prime time or on weekends.
In August 2018, Comet announced it would be airing both seasons of the original series beginning in September.[30]
Canada [ edit ]
In Canada, CBC Television was the broadcaster of Space: 1999 from 1975 into the 1980s. The first season in 1975–76 was shown regionally on some CBC owned-and-operated stations, the airtime varying. With the start of the second season in September 1976, CBC Television upgraded Space: 1999 to full-network status, airing it Saturdays on all CBC owned-and-operated stations, with affiliated, privately owned stations also offering the show on Saturdays. Most of the country saw Space: 1999 at 5 p.m. on Saturdays, a notable exception being the Atlantic Provinces in which it was broadcast at 6 or 6:30 p.m. or – as was the case in the summers – sometime earlier in the afternoon to accommodate live sports coverage, the airing of which crossed into or totally over the usual Space: 1999 airtime. After the 1976–77 broadcast year (in which second-season episodes were run and rerun), the show's ratings were sufficiently high for CBC Television to give the first season a full-network airing – and with further repeats – from 1977 to 1978. The French-language CBC Television, Radio-Canada, showed Cosmos: 1999 several times (both seasons) between 1975 and 1980, first on Mondays (1975–1976), then on Saturdays (1976–1977), then on Mondays (1979), and finally on Wednesdays (1979–1980).
The series fared admirably on CBC Television in Canada, airing in English in a family viewing period, late Saturday afternoons before hockey broadcasts, with a mostly un-disrupted run and rerun of all 24 episodes from September 1976 through September 1977. The French version was also broadcast, in early evening on Saturdays. Ratings were sufficient for a full additional year's transmission of Year One in the English CBC Saturday programming slot in 1977 and 1978. Episodes of both Year One and Year Two were repeated regionally in Canada in English and French through the early-to-mid-1980s. YTV Canada broadcast both seasons with reportedly good ratings from 1990 to 1992, in a late Saturday afternoon airtime closely matching that of the CBC English network in the 1970s.
The full-network English CBC airing began with the series opener, "Breakaway", on 11 September 1976, then "The Metamorph", the Year Two opener, on 18 September. "The Exiles", "Journey to Where", "The Taybor", and "New Adam, New Eve" followed respectively in the subsequent weeks. Next were "The Mark of Archanon", "Brian the Brain", "The Rules of Luton", "The AB Chrysalis", "Catacombs of the Moon", and "Seed of Destruction". "Seed of Destruction" aired on 27 November, and then with December there came a month of repeats. And after a pre-emption for New Year's Day sports, new episodes resumed airing on 8 January 1977 with "A Matter of Balance", followed by "The Beta Cloud", "One Moment of Humanity", "The Lambda Factor", "All That Glisters", and "The Seance Spectre". The two-part episode, "The Bringers of Wonder", was shown on 19 and 26 February. And then "Dorzak", "The Immunity Syndrome", "Devil's Planet", and "The Dorcons" followed in March. "Space Warp" would not be shown until 21 May, after many weeks of repeats. By 10 September 1977, except for "The Exiles", all of the second-season episodes had been repeated. And thereafter, a 1977–1978 run of first-season episodes began with "War Games" on 17 September.
Finland [ edit ]
In Finland the first season was originally aired by the commercial MTV (Mainostelevisio) channel in 1976, but it was withdrawn after couple of episodes on demand of the national programme board as the show was considered too brutal and horrifying. The same thing happened when MTV tried to air the second season in 1978.
The complete show wasn't seen in Finland until 1996–1997 when a small local channel, TV-Tampere, aired it. Since then it aired on TVTV! in 2000 and 2001, and later on MTV3 Scifi in 2008.
Elsewhere [ edit ]
It was shown in Italy as Spazio 1999, Argentina, Uruguay, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, francophone Canada, and France as Cosmos: 1999, Denmark as Månebase Alpha, Brazil and Portugal as Espaço: 1999, Germany as Mondbasis Alpha 1, Sweden as Månbas Alpha, Poland as Kosmos 1999 (1977–1979), Finland as Avaruusasema Alfa, Greece as Διάστημα 1999, Hungary as Alfa Holdbázis, Spain, Chile, Venezuela, and Colombia as Espacio: 1999, Mexico as Odisea 1999, Iran as 1999 سال, Turkey as Uzay 1999 and South Africa as Alpha 1999 (1976, dubbed into Afrikaans). The series was also broadcast in Belgium, New Zealand and Australia.
Fan and critic responses to the new series varied. Some missed the mystical plotlines, feature-film ambiance and the "British-ness" of the first series. Others said they enjoyed the new characters, down-to-earth characterisations and action. Comparisons with Star Trek were used by both camps to show how the series had been either saved or destroyed by the format change. Reviewing the show as a whole, science fiction historian John Clute described Space: 1999 as "visually splendid" but criticised what he regarded as the show's "mediocre acting" and "rotten scripts".[31]
Message From Moonbase Alpha and planned revivals [ edit ]
Filmed on 29 August 1999, Message From Moonbase Alpha is a fan-produced mini-episode made with the co-operation and involvement of Space: 1999 script editor Johnny Byrne, who penned the script. Filmed inside a private house on a remarkable working replica of a small section of the Main Mission set and utilising the original prop of Koenig's Command Centre desk and Sandra Benes's original Year Two Alpha uniform, the short film was first shown at the Space: 1999 Breakaway Convention[32] in Los Angeles, California on 13 September 1999—the day the events in episode 1 of the series were supposed to take place. With the permission of (then) copyright owners Carlton Media International, the film included brief clips from seven episodes to illustrate the deserted Moonbase Alpha and the Alphans' exodus to planet Terra Alpha. Previously unused footage shot for the Year Two title sequence and The Last Enemy was used to create a sequence showing the Moon being affected by a gravitational disturbance and thrown into an unknown solar system. Short excerpts from 12 other episodes appeared in a montage as Sandra Benes recalls her life on Alpha.
The seven-minute film features Zienia Merton reprising her role as Sandra Benes delivering a final message to Earth as the only crew member left on Moonbase Alpha while a massive exodus to a habitable planet, Terra Alpha, takes place with the rest of the crew. The evacuation was also necessitated by the degradation and decay of Alpha's life support systems. This basically gave the series the conclusion that it never had in its initial run. Taking place twenty five years after the events of "Breakaway", Commander Koenig and Maya are mentioned during Sandra's message. It concludes with the termination of the message as Sandra closes down Alpha's operational systems and transmits the message- which turns out to be the mysterious signal received shortly before the events of "Breakaway".
Modified versions of Message From Moonbase Alpha are available on the Space: 1999 Bonus Disk in the U.S. and Canada, and on a DVD bonus disc in France and in Italy. The original version appears as a bonus feature on the Space: 1999/UFO – The Documentaries DVD produced by Fanderson.
Around the same time 'Message From Moonbase Alpha' was being filmed, Johnny Byrne and Christopher Penfold attempted to revive the franchise as a movie series, similar to the way Star Trek had been revived cinematically in the late 1970s. The first film would have picked up the story several years after the series ended, and would have featured a heavily redesigned Moonbase Alpha. Ultimately the project failed, and nothing came of it.[33]
In February 2012, ITV Studios America and HDFILMS officially announced their intention to produce a reimagining of Space: 1999, to be titled Space: 2099, however no serious effort was made to develop the series any further beyond the concept stage.[34]
Home video releases [ edit ]
UK [ edit ]
The series was released on home video in the 1990s, with each cassette (or "volume") featuring two episodes. In 2001, it was released on DVD in the UK by Carlton Media, both in single disc volumes (each volume contained four episodes) and also as two complete season boxed sets (titled as "Year One" and "Year Two") comprising six discs each. Each DVD also contained various extra features, including a variety of archive production material, memorabilia, and interviews with the cast and crew from the time the series was being made.
In 2005, Network DVD re-issued Year One in the UK as a Special Edition seven-disc box set. For this release, to coincide with the series' 30th Anniversary, each episode was digitally restored by creating new 35 mm film elements (a new interpositive made from the original negative which is then used to make further copies). High Definition digital transfers were then made from the interpositives using a state-of-the-art Philips Spirit DataCine. This vastly improved the picture quality in comparison to the previous DVD releases, however the restoration process has actually made some of the space scenes (that involve special effects and model work) less realistic due to increased brightness and contrast. This box set also included two booklets and a new set of extra features that were not on the Carlton DVD releases, including featurettes on "Concept & Creation" and "Special Effects & Design" (edited from an earlier "Fanderson" documentary made in 1996), textless and alternative opening and closing title sequences, a two-part Clapperboard special on Gerry Anderson from 1975, and also a brand new 70-minute documentary entitled "These Episodes" in which Anderson, Christopher Penfold, Johnny Byrne, Zienia Merton and David Lane reflect on the making of key episodes from the first series.
Network DVD released Year One on Blu-ray in the UK on 1 November 2010, and simultaneously re-released their Special Edition DVD box set of Year One with new cover artwork at the same time.[35] The Blu-ray set includes all of the extras on the 2005 Network DVD release as well as some of the extras that were on the 2001 Carlton DVD release (including a Lyons Maid ice-lolly commercial, and an SFX segment from the British documentary series Horizon). It also includes several new extras including a "Memories of Space" featurette, a Sylvia Anderson interview (in which she frankly discusses the series and her thoughts about Landau and Bain), an expanded version of the "These Episodes" documentary from the DVD set, several PDF files containing scripts and annuals, an extensive set of photo galleries with hundreds of stills, and the first episode of Year Two, "The Metamorph", in digitally restored hi-definition.
Network DVD began a similar restoration process for Year Two in 2007, however progress was slow due to higher production costs in comparison to remastering Year One (the audio for Year One was already digitised prior to Network's restoration, but Year Two was not). In late 2014, Network finally announced that Year Two would be released in 2015. As part of this announcement, Network released a limited edition (of 1999 copies) of a special preview disc of the two-part story "The Bringers of Wonder" on 8 December 2014. This release also contains a restored version of the feature length Destination: Moonbase Alpha film.[36] The remastered Year Two was eventually released on Blu-ray and DVD in September 2015, to coincide with the series' 40th Anniversary.[37]Again containing a wealth of extra features, the sets include galleries, vintage interviews, a blooper, behind the scenes footage, original source audio recordings, scripts and annuals PDF files, a stock footage archive, a textless opening title sequence, trailers and promos, "music only" options for all episodes, a stop-motion fan film from 1979, and a specially re-edited/rescored version of the episode "Seed of Destruction" as if it were made for Year One.
United States [ edit ]
A&E Home Video (under license from Carlton International Media Limited) has released the entire series on DVD in Region 1. It was initially released in 8 sets with 6 episodes each in 2001 and 2002. On 24 September 2002, a 16-disc "Mega Set" box set featuring all 48 complete, uncut, original broadcast episodes of the series was released. On 31 July 2007, A&E released Space: 1999 – Complete Series, 30th Anniversary Edition. This is essentially the same as the 2002 "mega set" release (and does not use the 2005 hi-def remasters), but does includes a special bonus disc full of extra features.[38] Year One was released on Blu-ray in the U.S. on 2 November 2010 by A&E Home Entertainment, with new High-Definition restored transfers and a newly-remastered 5.1 DTS-HD MA surround sound re-mix.[39]
Other media [ edit ]
The series has been translated into other media. Originally, all the episodes had been adapted in novelisations, except, for some reason, "Earthbound" (though this may be because E.C. Tubb was working from a different script of "Breakaway" in which Commissioner Simmonds was killed when the Moon was torn out of Earth orbit) and "The Taybor" (from Year Two). The authors of these works wrote a number of original stories and have since written new stories and novels which were published after 1999. As well, the original authors participated in the revised versions of their original novels.
At the time of the series' original run, several comic book series were published and, in the US, a series of audio adaptations were recorded on record albums with the younger audience in mind. After 1999, many of these original comic book stories were revised and reprinted along with new stories. See the list above.
Mattel created a line of Space: 1999 toys to tie into the TV series, including the Eagle 1 Spaceship. Released in 1976, the Eagle 1 is over 2.5-feet long and a foot wide. The Eagle 1 is made mostly of molded plastic and has a number of parts and accessories.[40]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]
Clark, Mike; Cotter, Bill (November 1980). "An Interview With Fred Freiberger". Starlog (40): 58–61.
Hirsch, David (July 1986). "Martin Landau Space Age Hero". Starlog (108): 44–47.New York will require $1 million coverage for life-threatening brain injuries and other new health insurance for both professional boxers and its first group of licensed mixed martial artists under regulations slated to take effect in September.
The State Athletic Commission, which already regulates pro boxing, is carrying out the decision by the Legislature and Gov. Andrew Cuomo to legalize professional mixed martial arts and revamp oversight of combat sports generally. Regulation varies among states. New York's $1 million coverage appears to be the highest insurance minimum in the U.S.
The detailed plan, still subject |
onic composers all owed a debt to Mahler, whether they acknowledged him as a forerunner or not. Among the great symphonic composers who followed him were Sergei Prokofiev, Darius Milhaud, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Sibelius and Carl Nielsen. Perhaps the greatest was Dmitri Shostakovich, who was certainly Mahler’s most direct and worthiest musical descendant.
Shostakovich stood on Mahler’s shoulders not only with respect to form, but also in the spirit of his symphonies. Among Shostakovich’s 15 symphonies were a number that explicitly and directly portrayed epic struggles of the 20th century, including the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions and the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War. Shostakovich readily acknowledged Mahler as one of his chief influences.
Arnold Schoenberg
Mahler is also credited with influencing Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, the chief figures of the Second Viennese School, which originated the atonal style of composition and, somewhat later, serial, or twelve-tone music. All three of these composers, between 15 and 25 years Mahler’s junior, wrote youthful works that were somewhat close to the latter’s in style, but also possessed traits—non-tonal structures and increasingly pervasive dissonance—that indicated they were headed in a direction quite distinct from Mahler’s.
Mahler’s attitude toward Schoenberg and his music was far from antagonistic. He defended Schoenberg’s efforts at a performance that was interrupted by hecklers and in which the opposing sides nearly came to blows. Nevertheless, the assertion by Berg and others that Mahler, had he lived past 1911, would have embraced atonality or perhaps even serialism, must be regarded with a certain skepticism. It is at least equally likely that, like Richard Strauss, who lived until 1949, Mahler would have continued to write in a lyrical style that, while going beyond the tonality that characterized the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, held fast to the same basic harmonic moorings consolidated during the period of the Enlightenment.
The innovations of the musical avant-garde in the first decades of the 20th century had something of a dual character. There was much that was fresh and invigorating in the works not only of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, but also the impressionists Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel; the foremost members of the group known as “Les Six,” Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud; others who did not readily fit into a defined category, such as Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Prokofiev, Erik Satie and Villa-Lobos; and more experimental figures such as Charles Ives, Edgar Varèse and George Antheil. The mention of these names evokes the enormous flowering of artistic experimentation during this period. The avant-garde trends reflected the social ferment of the time and in many cases consciously associated themselves with the struggles against the war, autocracy and inequality.
Somewhat later, Schoenberg and others systematically and uncritically embraced atonality. The work of the post-Second World War avant-garde, in many cases turning away from any effort to write for a large audience, reflected, indirectly, the degree to which artists and intellectuals were thrown into despair by the horrors of the Holocaust, as well as the crimes of Stalinism. It must be said that Mahler, in an earlier period, while he certainly did not shy away from the discordant, the ugly or the tragic, interwove these elements with what he clearly believed to be the more fundamental beauty of the world and the possibilities for humanity.
There is a reason that Mahler’s music continues to find a broader audience than that of many of the more experimental generations that followed. It has less to do with the “uneducated” public, which allegedly does not possess the special acumen supposedly required for appreciating modern music, than with the problems of the academic music that has been composed in more recent decades.
Mahler’s music went from being broadly condemned or ignored during his lifetime, to a period when it was championed by a relatively small circle of composers and conductors, to a revival over the last half century that has not flagged to this day.
American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, whose life and career as both composer and conductor bear some comparison with that of his great predecessor, played a major role in this revival. Bernstein’s recordings of the complete Mahler symphonies were the first, and other conductors and major orchestras have followed. Mahler’s symphonies and song cycles have become staples of the repertoire.
Mahler’s music speaks in a fundamental way to the monumental and often tragic experiences through which humanity has passed in the course of the 20th century. Whether each listener, or even most listeners, is consciously aware of this connection or not, it undoubtedly exists. Mahler’s music shares with that of Shostakovich the ability to tap deep emotional responses bound up with major social and historical experiences.
The generation of listeners who rediscovered Mahler in the 1960s and 1970s were part of a period of renewed social struggles. Those who listen to Mahler today do so in a period which, in a political sense, more and more recalls the period in which Mahler himself composed. The unresolved questions of the 20th century—the dangers of war and dictatorship, the contradictions of an outmoded social order—are once again coming to the fore.
A new era of social upheaval will inject new life into the arts and pose new challenges to artists. The artist who wishes to rise to these challenges, and the worker, student and intellectual impelled to understand more profoundly the cultural framework in which they arise, or who simply wishes to experience deeply emotional and expressive music, would do well to listen to the works of Gustav Mahler.I adore gardening. I love the bliss of working for countless hours, without feeling even a bit tired as I focus on the task. Sure, when I return home, I will simply drop in the couch and feel super tired afterwards. That hasn’t bored me at all. Never.
The one thing that does, actually is the mess. All the dirt and mud I deal with while gardening is really messing up with my nerves. So, I decided I needed an apron. Nothing caght my attention in my quick online browsing and so I decided to match my wish with my other true passion – sewing.
I wanted to sew a gardening apron to cheer me up and keep my tools gandy. I’m not an avid sewist, mind you, so I needed something super simple. A quick search found me exactly what I was looking for, and with a stack of fun colored fabric I started my little project.
It was super easy and super fun to sew. There are just few simple straight seams, so if you are a novice or occasional seamstress like me, you would appreciate the simplicity. You can literally whip this thing up in a matter of an hour or so. All you need is a sewing machine, a fabric you love and a bit of enthusiasm.
I have a Brother CS6000i which is literally the best sewing machine for beginners you can find. I had enough of an old fun fabric handy from a previous project. And I was brimming with enthusiasm!
This makes an awesome gift for a friend too! If you know another gardener that would appreciate the apron, I can tell you this is a perfect gift. In the span of three days, I made three – one for me, one for mom, and one for my bestie. Both were absolutely THRILLED.
It is really simple, and you don’t really need a pattern if you an advanced sewist, but if you are like me, here is a quick video to get you started:
I made half apron, but you could make a full one if you prefer.
As for the fabric, I used 1 yard of cotton duck fabric for the apron body, and ½ yard coordinating fabric for the pocket piece. Then I pinned them together, drew a line with chalk where I wanted the pocket divisions. I sew along the marked lines, though all the layers of fabric and backstitched the beginning and the end to secure the seam.
Finally sew the tie. I fold the fabric in two, pinned the ends together and inserted the sewn apron body in the center of the tie. I finally made a long straight stitch going from the one end, through the middle section where I sew through all the layers of the apron body and the tie, and continued sewing the tie only on the other end.
Voila! The apron was ready, and of course I immediately went out to try it on!
It was super handy! Once again, if you can sew a couple of straight stitches, go make the apron. Here are the step by step instructions I followed. You will thank me later!
Happy gardening!S
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2XL red pink asphalt heather gray white General Sam $23.49In the wake of Rep. Joe Sestak's victory over Sen. Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, Republicans are working to spotlight Sestak's suggestion during a February radio interview that he had been offered a high-ranking administration job, possibly Secretary of the Navy, in exchange for dropping out of the race.
California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa has been pressing the White House to answer questions about the alleged job offer, which Issa says could be a violation of the law. He has called for a special prosecutor to investigate the matter, which the White House has sought to play down.
"It has been close to three months and the American public is still looking for a straight answer from the White House on whether a job offer was made to bait Joe Sestak out of the Pennsylvania Senate race and, if so, whether it still stands," Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele said in a statement today. "It is unacceptable for an administration that touts itself as the'most transparent' in history to continue to stonewall a significant and potentially devastating accusation of political corruption. And, until a thorough and public investigation has been conducted and the air is cleared, this matter will continue to cloud the President each time he steps foot in Pennsylvania to place the establishment mantle on Joe Sestak between now and November."
After President Obama called Sestak to congratulate him on his victory, Issa put out a release asking if "the reason why Congressman Joe Sestak refuses to name names is because the very people who tried to bribe him are now his benefactors."
"For months, Sestak has repeatedly said without equivocation that the White House illegally offered him a federal job in exchange for dropping out of the race," he said. "Was Joe Sestak embellishing what really happened or does he have first-hand knowledge of the White House breaking the law? If what he said is the truth, Joe Sestak has a moral imperative to come forward and expose who within the Obama Administration tried to bribe him."
Sestak was asked on CNN today about the alleged job offer, and he said he had answered the initial question honestly by saying he "was offered something." He added, "beyond that it doesn't matter."
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was pressed on the matter at his briefing today, and he repeatedly said he did not have anything to add to his March comments that any conversations between the White House and Sestak "are not problematic." He offered 10 variations of the phrase "I don't have anything to add to what I said in March."
Issa argues that conversations between the administration and Sestak may have violated anti-bribery provisions of the federal criminal code as well as prohibitions on government officials interfering in elections and using federal jobs for a political purpose. Violation of each provision is punishable by up to one year in jail.Boots has said it is 'truly sorry' for refusing to cut the price of the morning-after pill in case it 'incentivises inappropriate use'.
Britain's leading high-street chemist last night faced furor from Labour MPs who demanded it follow Tesco and Superdrug by halving the price of the contraceptive.
Campaigners urged women to boycott the store, calling its principles 'outdated, puritanical, and sexist' after it said why it wanted to keep the the price at £28.25.
But Boots has now apologised and said it is looking for cheaper alternatives.
Stella Creasy MP (left) urged a boycott and Jess Phillips (right) said: 'It's totally unacceptable and also totally commercial'
A spokesman for Boots said: 'Pharmacy and care for customers are at the heart of everything we do and as such we are truly sorry that our poor choice of words in describing our position on emergency hormonal contraception (EHC) has caused offence and misunderstanding, and we sincerely apologise.'
The row came after the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) had urged chemists to cut the cost amid claims that British women are forced to pay up to five times more than those in Europe for the contraceptive.
Tesco and Superdrug agreed to reduce the price but Boots said it did not want to encourage over-use.
The stance angered 35 female Labour MPs who wrote to Boots to demand a change of course, calling the pill vital 'back-up contraception'.
Yesterday, two of them urged women to 'vote with their feet'. Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy said: 'I am a strong believer in consumer activism and people voting not just at the ballot box but with their shopping baskets.'
The 35 Labour MPs, including former leader Harriet Harman and ex-shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, wrote to Boots, saying: 'It is completely unacceptable that British women have been paying up to £30 for a pill which costs a fraction of that to produce.
Campaigners from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) had urged the chemist to cut the cost of the morning-after pill (stock photo)
'The justification given by Boots was that it did not want to face complaints or to incentivise the use of emergency contraceptive. This infantilises women.' The MPs said the price cut was'supported by the majority of the public'.
Jess Phillips, MP for Birmingham Yardley, said: 'It's totally unacceptable and also totally commercial. They're willing to take a moral stance if it pays them… I agree that we should boycott it.'
Miss Cooper told Boots on Twitter: 'This is patronising and pathetic – keeping emergency contraception price too high cos you don't trust women and are scared of critics.'
Boots charges for Levonelle emergency contraceptive and £26.75 for a generic version.
Boots charges £28.25 for Levonelle emergency contraceptive and £26.75 for a generic version
Tesco has slashed its prices to £13.50 for Levonelle while at Superdrug an own-brand pill is £13.49 - and in France it costs just £5.50.
In a letter seen by the Guardian, Boots chief pharmacist Marc Donovan explained that it had carefully considered the issue and that the pill was already available free on the NHS.
But in a statement that has sparked outrage, he added at the end: 'In our experience the subject of emergency hormonal contraception polarises public opinion and we receive frequent contact from individuals who voice their disapproval of the fact that the company chooses to provide this service.
'We would not want to be accused of incentivising inappropriate use, and provoking complaints, by significantly reducing the price of this product.'
Now thousands of customers have threatened to boycott the store over the letter with the statement branded 'patronising' and'misogynistic'.
Rachel Bilski wrote on Twitter: 'Not all women can access the lower-cost services, for some Boots is it.
'No one should suffer due to outdated, puritanical, sexist opinions.'
In a letter seen by the Guardian, Boots chief pharmacist Marc Donovan explained that it had carefully considered the issue and that the pill was already available free on the NHS
Meg Evans added: 'This is just straight up misogyny. If Boots actually cared about women's health it would lower cost and make more accessible, not less.'
BPAS said that setting the price high was 'patronising' and wrote back to ask Boots to reconsider its position.
But the retailer wrote back and said 'they weren't changing their minds and the letter still stood', according to the campaign group's director of external affairs Clare Murphy.
The original Emergency Hormonal Contraception pill, called PC4 and known as the'morning after pill', was developed in 1985.
The morning-after pill, which must be used within 72 hours of unprotected sex, prevents pregnancy by suppressing ovulation and stopping the fertilisation of any egg released from the ovaries.
Boots said in a statement that it was 'disappointed' with the BPAS campaign and added that it offers customers a consultation service as part of the fee.
Thousands of customers have threatened to boycott the store over the letter with the statement branded 'patronising' and'misogynistic'
Meg Evans wrote on Twitter: 'This is just straight up misogyny. If Boots actually cared about women's health it would lower cost and make more accessible, not less'
The retailer told MailOnline: 'As the UK's leading pharmacy-led health and beauty retailer, we are regularly contacted by groups with varying views on this topic, our priority is the health and wellbeing of our customers and patients.
'We were recently contacted by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) and sent a full and detailed response outlining our views that this is a professional healthcare service which, we believe, requires a professional healthcare consultation.
'This consultation helps support customers in their choice by examining an individual's full medical history and any potential drug interactions.
'The consultation also helps the pharmacist offer important sexual healthcare advice to women and helps us prevent emergency contraception from being misused or overused.
'The NHS commission a free local EHC service which we offer in the vast majority of our pharmacies to eligible women following consultation.
'We also stock three Emergency Hormonal Contraceptive medicines (EHC) which are available following a conversation with a pharmacist.
'We are extremely disappointed by the focus BPAS have taken in this instance.'Sustainable transportation advocates have been locked in a pitched battle over the future of California’s mobility for the last several months. The Governor just signed SB 350 (De León) which, by 2030, will increase the fraction of renewable electricity the state uses to 50% and double energy efficiency improvements in buildings[1]. A third provision, to cut petroleum consumption in half was dropped after a punishing legislative session and literally millions of dollars of negative, and unfounded oil company advertising, the petroleum component of SB 350 was dropped.
A commitment to move one of the world’s largest economies onto 50% renewable energy[2] is a major victory. Increasing the energy-efficiency of buildings is also worthy of celebration. Losing the oil component seems like a missed opportunity for the climate, consumers and public health, but that remains to be seen since Governor Brown vowed to move forward with a robust slate of petroleum reduction policies using his executive authority; as he put it: “my zeal is intensified to the maximum degree.” Amidst the debate over the headline oil reduction section of SB 350, a provision in the renewable energy section supporting electric vehicles flew under the radar and survived the oil company assault. This provision, Section 32 for those who like reading bill text, has promising and potentially far-reaching implications for the future of transportation in California.
Charging Ahead
California is already a world leader at deploying electric vehicles. The Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) program was the first major policy to create a market for electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. In 2014, Senator (now Senate President Pro-Tem) Kevin de León successfully passed SB 1275, the Charge Ahead initiative, which directed the state to bring one million electric, plug-in hybrid and fuel cell vehicles onto the road by 2022 and to create incentive programs to ensure that low-income families could afford them. These ZEVs would not only reduce air pollutant emissions and the state’s dependence on petroleum, but also save consumers money; electric engines are more efficient at turning energy into motion than gasoline engines and electricity is cheaper in the U.S. than gasoline, per unit of energy.
This sounds great for both consumers and the climate, but the transition from gasoline to electricity does not come without challenges. Ensuring that there are convenient recharging stations is a key step in the electric vehicle transition. Most people who own their homes as well as residents of some apartment complexes can plug in at night, but others may not have this option. Charging during the day is, in some cases, a superior option to night (more on this in a moment), but it requires that chargers be installed where ZEVs are likely to be during the day, like workplaces and shopping centers.
This creates a chicken-and-egg problem: prospective electric vehicle owners may worry that they can’t charge their ZEV enough to enjoy the benefits, while potential developers or owners of chargers worry that if they install a charger, there won’t be enough demand to justify the expense. A few companies have started trying to develop a business model around providing chargers in public places, and electric utilities are trying to get in on the action as well, but the process has been slow.
Cracking the Egg
Here’s where SB 350 comes in: a provision in the bill (first discussed by NRDC’s Max Baumhefner and expounded upon by Dan Morain and Steven Maviglio) requires the agencies in charge of energy in California – the Air Resources Board, the Public Utilities Commission, and the Energy Commission – to develop a plan for providing electric vehicle charging infrastructure in the state. Most critically, the Public Utilities Commission will direct utilities to create plans to:
“achieve the goals set forth in the Charge Ahead California Initiative… and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.”
That line is a big win for sustainable transportation for three reasons:
First, even though it doesn’t directly cut petroleum or reduce greenhouse gases, it clearly indicates the legislature’s intent to achieve the greenhouse gas reduction goals laid out by previous executive orders[3]. Transportation accounts for around 37% of California’s greenhouse gas emissions and there is no way to achieve these climate goals without transportation doing its share, which means slashing petroleum consumption. The words may not say “cut petroleum consumption” but the implication is crystal-clear: the legislature intends for the state to burn a lot less oil in the future.
Second, unless you believe the most wildly optimistic projections of advanced biofuel commercialization[4], there’s no way to achieve either of the executive order GHG targets without significant penetration of electric vehicles. So, SB 350 tells the entities responsible for all things energy that there will be a lot of electric vehicles coming, and the state needs to be ready for them.
Third, electric vehicle charging infrastructure spans multiple policy domains overseen by several different State agencies. This regulatory overlap led to confusion and delay as the agencies tried to determine how best to plan for the future without overstepping their authority or mandate. This puts one agency, the Public Utilities Commission in the lead, authorizes development of far-reaching plans and gives them an emphatic push in the right direction with the security of knowing that the Governor and Legislature support their efforts.
This cracks the chicken-and-egg problem of vehicles vs. infrastructure. While we cannot expect California’s regulators or utilities to jump to precipitous action on charging deployment, SB 350 creates a clear target for charging infrastructure and requires the various agencies to collaboratively develop a transparent plan on how to get there. Businesses, consumers, and automakers will know what to expect and can start working to get vehicles on the road, confident that there will be a robust network of charging infrastructure to support them. Requiring charging infrastructure is not, by itself, sufficient to break gasoline’s near-monopoly over personal transportation, but it’s probably necessary to do so.
Removing the lack of charging infrastructure as a potential roadblock unlocks the transformative potential of an electric vehicles, which has been written about by many authors, including myself. I want to highlight two key ways in which the broad, multi-agency planning and coordination effort launched by SB 350 will be crucial. First, it will almost certainly improve the provision of public charging infrastructure, which is most often used in the daytime, when people are most active and when solar panels are generating the most power. Matching the supply (solar) to demand (ZEVs at public chargers) helps electrical grid operators ensure a stable and reliable electricity sstem. Second, the clear directive towards interagency cooperation will likely facilitate the deployment of “smart” chargers which communicate with the grid to schedule vehicle charging to avoid exacerbating imbalances between the supply and demand of electricity; such as delaying overnight charging until after the evening demand peak.
Average net demand (total demand minus renewable supply) on the CA electricity grid. Public charging options and Smart Chargers can help ensure that most ZEV charging avoids peak demand. Souce: California Independent System Operator.
The obstacles impeding public charging stations and smart chargers have been regulatory more than technical. The directive contained in SB 350 will ensure that all parties are working towards the same goal in a coordinated fashion.
As Governor Brown put it in his press conference announcing the withdrawal of the petroleum provisions from SB 350, oil companies may have won that skirmish, but they will lose the war. The ZEV provisions in SB 350 are part of the reason why.
[1] Another crucial climate bill, SB 32 (Pavely), which would have enhanced and extended the California’s landmark climate-change program, advanced most of the way through the legislature and will seek final passage next year.
[2] Not counting large hydroelectric or nuclear facilities.
[3] Specifically, S-03-05 (Schwarzenegger) and B-30-15 (Brown).
[4] And for the record, I am a biofuel expert, and I don’t. Biofuels will be a critical contributor, but probably not the dominant fuel for passenger vehicles.Snow Storms in Canada
While spring is slowly coming in large parts of Europe, people in northern Manitoba are preparing for a few more winter months and are on their way to removing the traces of the last big snowstorm. The emigrant Claudia Grill has witnessed this Blizzard on site.
When Environment Canada issued a Blizzard warning in early March, most people in Churchill, Manitoba, didn’t think much of it. It is already the fifth such official announcement since December, completely normal in the city of polar bears. Hardly anyone expects that the predicted storm will grow into an event of the century. Just a few weeks ago, after a similar warning, |
the significance of the number 418. Prior to the release of the band's third album, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, a leaked demo—now known as Fight Off Your Demons—featured the number. Then when the official album was finally released, its accompanying lyric booklet had a conspicuous lack of lyrics, but it did encourage the listener to send $1 to an address for a set of lyrics. Anyone who took Brand New up on this strange offer was eventually rewarded with " Pogolith Issue #000," a complete lyric book that also poked fun at how the band's initial demo had been leaked by offering a cassette of the leaked demos. (This cassette and lyric books were actually released almost a decade later in 2015).
Importantly, Pogolith #000 also contained references to 418, although Pogolith #001, released in 2016 to accompany Kevin Devine's new album (whose records have also been released on Procrastinate! Music Traitors) did not contain any references to 418, suggesting that Pogolith is tied to the band's label, not to Brand New as a band.
It's unclear exactly what to make of this number. Some have hinted that it points to a possible 'break up' date for the band in April of 2018. This is hinted at by the band's own merch, which includes a t-shirt that reads "Brand New 2000-2018." Others have offered more mundane solutions, suggesting that 418 refers to the date of the Instagram post: April 18. In any case, the number makes a reappearance on the knowgodsjustwork site as the subdomain hosting the morse code.
Pogolith also occupies a strange place in the band's history. In 2014, Brand New changed their website landing page to announce they were in the studio. This was accompanied by the words "Procrastinate!," "PoGolith," and "Earth Sound Alliance," as well as a secret link to a music video for PPL MVR, a band that some have tried to argue is actually Brand New.
Shortly thereafter, these words were replaced on Brand New's website with 'NODE,' a hyperlink to a page on the bizarro Wikipedia called Fusion Anomaly that discussed the effects of radio waves on humans. The band had also linked to Fusion Anomaly in a post about their recording session for The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me back in 2005. Moreover, the album's producer, Mike Sapone, has mentioned #fusionanomaly on his Instagram a few times, according to SirBrothers. This has led some redditors to link Sapone to the reddit account u/fusionano. This user regularly posts cryptic messages about Brand New on subreddits like PogolithEarthSound, islandparkny, and terminalpasswords, which read like the makings of an Brand New-centered alternate reality game that never took off.
When taken altogether, it seems that Brand New has been leaving clues for its fans throughout its history as a band. But many remain skeptical about the website being anything more than an elaborate hoax.
"The big breaks seem to be coming from one person on Reddit, so I find that suspect," SirBrothers told me in a direct message. "I'm a skeptic. Until I have proof either way I'm just assuming it's a fun game"
Brand New has built a music career out of intentionally obscuring its intentions. So even if the latest website is just a convoluted scavenger hunt dreamt up by someone with a deep knowledge of Brand New lore, it's hard to imagine a more fitting tribute to the band.
Daniel Oberhaus is a writer based in Phoenix, Arizona. You can follow him on Twitter.Rex Tillerson was officially sworn in as secretary of State on Wednesday after overcoming opposition from Democrats in the Senate.
President Trump congratulated the 69th secretary of State in a White House ceremony after returning from Dover Air Force Base, where he honored a U.S. service member killed in Yemen over the weekend.
"Secretary Tillerson... you bring the unique skills and deep, deep insights — and I’ve gotten to see it firsthand — into foreign diplomacy our nation needs to foster stability and security in a world too often trapped, and right now it’s trapped, in violence and in war," Trump said.
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Trump also praised Tillerson for his understanding of diplomacy while lauding him for prioritizing U.S. values and security."This is a man who is respected all over the world before he even begins... this is where you were meant to be, right here, today at this crossroads in history," Trump said.The president said it was time to bring "a clear-eyed focus" to foreign relations and "seek new solutions grounded in very ancient truths.""These truths include the fact that nations have a right to protect their interests, that all people have a right to freely pursue their own destiny, and that all of us are better off when we act in concert, and not in conflict," Trump said.After Tillerson was sworn in by Vice President Pence, the secretary of State thanked everyone for supporting him during a contentious confirmation process. Many Democrats were opposed to the former Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO's nomination, primarily over his business ties and connections to Russia.
He was confirmed 55-43, with no Republicans voting against him. Democratic Sens. Mark Warner Mark Robert WarnerHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Addressing repair backlog at national parks can give Congress a big win MORE (Va.), Heidi Heitkamp Mary (Heidi) Kathryn HeitkampOvernight Energy: Trump taps ex-oil lobbyist Bernhardt to lead Interior | Bernhardt slams Obama officials for agency's ethics issues | Head of major green group steps down Trump picks ex-oil lobbyist David Bernhardt for Interior secretary On The Money: Shutdown Day 27 | Trump fires back at Pelosi by canceling her foreign travel | Dems blast 'petty' move | Trump also cancels delegation to Davos | House votes to disapprove of Trump lifting Russia sanction MORE (N.D.) and Joe Manchin Joseph (Joe) ManchinTrump claims Democrats ‘don’t mind executing babies after birth’ after blocked abortion bill Democrats block abortion bill in Senate The Hill's Morning Report - A pivotal week for Trump MORE (W.Va.) joined Republicans in voting yes.
"I’ve also received over the last month so many messages, letters, phone calls of best wishes, encouragement, prayers from family, friends and colleagues who know me well. But I’ve also received an enormous outpouring of wonderful messages from people all over the country whom I do not know," Tillerson said.
"And it’s their messages that are going to really stand in steadfast reminder to me as I enter the responsibilities of secretary of State, that as I serve this president, I serve their interest and will always represent the interest of all of the American people at all times."I've spoken a great deal recently about architectural priorities. In short, we as software developers cannot eat our cake and have it too. Improving flexibility in one area may hurt performance, while improving usability one another area may hinder flexibility. These trade-offs are not necessarily right or wrong, except in the context of the goals and purpose of the project with respect to its target audience.
But what is Drupal's target audience, and how does that impact our architectural decisions?
DrupalCon Copenhagen was a watershed event in terms of understanding how to conceptualize that question, in my view, based on conversations I had with the likes of Mark Boulton, Jen Simmons, and Sam Boyer. In his (excellent) keynote, Jeremy Keith noted that the HTML5 Working Group had a specific, defined set of priorities:
In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementers over specifiers over theoretical purity.
That may be a good priority order; it may be bad. That depends on your point of view and your goals. It lays out the order in which different stakeholders should be listened to, and if you come to a decision where you have to screw one group over to benefit another how that decision should be made. Having such a clear understanding of your constituent priority is critical to making good, consistent architectural decisions.
So what are Drupal's priorities?
Constituencies of Drupal
One of the problems Drupal faces is that we don't have a clear, explicit understanding of how we prioritize our constituencies. As a result, we're struggling with "we're really trying to make it easy, really!" while people are still screaming "I can't!*%! use this thing, Drupal sucks!" Both statements can be true if they are about different constituencies.
If I could be so bold as to describe the Drupal community's implicit, ill-defined design priorities, I would define them like this:
In case of conflict, consider site builders over content editors over programmers over theoretical purity over CSS designers over HTML designers.
That may be a good order or a bad order, but it is the order that, in practice, we seem to follow in my experience. But let's consider what each of those means:
Site builders By site builder, I mean the click-together site assembler. This is the person who creates node types by pushing buttons in the CCK/Fields UI, then clicks through the Views UI, then possibly spends time giving the Panels UI some mouse-clicking love. Content editors The content editors are the site administrators responsible for keeping tabs on content. Not content types, but content. Creating and editing a site's primary nodes. Moderating comments. Etc. Programmers By this I mean anyone who is writing PHP or Javascript code. Pretty self-explanatory, with one caveat: Editing template.php counts as a programmer task. I don't care that it's front-end stuff, it's programming. Theoretical purity This is something of a catch-all for architectural cleanliness, security, performance, non-repeating code, code that non-Drupal-fanboys can comprehend, etc. (For architecture geeks like me, having this be so low on the list is frequently painful.) CSS designers Also self-explanatory. If you spend your days in *.css files, this is you. HTML designers For Drupal, this means people who edit template files. It also includes those whose primary skill is HTML in general.
Notably absent from this list is that weird Drupal-specific role we call "themer". There is, really, no such thing. It's a weird amalgam of template.php-dwelling programmers, CSS ninjas, and HTML gurus rolled uncomfortably into one. That is a fallacy that, I believe, hurts us in our understanding of our own system.
Sorry, designers
Also of particular note is the dead-last placement of the HTML designer. That is actually a deliberate decision, and a consequence of putting site-builders first and foremost. HTML is incidental to Drupal. We treat it as little more than an API.
Drupal treats HTML not as a user base in itself, but as an API between PHP and CSS.
Again, that could be good or bad depending on your point of view. However, consider that artistic web designers, those that actually figure out how the page should look; If they know anything about implementation are going to know HTML and some CSS. They're regular readers of A List Apart, which is all about the new hotness in HTML and CSS. For them, the way Drupal treats HTML as simply a means and not an ends is like nails on a chalkboard. They respond just as violently to it as Drupal's PHP developers do to, say, WordPress's "just dump everything into the template file, even if that means SQL" design. (Note: I'm sure WordPress developers will defend their architectural decisions; I am just noting that Drupal developers are horribly turned off by it, much as HTML designers are horribly turned off by Drupal's template design.)
Of course, there is no way to not have messy HTML while still retaining the preeminence of the click-together site builder. CCK, Views, and Panels cannot let a button-pusher build awesome sites "without writing code" without having ridiculously generic HTML output with every possible CSS hook you might need. And pristine, semantic, just-so HTML cannot be generated by a general purpose tool. Modules like Semantic Views help, but they're really just a short-hand way for HTML designers to hack selected templates. They don't change the architectural design.
Is that a good trade-off? If you're a site-builder, it's a great decision. If you're an HTML-savvy designer, it seriously sucks.
Casual architecture
Similarly, even within the programming ranks the same conflict exists. Drupal tries, culturally, to cater to the "casual, self-taught PHP developer", the "weekend warrior" who knows just enough to be dangerous. We want them to be able to throw up community sites over a holiday weekend to aid in the democratization of the Internet. That's an explicit goal.
The flipside, of course, is that we routinely turn off professionally trained software engineers (which are not the same as programmers), software architects, and anyone who has experience with more traditional architectures. We are the last serious PHP framework to still be struggling with the idea of using OOP. We have been doing a hacked-up Aspect-Oriented Programming approach for years, but didn't even know what we were talking about so haven't always leveraged it intelligently. We collectively don't have a clue about performance. We architect for what sounds like a clever hack without considering the systemic implications... if we bother to "architect" at all. We routinely integrate systems that have no architectural reason for being related in the name of site-builder usability, ignoring the performance and bug-hiding risks that come with that.
We are a weird amalgam of a professional CMS built by amateurs and an amateur CMS built by professionals, with all of the ugliness that comes with that.
Is that a good trade-off? If we want to appeal to the thousands of casual self-taught PHP hackers in the world, yes. If we want to appeal to the thousands of professional software engineers in the world, no.
The real target audience
Of course, as with any open source project the only constituencies that matter are those that do work, and the more work they do the more they matter. Who is Drupal's target market? The people building Drupal.
The practical reality is that Drupal's primary target audience is Drupal consulting shops.
Why? Because most of the leading core and contrib developers work for Drupal consulting shops or are freelance consultants. They're site builders and programmers, and their paying clients are content editors. They are not HTML/CSS ninjas nor designers. It doesn't matter how much we insist that we are the everyman CMS, or how much we care about end-user experience, or how designer-friendly we say we want to be.
When you get right down to it, our target market is us.
Tough choices
Of course, all of that begs the question... is that the right priority for us to have? Should we really favor site builders at the expense of architectural quality and HTML designers? If we want to make Drupal easier for HTML designers, are we willing to sacrifice button-pushing power to do so? (We would have to.)
Is making the admin easier for content editors (as the D7UX project aimed to do) at the expense of programmer frustration a good trade-off? (Maybe?)
As we begin to adopt HTML5 for Drupal 8... who will get to decide where to use what new-and-cool HTML tag? The site builder? The programmer? The HTML designer? I don't know. But I do know that we need to not delude ourselves into thinking that we can let all three do so with equal ease. We have some hard decisions to make, but they must be made explicitly, not implicitly, if we are to survive the next wave in our evolution.The city of Juneau, Alaska, is pulling a wild card move.
The state's capital announced Friday that it is officially changing its name to UNO as part of a sponsorship deal with the Mattel card game — suspiciously timed to take effect on the first day of April.
The partnership will kick off a new Mattel campaign aimed at promoting a new version of the game stocked with more "wild" cards.
"We sort of thought, 'How do we go wild for UNO and what's something we can do that's wild?'" said Ray Adler, the company's director of global games. "And we looked to the great outdoors."
The brand is also handing out free decks of cards at the "UNO" City Hall all day and making a commemorative donation to a local nonprofit that will go toward local youth programs.
While it might seem a strange move on Juneau's part, buying the naming rights to a city is not unheard of. In 2011, Supersize Me director Morgan Spurlock temporarily renamed the town of Altoona, Pennsylvania, to POM Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Pennsylvania — likely to the annoyance of its residents and postal workers.
The city's leaders are hoping the deal will give it some free publicity on the national stage and provide some fun for residents in the wake of the recent death of the city's mayor, Greg Fisk.
"It seemed like a win all the way around," said Juneau city manager Kimberly Kiefer. "Frankly for Juneau, we've been through some hard times so I think having something we can all laugh together about is a good thing."
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.The presentation SPO3 Ricky Sta. Isabel and SPO4 Roy Villegas at an Angeles City court is reportedly upon the insistence of a judge
Published 7:36 AM, January 25, 2017
PAMPANGA, Philippines (UPDATED) – The two policemen who are suspects in the kidnapping and killing of Korean businessman Jee Ick Joo were presented to the court in Angeles City on Tuesday, January 24, reportedly upon the insistence of a judge.
Last Monday, January 23, officers of the Philippine National Police-Anti-Kidnapping Group (PNP-AKG) in Camp Crame returned the warrant of arrest issued by Angeles City Regional Trial Court Branch 58 Judge Irineo Pangilinan Jr. against SPO3 Ricky Sta. Isabel and SPO4 Roy Villegas with a written explanation that the two suspects are already under the custody of the police unit.
But it was learned from sources that Pangilinan refused to accept the warrant he had issued without the personal appearance of Sta. Isabel and Villegas.
Earlier that day, Rappler was told by a staff of the RTC Branch 58’s clerk of court that the presentation of the persons who are subject of an arrest warrant is necessary when law enforcers return the warrant to the court.
Around 3 pm Tuesday, officers of the PNP-AKG returned to the Angeles City court bringing with them Sta. Isabel and Villegas to present the 2 policemen before the judge.
After waiting for more than an hour inside the clerk of court’s office, Judge Pangilinan, who had to finish hearing another case in his sala, faced Sta. Isabel and Villegas.
The judge had allowed the 2 policemen to remain under the custody of the PNP-AKG for security reasons.
A source in Angeles City who heard the conversation between Judge Pangilinan, the PNP-AKG officers and the 2 cop suspects, said Sta. Isabel wanted to be transferred to the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), which is set to make its own investigation into the kidnapping and killing of Jee.
It was learned that the police security escorts of Sta. Isabel and Villegas, who were both assigned to the PNP-Anti Illegal Drugs Group in Camp Crame, always kept the 2 apart to prevent them from possibly harming each other.
In his sworn statement before the Department of Justice (DOJ), Villegas said he participated in the surveillance operation led by Sta. Isabel against Jee, thinking it was a legitimate anti-illegal drugs operation, and in what he allegedly thought as the arrest of the South Korean on October 18, 2016.
Villegas also told DOJ state prosecutors that he allegedly saw how Sta. Isabel “strangling and killing the victim” and hearing him calling a certain “Ding” who agreed to receive Jee’s body in exchange for P30,000 and a golf set. He said he was among those who brought the South Korean’s body to a funeral parlor.
He said it was too late when he realized that what they did was not a legitimate police operation and that he obeyed Sta. Isabel’s instruction “for fear of his life and that of his family.”
Sta. Isabel, for his part, has denied killing Jee.
The DOJ recommended on January 17 the filing of kidnapping for ransom with homicide against Sta. Isabel, Villegas, Ramon Yalung, and 4 other John Does with aliases “Pulis”, “Jerry”, “Sir Dumlao” and “Ding”. – Rappler.comWACO, Texas -- Former Baylor coach Art Briles and former Baylor athletic director Ian McCaw can stand trial for negligence, a Texas federal judge ruled on Friday, calling the allegations against the two "disturbing" in his ruling.
ESPN's Mark Schlabach reported the news first that United States District Judge Robert Pitman ruled former Baylor student Jasmin Hernandez can proceed with her Title IX and negligence claims against Baylor University and a negligence claim against Briles and McCaw, who is now the athletic director at Liberty.
Hernandez was raped by Baylor football player Tevin Elliott in 2012, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2014 for sexual assault.
Briles was Baylor's coach for eight years before he was fired in May 2016.
From Pitman's ruling: "'disturbing' is an apt descriptor for allegations that (Briles and McCaw) put the interests of the football team or the reputation of the university ahead of other students' interest in not being sexually assaulted, ultimately leading to Plaintiff's own sexual assault by Elliott."MANILA - Following Camarines Sur Rep. Leni Robredo's comment that she does not subscribe to the mailed-fist rule of Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, the presidential aspirant on Sunday said he is no fan of the lawmaker's leadership.
"I do not also subscribe the style of her leadership. Tabla lang kami -- she does not like me, I do not like her, so no problem," Duterte told reporters in Davao City.
The feisty mayor did not expound on his statement.
Robredo said Friday that Naga City was able to equal the progress of Davao City without employing harsh methods in curbing criminality.
"We achieved the same results in Naga... 'yung peace and order, 'yung discipline among the people... we achieved the same things without that kind of attitude," Robredo said in an interview with The Philippine STAR.
"It may have worked in Davao and in many other places... but based on experience we were able to achieve the same results without resorting to those things," she added.
Robredo's husband, the late Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo, served as Naga's mayor for 19 years, from 1988 to 1998 and from 2001 to 2010.
In 1999, Naga City was cited as one of the most improved cities in Asia. The late mayor was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service in 2000.
The widow earlier said that her vice presidential bid in 2016 is aimed at continuing the "tsinelas leadership" of her husband. The term was coined after the late Cabinet member was seen wearing slippers, an act interpreted by his supporters as humility.
(Tsinelas leadership: Why Leni Robredo joined VP race)
On his radio show Sunday, Duterte was again asked to comment on Robredo's disdain for his iron rule. This time, the aspiring president said he will leave Naga to its own devices if its leaders think that the city is peaceful.
"I hate to respond on questions, issues coming from lady candidates. Ang masasabi ko lang kung ang iyong Naga City ay peaceful, wala problema sa droga, walang problema sa mga kriminal, ang leadership dili manghilabot nimo (hindi makikialam sa inyo)," Duterte said.
"We will not go to Naga. We will ignore the law and order in Naga tutal kaya naman nilang i-improve. We will never interfere in Naga."
Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, Duterte's running mate, earlier said that the crime rate spiked in Naga from January to July 2015, at 5,692 cases.
This figure is only a little less than the 6,026 combined crime cases recorded in the five other towns of Bicol, Cayetano added.
Commenting on the numbers, Duterte said: "If that figure makes Naga City peaceful, according to Robredo e di fine... We will escape Naga. If you can improve there without my leadership, ang leadership ko, hindi manghilabot nimo (hindi makikialam sa inyo)."
Duterte, who has been tagged in extrajudicial killings in his city, was dubbed by TIME Magazine as "The Punisher" in a 2002 article.
In May 2015, Duterte admitted his links to the Davao Death Squad (DDS), which is allegedly responsible for summary executions of over 1,000 criminals in the city. He, however, later backtracked on his statement, saying he was referring to the Davao Development System.
Duterte vowed to counter crime and mold the country in the image of Davao City, if and when he is elected as president in 2016. -- With reports from Clare Cornelio and Bonnamae Pamplona, ABS-CBN News Southern MindanaoPaste is excited to unveil the cover of our debut issue of Paste Quarterly, our new large-format print magazine. Paste music editor Bonnie Stiernberg spent a day in Los Angeles with Father John Misty for a 6,000-word cover story. in which Josh Tillman discusses why he says “I can’t go back to what I was doing last year” and how he plans to externalize Father John Misty this year (hint: it involves an elaborate, ritualistic stage show that includes multiple Father John Mistys, bears and banana peels).
“Some interviews, I know exactly what I’m walking into,” says Stiernberg, “but there are others where I have no idea what to expect from a particular person, and those always tend to wind up being my favorites. This one’s no exception.”
L.A. photographer Austin Hargrave (Vanity Fair, The Sunday Times) shot Tillman exclusively for the cover and interior of Paste Quarterly. The magazine ships March 1 to subscribers and will be available in select independent record stores beginning March 17.
Filled with original illustration and photography, the issue also includes features on The Jesus and Mary Chain, Jay Farrar, The Americans, a look back at Aretha Franklin’s seminal album I Never Loved a Man The Way I Love You and so much more.
Each issue of Paste Quarterly comes with a 150-gram colored vinyl sampler album. Issue #1 features exclusive tracks from Lake Street Dive, Shakey Graves, Lucius, Josh Ritter, Joseph, Anderson East, Lee Fields & The Expressions, Bonnie Bishop, Violent Femmes and Courtney Barnett.
If you subscribe to Paste Quarterly or purchase Issue #1 before Feb. 28, you’ll also get a free digital sampler with tracks from many of the above artists, along with tracks from Colin Hay, Martha Wainwright, Thao & the Get Down Stay Down, Blackalicious, Aoife O’Donovan, Greensky Bluegrass, Best of What’s Next artists ALA.NI and Jojo Abot and more.
Each issue is $20 (shipping included) or $70 for a one-year subscription (four issues, four vinyl albums, four digital samplers). Subscribe to Paste Quaterly at PasteQuarterly.com.No major American cultural force is more opposed to examination and more active in suppressing it today than Silicon Valley. So when it was revealed this week that Facebook board member Peter Thiel had been secretly bankrolling a lawsuit to inflict financial ruin on the news and gossip site Gawker, Silicon Valley cheered.
The investor Vinod Khosla wrote on Twitter that the “press gets very uppity when challenged”. And that these bad journalists need “to be taught lessons”.
Khosla has suffered a great deal of negative press since buying a beachfront community and blocking off public access to the historic surfing beach, an illegal move that has garnered him unflattering stories in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times – a news organization that Khosla says also does “clickbait journalism” and deserves some “lessons” as well.
Investor and bellicose Silicon Valley personality Jason Calacanis wrote that, though he disagrees with Thiel on some things, in this fight against Gawker, Thiel “is a hero, 100% in the right fighting against evil”.
Shark Tank TV show host and Twitter investor Chris Sacca wrote: “My one regret is that [a Valleywag writer at the time] isn’t personally liable for any of that money owed.”
Each of these investors – and many of those writing in a wave of local support for Thiel – add caveats that they’re happy to see “clickbait” or “gossip” journalists suffer but that they fully support “real” journalists. As Khosla made clear by putting the New York Times on the side of clickbait, many Silicon Valley investors see most press as suspect.
After six years as a reporter in Silicon Valley, I’ve found that a tech mogul will generally call anything unflattering I write “clickbait” and anything flattering “finally some real journalism”.
A macabre parlor game among reporters here now is to guess which billionaire will, as Thiel did, wait 10 years with a grudge before seizing an opportunity to bankrupt you and exact maximum revenge. It’s a paranoia that seems more fitting for reporters covering characters like Vladimir Putin than the latest startup.
In America today, almost no one wields the concentrated wealth and power that the new rulers of Silicon Valley have. As the prodigies grow up, they’re realizing just how much they can flex that power.
To be fair, by no means is everyone supporting Thiel. Pierre Omidyar, eBay founder, is now backing Gawker’s appeal, launching what looks like will become a proxy war. “First Look Media is looking into organizing amicus support for Gawker in its legal fight and appeal against Hulk Hogan,” Lynn Oberlander, First Look’s general counsel, told the New York Post.
Jason Mandell, co-founder of the startup PR firm LaunchSquad, whose client list includes Facebook, Coursera and Munchery, said he thought Silicon Valley generally had a healthy relationship with the tech press, less so with the broader press.
“People like Peter Thiel are used to being able to tell an engineer ‘this is broken – fix it’,” Mandell said. “They don’t understand the unique dynamic between the press and the public. They don’t understand the first amendment and free speech as it relates to the media.”
“Tech guys love tech reporters because they’re often rooting for them to succeed but when reporters go off that script and do something that’s more combative I think it’s jarring.”
Mandell said there’s a “unique relationship” between tech entrepreneurs and the press because while other industries might be doing bad things, Silicon Valley thinks it is doing good for the world.
“Everybody here is part of this revolution and everyone agrees it’s a good thing in general. People want Tesla to succeed,” he said. “If you’re covering finance you can’t be enamored with the CEO with Bank of America … But aside from companies like Uber, what companies in our world are doing bad things?”The two men were arrested after they were found to be jointly carrying A$520,450 (S$551,367) at Adelaide Airport, say the Australian Federal Police.
SINGAPORE: Two Singaporean men have been charged for dealing with criminal proceeds in Adelaide, Australia, after they were found to be jointly carrying A$520,450 (S$551,367) at Adelaide Airport.
In a media release, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said one of the men was identified on Sunday in the airport's check-in area. A police cash and drug detector dog had approached him, and he was found to be carrying A$250,000 (S$264,828) after police searched his luggage.
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The second man was subsequently identified, and was found to be carrying A$270,450 (S$286,455) after his bag had been searched.
Both men were then arrested. They appeared before the Adelaide Magistrates Court on Monday, according to AFP.
Adelaide Airport Police Commander Gavin Stone said this is the largest cash seizure detected by one of its cash and drug detector dogs at Adelaide Airport, adding that the dog, Utana, was instrumental in the seizure.
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Utana, an AFP Cash and Drug Detector (CADD) dog. (Photo: Australian Federal Police)
"Travellers are reminded that when carrying more than $10,000 in Australian currency or equivalent, it must be declared before departing Australia," AFP said.Ash King felt as if he had spent his adult life searching for some sort of sexual intimacy. Born with a severe spinal and muscular condition, sex was something he still hadn't experienced by the age of 35 and he was afraid that, with his disability making him increasingly weak, he never would. In 2010, after becoming isolated and depressed, King decided to hire a sex worker.
"I couldn't make someone fall in love with me," he says, "but I could at least learn about my sexual potential and more about women by paying a sex worker." Looking back at his first sexual encounter, King describes it as an "enlightenment".
The sexual needs of people with disabilities are under the spotlight like never before after the release of Oscar-nominated film The Sessions, which is based on the true of story of a man confined to an iron lung who loses his virginity to a "sexual surrogate".
King found his sexual surrogate online, through the TLC Trust, a UK organisation that seeks to connect people with disabilities to sex workers. According to its founder, sex therapist Tuppy Owens, each of the 100 sex workers listed on the website could be seeing around eight disabled clients a month. "Finding a sex worker who will talk, teach, accept … is a bit of a boost of confidence and self-esteem," she says.
Becky Adams, who describes herself as a former madam, runs a not-for-profit, telephone-based service supported by TLC, and says she receives about 12 inquiries a week from disabled and vulnerable people looking for a trusted sex worker. She plans to open the first brothel designed for disabled clients in the UK next year. She says she wants to provide an environment in which people with disabilities can explore their sexuality. "That can be sex," she says, "but also having a cuddle. It could even be someone having an hour cross-dressing who wouldn't normally have the privacy to. I've been overwhelmed by the response we've had."
One of her clients, Chris Fulton, 29, who has cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy, has launched a campaign calling on the government to introduce a Netherlands-style grant scheme in which citizens with disabilities receive public money to pay for sexual services up to 12 times a year. But disability charities say the issue is not a priority. Richard Hawkes, chief executive of the disability charity Scope, says: "We need to break through taboos around disability and sex. But it's impossible to have any kind of relationship if you don't have the support you need to get out of bed, get washed and dressed, have a proper meal and get out of the house. At the same time, many disabled people are worrying how they'll pay the bills. Living costs are spiralling, jobs are hard to come by and the government is cutting disability living allowance and employment and support allowance."
In the UK, paying for sex is not against the law but it is illegal to solicit sexual services. Amanda Smith, an escort in her 40s from south London, who has a listing on the TLC website, says: "For some men, the only touch they've ever had is their mum bathing them." Talking about the practicalities of providing sexual services to disabled clients, she says: "I've lifted grown men who weighed less than a five-year-old from their wheelchair to the bed, and then back again, fully dressed for the takeover by carers or family."
Some of the bookings are made by the parent of the client, says Smith – typically fathers. "Sex is a need, like food," she says. "If you can't quell it, it should be taken care of. It's cruel not to."
It is language that is rarely used in reference to women with disabilities. Owens says she would like to see this change, and has known disabled women who have used male escorts. But she acknowledges that many disabled women feared the risk of being abused. They "don't trust male sex workers to be honourable", she says. A rare survey of disabled people's attitudes to prostitution, conducted by Disability Now magazine in 2005, found that just 19% of women said they would see trained sex workers, compared with 63% of men.
Mik Scarlet, a writer and campaigner in sexuality and disability, sees the use of sex workers as a potentially harmful development. "It's like the world telling you that disabled people are so unsexy that the only way they can have sex is to pay for it," he says. "If you're growing up as a disabled child or someone who's just come to disability, how does that affect how you feel about yourself? I don't want a world where it's easier for disabled people to visit sex workers, I want a world that sees disabled people as sexual and valid prospective partners."
Penny Pepper, author of Desires Reborn, a fictional depiction of the relationships of a group of disabled characters, agrees: "What disabled people need is full and equal rights. An inclusive society, which doesn't create barriers." Forming sexual relationships, casual or committed, with mistakes is part of that, she says.
Laurence Clark, a comedian who has cerebral palsy and featured, along with his wife Adele who also has cerebral palsy, in BBC documentary We Won't Drop the Baby as they prepared for the birth of their second child, says many people with disabilities are in emotionally and sexually fulfilling relationships.
Before getting married, he says he had mixed experiences of dating. "I found the traditional ways that people find partners, such as going to clubs and bars, didn't really work for me, as attraction in those sorts of environments is very much based on looks," says Clark. "But like lots of people, I tended to date through people that |
BBC News
Under pressure: The Critically Endangered grey-shanked douc langur is one of the primates in peril
In pictures
A global review of the world's primates says 48% of species face extinction, an outlook described as "depressing" by conservationists. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species says the main threat is habitat loss, primarily through the burning and clearing of tropical forests. More than 70% of primates in Asia are now listed as Endangered, it adds. The findings form part of the most detailed survey of the Earth's mammals, which will be published in October. PRIMATES IN PERIL Nations with the highest percentage of threatened species:
Cambodia - 90% Vietnam - 86% Indonesia - 84% Laos - 83% China - 79% (Source: IUCN Red List) Other threats include hunting of primates for food and the illegal wildlife trade, explained Russell Mittermeier, chairman of global conservation group IUCN's Primate Specialist Group and president of Conservation International. "In many places, primates are quite literally being eaten to extinction," he warned. "Tropical forest destruction has always been the main cause, but now it appears that hunting is just as serious a threat in some areas, even where the habitat is still quite intact."
The survey, involving hundreds of experts, showed that out of 634 recognised species and subspecies, 11% were Critically Endangered, 22% were Endangered, while a further 15% were listed as Vulnerable. Asia had the greatest proportion of threatened primates, with 71% considered at risk of extinction. The five nations with the highest percentage of endangered species were all within Asia. 'Depressing' picture "It is quite spectacular; we are just wiping out primates," said Jean-Christophe Vie, deputy head of the IUCN Species Programme. RED LIST DEFINITIONS The Tonkin snub-nosed monkey is listed as Critically Endangered Extinct - Surveys suggest last known individual has died Critically Endangered - Extreme high risk of extinction - this means some Critically Endangered species are also tagged Possibly Extinct Endangered - Species at very high risk of extinction Vulnerable - Species at high risk of extinction Near Threatened - May soon move into above categories Least Concern - Species is widespread and abundant Data Deficient - not enough data to assess He added that the data was probably the worst assessment for any group of species on record. "The problem with these species is that they have long lives, so it takes time to reverse the decline. It is quite depressing." Although habitat loss and deforestation were deemed to be the main threats globally, Dr Vie explained how human encroachment into forests was also creating favourable conditions for hunters. "This creates access, allowing people to go to places that they could not go in the past," he told BBC News. "Primates are relatively easy to hunt because they are diurnal, live in groups and are noisy - they are really easy targets. "Many of the Asian primates, like langurs, are 5-10kg, so they are a good target. Generally, you find that what is big and easy to get disappears very quickly." In Africa, 11 of the 13 kinds of red colobus monkeys assessed were listed as Critically Endangered or Endangered. Conservationists fear that two may already be extinct. The Bouvier's red colobus has not been seen for 25 years, and no living Miss Waldron red colobus has been recorded since 1978. The authors of the primate Red List did consider downlisting mountain gorillas to Endangered from Critically Endangered because the great apes had recorded a population increase. But they decided to delay reclassification as a result of five of the gorillas being killed in July 2007 by gunmen in the DR Congo's Virunga National Park, which is still at the centre of a conflict between rebel forces and government troops. During 2007, wildlife rangers in the park recorded a total of 10 gorilla killings. The rangers have been documenting their struggles in a regular diary on the BBC News website over the past year. Mountain gorillas have been caught in the crossfire of a land dispute
Diary: Protecting mountain gorillas "If you kill seven, 10 or 20 mountain gorillas, it has a devastating impact on the entire population," Dr Vie explained. "Within the Red List criteria, you are allowed to anticipate what will happen in the future as well as look at what has happened in the past. "So it was decided not to change the mountain gorillas' listing because of the sudden deaths, and we do not know when it is going to stop." Dr Emmanuel de Merode, chief executive of Gorilla.cd - an EU-funded programme working in Virunga National Park - said the gorillas' long-term survival was still far from assured. "Militias have been in control of the Gorilla Sector since September last year, which means the Congolese wildlife authority has been unable to manage the area and protect the gorillas," he told BBC News. "Until the war ends and the rangers are able to get back in and patrol the area, we have no idea as to the fate of almost a third of the mountain gorillas left in the world." Golden glimmer of hope Despite the gloomy outlook, the Red List did record a number of conservation successes. The re-introduction of golden lion tamarins is one of the few successes Brazil's populations of golden lion tamarins and black lion tamarins were downlisted from Critically Endangered to Endangered. "It is the result of decades of effort," said Dr Vie. "The lion tamarins were almost extinct in the wild, but they were very popular in zoos so there was a large captive population. "So zoos around the world decided to join forces to introduce a captive breeding programme to reintroduce the tamarins in Brazil." However the first attempts were not successful and the released population quickly crashed because the animals were ill-prepared for life in the wild, he recalled. "They were not exposed to eagles or snakes and they did not know how to find food, so a lot of them died. But some did survive and, slowly, the numbers began to increase." Ultimately, the success was a combination of ex-situ conservation in zoos and in-situ conservation by protecting and reforesting small areas around Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. "It took time, money and effort at all levels, from the politicians to scientists and volunteers on the ground, for just two species." The findings, issued at the International Primatological Society Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland, will be included in a survey described as an "unprecedented examination of the state of the world's mammals", which will be presented at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in October.
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StumbleUpon What are these?The transfer window might be shut, but don't think the wheeling and dealing won't continue! Check out all the latest deals here.
TOP STORY: Chelsea to return for Romagnoli with monster bid
Alessio Romagnoli was the subject of a move by Chelsea late in the summer transfer window to solve their defensive crisis, though AC Milan stood firm. According to the Sun, though, the Blues will return in January.
A bid of £50 million reportedly is being readied for the 21-year-old, who is being featured as part of Giampiero Ventura's Italy defence. Chelsea missed out with a £35 million offer in the summer, but the Rossoneri maintain that the clubs have good relations, and that could leave the opportunity for talks to be resumed in January.
Valencia want 'Chicharito' as centre-piece of new era
Valencia have had a torrid time of late. Financially hamstrung, Los Che have seen their star players walk away, and they are still to move to the Nou Mestalla. But AS reported that new manager Cesare Prandelli flew to Singapore to discuss targets with owner Peter Lim, and Javier Hernandez is the Italian's dream signing.
The Bayer Leverkusen star and former Manchester United hit man has a €45 million release clause in his contract, but with only 18 months to run on that deal, the Bundesliga side could well cash in for a figure below that.
New Valencia manager Cesare Prandelli reportedly has made Javier Hernandez his prime target as the Spanish club rebuilds. Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Bongarts/Getty Images
Atletico keen to tie down Carrasco amid Chelsea interest
Yannick Carrasco's excellent form for both Atletico Madrid and Belgium has seen Chelsea register an interest, according to the Mirror. The 23-year-old winger has a £35 million buyout clause in his current deal, which runs to 2020, but Los Colchoneros see it as too low and are agitating toward a new deal to protect their star player.
Carrasco is thought to be content with life in the Spanish capital, but the Blues are believed to be confident about luring him to London. They are exploring their options to provide Antonio Conte with new weapons in the market as the Italian overhauls his team.
Man United target 'the new David Silva'
Manchester United are monitoring one of the most outstanding young talents in Spanish football, with the Mail linking the Red Devils with a move for Fran Villalba. The Valencia starlet has been likened to David Silva and reportedly has a £3.6 million buyout clause.
The 18-year-old is also being tracked by Barcelona and was the subject of a failed bid from Liverpool back in 2014. He could now follow the route of Silva and continue his development in the Premier League.
Tap-ins
- Leicester and Everton are interested in Sevilla midfielder Steven N'Zonzi, but the Spanish side are keen to agree to new terms with the French midfield powerhouse, according to the Mail. The Premier League duo are considering activating the £27 million release clause to add steel to their engine room.
- West Ham flop Simone Zaza could find an escape route to Spain, with Gazzetta dello Sport reporting that new Valencia boss Prandelli is keen on his countryman. Los Che would need to thrash out a "complicated" deal with the Hammers, who are obligated to sign the Azzurri international after his season on loan.The eastern side of Auckland Harbour Bridge where the Additional Waitemata Harbour Crossing tunnel is planned to be built.
The Government has given its first-ever clear indication it will help fund a rail link to Auckland's North Shore.
The announcement appeared in the Auckland Transport Alignment Project (ATAP) plan released on September 15 and states "Waitemata Harbour crossing improvements, including mass transit upgrade of Northern Busway" are a priority during the 2030s.
The report is significant because it is the first time the Government, Auckland Council and New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) have indicated together there will be a "mass transit" component to the Additional Waitemata Harbour Crossing (AWHC).
SUPPLIED An artist's impression of a light rail system on Auckland's Queen Street. Could we be seeing the beginning of such a system now?
The AWHC will be a $4 billion tunnel under Auckland Harbour to be completed around 2030.
READ MORE:
* Opinion: We need a rail network to the North Shore
* Rail to Auckland's North Shore will "absolutely" happen: Mayor Len Brown
* Opinion poll sought for harbour rail link
The ATAP report joined together all the major funding contributors to Auckland transport infrastructure: Ministry of Transport, NZTA, Auckland Council, Auckland Transport, the Treasury and State Services Commission.
Auckland Councillor from the North Shore Ward, Chris Darby, says the term "mass transit upgrade" of the harbour crossing essentially means light rail - not additional buses.
"It shows what I am interpreting as rail to the Shore because it's'mass transit' which is only really a type of rail," Darby says.
"I'm not picking that to be a heavy gauge rail, I'm picking that to be a light rapid transit, contemporary trams, to the Shore.
"For the first time in any document that I've seen, there is reference to the Waitemata Harbour Crossing improvements including mass transit upgrades of the Northern Busway."
However, TransportBlog spokesperson Matt Lowrie says, while he "struggles to think how'mass transit' would be just busses", rail to the North Shore is still not absolutely locked in.
"I understand that for some people there's an ideological opposition to the word 'rail' rather than just saying'mass transit'," Lowrie says.
"But yes, it's a way of saying 'rail', it almost certainly will be rail, but they just don't want to say it yet.
"There's still work to go in terms of people within government agencies accepting rail as a viable solution.
"Rail is the leading candidate though."
Auckland's future public transport network set out in the ATAP has "mass transit" of some description extending in a line from Britomart travelling North to Orewa.
There is also a planned public transport line shooting off from Akoranga to Takapuna.
Councillor Darby was, however, keen to stress a $4 billion shortfall in public transport funding needs to be resolved over the next decade.
"From 2018-28 we have $4 billion of funding to find which is currently not identified in council or government budgets," Darby says.
"In the next year Council and Government will need to dig down and come to agreement on non-ratepayer alternative funding tools.
"All these projects that are identified in this document, and the decades they're in, they're all subject to robust business cases.
"They are likely to move, some up, some down as we progress."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's campaign has shelled out at least $5.5 million on TV ads on NBC during the Olympics while Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE still hasn't aired an ad in the general election campaign, Bloomberg News reported Friday.
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The Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, which kicked off Friday, last 17 days. The ads will help Clinton reach a wide audience of men and young people, demographics she has struggled with.
Trump hasn't reserved any ad time during the games, even though he raised $82 million with the Republican National Committee in July. He had $37 million in his campaign account at the beginning of August.
NBC expects record viewership during the games. The 2012 Olympics in London drew in an average of 31 million viewers in prime time over 17 nights.
Clinton is expected to exceed President Obama's record expenditures on ads during the 2012 Olympics.
He spent $4.5 million on NBC during his reelection bid; his GOP rival, Mitt Romney, spent $2.8 million.A man shot at a car with two women and a child inside after getting into a dispute with one woman's brother, West Palm Beach police said.
The driver stopped her car and found two bullets lodged inside a bag full of clothes in the trunk. She told police that had the bag not been there, the bullet could've hit the child in the back seat, according to the report.
Police arrested Luke Hazen, 21, on Thursday.
Police said on Jan. 13, a woman was leaving the Caribbean Villas, an apartment complex located at 5865 Haverhill Road North, with a friend and a child.
As she was driving, a man she only knew as Luke came up to the car. The man, later identified as Hazen, was in an ongoing conflict with the woman's brother.
According to the woman, Hazen pulled out a gun from his waistband and she started to speed away. He shot two times at her before running away, according to the arrest report.
Hazen is charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and aggravated child abuse. He is being held at the Palm Beach County Jail in lieu of $250,000 bail.
kjacobson@sunsentinel.com, 561-243-6547More Food Articles Grocery Coupons Cookbook Reviews Free Newsletter Tweet Ranger Creek: Texas' First Brewstillery In The Still Of The Night by Randy Lankford Mark McDavid and his partners at San Antonio's Ranger Creek Distillery are on a quest. They've got their gear, they've got their plan and they've got mountains of enthusiasm. All they need now is a target. They're out to make Texas bourbon. The only problem is nobody knows what Texas bourbon is. And it's going to take some time to figure it out. What Is Texas Bourbon? "There is no defined Texas bourbon," McDavid explains. "Our philosophy is to be a truly craft distillery. To us, that means using local ingredients in interesting ways with innovative recipes." "There is no defined Texas bourbon," McDavid explains. "Our philosophy is to be a truly craft distillery. To us, that means using local ingredients in interesting ways with innovative recipes." Ranger Creek is among the trailblazers in craft distilling. The concept of making and selling liquor in small batches is today where craft beer brewing was 20 years ago. Where Texas was a follower on the craft brewing curve, it's on the leading edge of craft distilling. And when McDavid says "craft" he means it. Ranger Creek is a truly do-it-yourself operation. The team mills its own corn and barley. Bread box-sized barrels are aging in a 40-foot shipping container and grains are smoked in a 20-foot container that's had a firebox welded onto one end and a flue at the other. And when McDavid says "craft" he means it. Ranger Creek is a truly do-it-yourself operation. The team mills its own corn and barley. Bread box-sized barrels are aging in a 40-foot shipping container and grains are smoked in a 20-foot container that's had a firebox welded onto one end and a flue at the other. What Ranger Creek is actually making out of Lytle, Texas corn and Edwards Aquifer water is called "white dog." It's the clear alcohol that comes out of their custom-built Hungarian pot still. And while it's not as eye-watering as single-distilled white lightning, it's still powerful stuff. It's not until it's been in charred oak barrels for at least several months that it mellows and picks up the amber color and smoky flavor that will make it bourbon. "We're making a traditional bourbon-style whiskey," McDavid says, "but we're also going to be doing some more innovative things as well like a mesquite-smoked whiskey." Ranger Creek is experimenting with three different cooperages and two different chars on its barrels. With six possible combinations of wood and a handful of recipes, the startup operation is casting a wide net. "All that is to say we don't know what Texas bourbon is supposed to be so we're experimenting," says McDavid. "We want to set up that conversation with consumers. We want them to tell us. Our job is to try a few different things, release them and get feedback." Ranger Creek doesn't have any delusions about taking over the whiskey world, they just want to carve out a niche in it. "We're not trying to replace what you normally drink," adds McDavid. "We just want you to add a bottle to your liquor cabinet so when somebody comes to town and they want to try something very special and unique you'll have something Texan for them to try.
"Honestly, we can't make enough to replace your MacAllen or your Maker's Mark. We're not at that volume." In the meantime, there are bills to pay. That's when the distillery turns into a brewery. It's as simple as Head Distiller T.J. Miller handing over the keys to Head Brewer Rob Landerman. The idea came to McDavid and his partners after months of ongoing arguments over whether to open a distillery or a brewery. Why not both? "We all have a passion for beer," says McDavid, "and we started brewing beer together. We were talking about starting a business and T.J. kept sending us articles on craft brewing. We were making fun of him about just wanting free beer. "We started talking about the idea of a Texas bourbon and we thought, 'hold on, there's got to be a Texas bourbon already. And if there's not, there's got to be a good reason.' It turns out there wasn't a Texas bourbon and there wasn't a good reason either. "That's when we realized we could do both of the things we're really passionate about." Bourbon and Beer "Barbeque in a glass" On the beer side of the house, Ranger Creek is brewing an oatmeal pale ale, a mesquite-smoked porter McDavid describes as "barbeque in a glass," a Belgian dark ale called La Bestia Aimable (The Friendly Beast) and a lager. On the beer side of the house, Ranger Creek is brewing an oatmeal pale ale, a mesquite-smoked porter McDavid describes as "barbeque in a glass," a Belgian dark ale called La Bestia Aimable (The Friendly Beast) and a lager. "The reception has been really good," adds McDavid. "We sort of thought San Antonio would be excited about having a local brewery but it's been even better than we expected. "What we're seeing is the 'craftier' beers are doing well in Austin because there's more of a progressive beer culture there. We're going to do a hefeweizen as a summer seasonal. That will probably resonate more in San Antonio. San Antonio's a little more of a bottled beer town. Austin's more of a draft town. People are typically younger in Austin and out drinking in bars. Where in San Antonio, it's grab a six pack and head home." McDavid calls his lager a "gateway" beer, something casual beer drinkers will recognize. The idea is to create a Ranger Creek following that will then experiment with its more exotic offerings. "Most people have tried a pale ale by now," he explains. "Our porter is really a beer drinker's beer. And our Belgian dark ale is expected to appeal to wine drinkers. It's dark in color and sweet in flavor and has all this nice, dark fruit." The ultimate goal for Ranger Creek is to integrate its operations to the point it's making beer that's aged in barrels that once held its bourbon. "That would be the pinnacle to me," McDavid says. The ultimate goal for Ranger Creek is to integrate its operations to the point it's making beer that's aged in barrels that once held its bourbon. "That would be the pinnacle to me," McDavid says. "Once we release the bourbon we plan to start doing some really exciting stuff. "Let's say we have a dinner at one of the restaurants here and we pair the first three courses with our beer and then the last two with our whiskey. And we have all kinds of bourbon barrel-aged beer going along with that and a mesquite-smoked bourbon you can drink with a really nice steak. That's what we're trying to achieve, that combination of flavors with the beer and the whiskey and the food element." San Antonio, with its blue-collar reputation, may be a tough market to sell $100 bourbon-beef combos. But McDavid is eager to try. "Part of our approach is to work with other people who are trying to make San Antonio into 'that kind of town.' I think there are enough people here who are excited about developing those interesting local flavors that I think it can work. It's going to be a challenge. Ranger Creek Brewing & Distilling
4834 Whirlwind Dr.
San Antonio, TX 78217
(210) 775-2099
Tours available weekly.
Website:
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or Name Your Own Price 4834 Whirlwind Dr.San Antonio, TX 78217(210) 775-2099Tours available weekly.Website: http://drinkrangercreek.com/
"We have a lot people here who are interested in it either naturally or because they're from California or Austin or Colorado and say, 'Let's bring that here.' We're all working towards kicking San Antonio in the ass a little bit into this food and beer culture." Smokin' Glazed Chicken Brine 2 gallons water
1/2 cup vinegar (white)
2 tablespoons pickling spices
1 teaspoon allspice
2 teaspoons black pepper
2 teaspoons garlic powder
2 teaspoons onion powder
2 teaspoons celery salt
3 cups kosher salt
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons maple extract
2 teaspoons liquid smoke Prep 1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup cajun seasoning Mop 2 cups apple cider vinegar
2 cups water
2 tablespoons salt
2 tablespoons black pepper Glaze 6 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons honey Guest of Honor 8 lbs chicken For the brine: Combine the first 10 ingredients, bring to a boil, then let cool. Add maple extract and liquid smoke. "We have a lot people here who are interested in it either naturally or because they're from California or Austin or Colorado and say, 'Let's bring that here.' We're all working towards kicking San Antonio in the ass a little bit into this food and beer culture."For the brine: Combine the first 10 ingredients, bring to a boil, then let cool. Add maple extract and liquid smoke. Rinse chicken and pat dry. Brine chicken for at least 4 hours. Overnight is best. Remove pieces, rinse in cold water and pat dry. Coat with oil and season with Cajun seasoning. Prepare smoker and smoke chicken at 230 degrees for about two hours, basting with mop every 30 minutes. For the mop: Combine vinegar, water, salt, and pepper in a pot and bring to a boil. Remove as set aside. When chicken is done, coat with glaze and move pieces to a hot grill to crisp the skin. This will only take a few minutes. For the glaze: Combine 3 parts butter to one part honey. Make as much as you need to finish the job. Remove and serve immediately.Since We Last Spoke: Brian LaHair has become The Babe reincarnated in Cubbie Blue, Josh Hamilton went on a binge (the home run hitting kind, not the other kind), NATO has begun its takeover of our fine city, President Obama endorsed gay marriage, and we’ve achieved peace in the Middle East. Well, maybe not the last one, but while we’re fantasizing about things that never happened but should…
…The Bulls just swept the listless, overmatched, lazy defending, inconsistent, bite-off-more-than-they-can-chew-by-saying-they’d-rather-see-The-Bulls-in-The-Playoffs Philadelphia 76ers, and they’re up 2-0 against the obviously aging Boston Celtics. Doug Collins has pulled out the last of his receding Silver Fox coiffure trying to figure out how to stop reigning MVP Derrick Rose from shredding his entire team en route to averaging a triple double for the series. The few Sixer fans who’ve bothered to show up for the two games at Wachovia Center chanted, “MVP, MVP!” every time Chicago’s finest stepped to the free throw line to put the nail in the coffin of this clearly inferior team. Luol Deng fed off of D-Rose’s championship tone setting play, and he showed why he was an All-Star earlier this year. Joakim Noah tore up the court the way only he can. He embarrassed the hell out of Spencer Hawes at every opportunity.
I know this was a shortened season with more likelihood for injury and setbacks, but damn! This was simply ridiculous. There will forever be an asterisk linked to whoever claims Larry O’Brien this year, but this really felt like Da Bulls’ year. For real. Legitimately. The same feeling is probably being felt by Oklahoma City or Miami or (yet again) San Antonio natives this year, too. Well, go ahead and marinate on this: take Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden off of the Thunder. Remove LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh from the Heat roster. Timmy goes down along with Manu and Tony? Hell, take the top three players from any contender, and they instantly become candidates for the lottery.
Fuck the 2012 NBA season. Derrick Rose may never be the same again. A torn ACL takes away a leaper’s leap and a cutter’s cut, especially a 6’3″ point guard’s ability to explode to the cup the way Derrick does (did?). No one wants to hear this, and I guarantee he feels worse than anybody about the whole situation, but it bears mentioning that without Derrick the Bulls might not ever get back to their championship level with Thibs’ current core.
Anybody remember Penny Hardaway by any chance? Exactly.
But it has been a depressing season this year for Chicago sports. Not the traditional “our teams suck” brand of depression. It’s the brand of depression that involves high expectations, championship-caliber ball being played and then injuries and unforeseen circumstances taking over the fate of a season. The window in professional sports gets smaller and smaller for franchises, and the Bulls’ window might have just slammed shut with one snap of a kneecap. The same happened with the Bears this year. And the Blackhawks.
Which brings me to a very important existential question: is it better to have loved and lost or never to have loved at all? The sports version of that conundrum boils down to this: is it better to have a great team and have it injure itself before potential gets realized or just to have sucked all along. Maybe we should round up a gang of Cleveland Browns or Charlotte Bobcats (sorry, Mike) fans to gain some perspective into the world of sucking. Or we can just take a cue from one of our baseball teams, and just, oh my gosh, I can’t believe I’m saying this…
…wait till next year.When he moved to Miami from Austin in May last year, Josh Frank wanted to simply re-create the Blue Starlite, the urban drive-in theater he launched in Texas.
Four months later, the Blue Starlite Mini Urban Drive-In opened its gate in a small Wynwood lot next to O Cinema. The drive-in earned plenty of buzz, but Frank says he never quite felt settled into the area. "[Wynwood was] a great place to start because it's where people in Miami associate 'the now,' and at the time, the drive-in was new... I proved myself in Wynwood."
Blue Starlite Mini Urban Drive-In: 3500 Main Hwy., Coconut Grove; miamiurbandrivein.com. The grand opening of the new location is scheduled for Monday, June 23, with films The Coconuts and Angel on My Shoulder.
But when Frank first drove around Miami looking for a spot to drop his drive-in, he noticed a secluded nook, still visible from all the right angles, tucked within the cobbled streets of Coconut Grove. It was right there, in the back lot of the beleaguered Coconut Grove Playhouse, that Frank envisioned his Miami drive-in.
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Next month, that vision will become a reality, he says. The Blue Starlite will move to the long-shuttered playhouse, effectively launching the building's revival.
"I feel very honored and excited to be able to give the Playhouse a use within what it is meant for," Frank says. "I get to use the Blue Starlite to revive it in a way and also to be able to have people enjoy it again."
The playhouse has stood vacant since 2006, amid rising debts and accusations of mismanagement by its board of directors. Until last year, its fate remained uncertain. Then, in early April, a meeting at Miami City Hall was held to determine the future of the historic building, which dates to 1927 and once catered to the likes of Tennessee Williams and Liza Minnelli. The most popular plan: refurbishing the building using $20 million in Miami-Dade County bonds to turn it into a working theater once again. That plan has yet to be finalized and put into motion.
Meanwhile, Frank's dream lot was up for grabs. The Miami Parking Authority was renting the space, so Frank pitched his vision to the Business District Council and to the Parking Authority. After he spent two months lobbying for his cause, the location was his.
If the city's plans work out, it'll be the first of several ventures on the property.
"The big idea," says Michael Spring, director of the county's Department of Cultural Affairs and one of the spearheads reviving the playhouse, "is to [ultimately] return great theater to the site... I always say that the playhouse was like the ancestral home of theater here."
An architectural firm will be hired this year, Spring confirms, to work out the details of the renovations. When they're completed, GableStage and Florida International University's theater program will partner to produce live shows at the venue.
But before any real work will begin on the playhouse, Spring and his team are working on fixing up the surrounding parking, including the future home of the Blue Starlite, and making sure the building is secured from vandals.
Frank insists his freshman stint in Wynwood was successful. So why close shop and move to a new spot, away from the city nightlife?
"Bottom line: People aren't coming to Wynwood for the kind of experience I'm offering," he explains, saying that Coconut Grove has the kind of artistic history he's looking for.
Plus, the new space is larger. In the former lot, he could fit only up to 18 cars — and even then, he describes the area as "tight." In the playhouse lot, he can comfortably fit 30 to 35 cars while still creating a boutique film experience.
The Miami Parking Authority uses the playhouse lot on weekends, so Frank will operate the Blue Starlite on weekdays only. But that doesn't seem to bother him. "Maybe I should stop competing with all the millions of things that go on during the weekend in Miami," he reasons, "and concentrate on the week."
So the Blue Starlite's retro concession stand and vintage speakers will have to share their new home. But that compromise is worth it, Frank says, for the chance to become part of local history.
"Whatever the Coconut Grove Playhouse is years from now, people can pass by and say, 'Oh, that used to be a movie theater,' 'that used to be a playhouse,' or 'that used to be a drive-in.' I love that idea."Nationally syndicated radio talk show host Mark Levin (Flickr Photo/Gage Skidmore)
On his nationally syndicated radio talk show Wednesday, host Mark Levin lambasted the media and praised Donald Trump, saying if exposing the media is the only thing Trump does, he will have been a successful president.
“I honestly believe if this is the only thing President Trump succeeds in doing he will have been a successful president – that is, exposing the media,” said Mark Levin. “For decade, after decade, after decade, and now it’s worse than ever, the media have fraudulently presented themselves to the American people – to you – as some kind of objective nonpartisan entity just reporting the news. Now they’re all out of the closet, and it’s not very pretty.”
Levin’s comments came after President Trump called out the “fake news” media at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona.
Below is a transcript of Levin’s remarks from his Wednesday show:
“I honestly believe if this is the only thing President Trump succeeds in doing he will have been a successful president – that is, exposing the media. For decade, after decade, after decade, and now it’s worse than ever, the media have fraudulently presented themselves to the American people – to you – as some kind of objective nonpartisan entity just reporting the news. Now they’re all out of the closet, and it’s not very pretty. “You know, they say we need to have a national conversation about race. We’ve been having a national conversation about race since at least the Civil War and before. “We never have a national conversation about the behavior and the partisanship of the media. It’s time that we have a national conversation about the behavior and partisanship of the media, and I think Donald Trump has rightly triggered this. “I don’t mean a debate about the First Amendment and freedom of the press. There’s no question about that. I’m an Originalist. It’s the left that keeps trying to destroy the Constitution, not us, not me. But an honest to goodness discussion in this country about the media. “The vast majority of the media are corporate entities. They’re for profit entities, and then, of course, you have government media like PBS and NPR, which we shouldn’t even have. There’s no need for PBS and NPR. You want to listen to liberals who are monotonous, who are monotone, then, you know, let them compete in the commercial world. There’s no need for government radio and government TV, and the good parts of either can be sold off to commercial enterprises.Labor contemplates Obama presidency
With a month before the election, a top union leader and Obama ally is already cautioning others in labor not to ask for too many specific favors from President Obama.
In a memo to another labor official, John Wilhelm, a top official of the merged UNITE HERE hotel and textile workers unions, writes that labor should respond to an Obama presidency by launching a massive organizing campaign, but warns against "flood[ing] a new Obama administration with all sorts of proposals for regulatory changes, executive orders, appointments, etc."
Instead, Wilhelm writes in the September 18 memo to Tom Tom Woodruff, the director of the Strategic Organizing Center at the Change to Win federation of unions, labor should ask Obama to use his "bully pulpit" and a few key appointments to further the labor cause. (The memo was provided to Politico by a union official.)
The memo is a mark of how immediate the prospect of an Obama presidency feels to elemets of the Democratic Party, and how the jockeying has already begun for its favor. Wilhelm's was the first major labor union to endorse Obama, and ihs memo is seen by some as an attempt to head off the flood of demands Obama expects.
Wilhelm writes:
I disagree with the notion that we should flood a new Obama administration with all sorts of proposals for regulatory changes, executive orders, appointments, etc. To the contrary, I believe that we should have only one demand of an Obama administration: that the President of |
Eventually, though, a federal court ruled that this was simply a scheme to avoid paying the minimum wage, and he was ordered to pay his workers the accumulated sums he owed them, plus a double-time penalty thrown in for good measure. Wal-Mart cut the checks, but Walton also summoned the employees at a major cluster of his stores to a meeting. ‘I’ll fire anyone who cashes the check,’ he told them.
As Lichtenstein reported, in 1960s Congress passed legislation that nearly doubled the federal minimum wage (to $1.15 an hour) and imposed stricter limits on which businesses were exempt from minimum wage standards (excluding only businesses whose annual sales were less than $250,000 per year, markedly lower than the previous ceiling of $1 million in sales per year). Walton, who had been paying newly displaced female agricultural workers rather low wages to clerk at his stores, managed to “duck under the new minimum wage sales standard” due to the unusual nature of his stores’ business structure (a structure that was already in place for other reasons; not, as suggested above, one that was concocted solely to skirt minimum wage laws):
But all this changed in the early 1960s. Like the domestics and farmworkers whom the southern political and economic elite had excluded from coverage under New Deal social legislation in the 1930s, the chain stores, backstopped by a Republican-southern Democratic alliance in Congress, waged a bitter rearguard battle to exempt some 4 million retail workers, mainly white women, from minimum wage guidelines. John F. Kennedy made a raise and an extension of the minimum wage for retail workers one of the key issues in his quest for the presidency, while conservative Republicans, led by Senator Barry Goldwater, the Arizona department store heir, denounced the idea. Kennedy and the liberals won this round, although the new law faced tough going in the rural South, where the $1.15-an-hour minimum almost doubled the going rate for female clerks. Sam Walton, for one, hated the new minimum wage, and he would simply not abide by it. Of course, Walton’s attitude was not unusual for a white southerner of this era. If their seniority-rich representatives in Congress failed to stanch a law they thought unfair to the racial or labor arrangements characteristic of their region, many otherwise law-abiding southerners simply violated it. And Walton thought he saw a loophole that fit his business practices. The new minimum wage law exempted all retail establishments whose annual sales were less than $1 million a year, a ceiling lowered to $250,000 in 1965 when Congress was briefly controlled by liberal Democrats. Taken as a whole, Walton’s chain had sales well above this limit, but as he expanded into the discount sector in the 1960s, he created a series of single-store, family-dominated corporate shells, each with a slightly different ownership structure. Initially, these had been designed as a vehicle by which store managers, local investors, and members of the Robson family could contribute their capital to the cash-short Walton chain. By the 1960s this increasingly baroque ownership structure also had the decided benefit of allowing Walton to duck under the new minimum wage sales standard. This saved him a lot of money, because in 1968 the minimum wage had climbed to its twentieth-century apogee, but Walton could employ, at “pin money” wages, thousands of women who were pouring off Arkansas and Missouri farms during the years when the revolution in American agriculture belatedly reached the Ozark plateau.
As Lichtenstein also observed, when court decisions held that Walton could not avoid minimum wage laws via the method he was using and required him to pay back wages and penalties to clerks at three of his stores, he maintained that he would “fire anyone who cashes the check” before relenting:
When the courts finally ruled that his decentralized ownership structure was but a scheme to avoid the new wage and hour law, Walton and most of his store managers were furious. They hated the assistant district attorney from Fort Smith who pressed the case, because, as one manager put it, now “dingbats in the store would be making $1.15 an hour.” When a court order called for Walton to issue checks to the clerks at his stores in Harrison, Rogers, and Springdale for back pay, including a double-time penalty for what they had lost, he told a meeting of his employees, “I’ll fire anyone who cashes the check.” Cooler heads soon prevailed, but Walton’s determination to hold the line on his labor costs had hardly softened.
Nor had his contempt for the regulatory state and its laws.
(The account of the “I’ll fire anyone who cashes the check” quote is, according to the referenced book’s endnotes, based on the author’s interview with a Walmart store manager in 2006, some forty years after the fact, so its accuracy may be questionable.)Image caption The temples of Khajuraho feature a wide variety of erotic sculpture
Some social media users in India are seething over a Hindu group's demand to ban a famous ancient book on love and sex in temples which are widely known for their erotic sculptures.
The leader of the little-known Bajrang Sena group was outraged at the reading material being hawked inside the world-famous Khajuraho temples.
"These temples have religious significance…. How can you allow Kamasutra to be sold in the sacred premises?" Jyoti Agarwal told the Hindustan Times. "What sort of moral values are we passing on to our younger generation?"
The group asked the police to step in, arguing that selling the book in a holy place is an affront to Indian culture.
But Twitter users were quick to point out an apparent contradiction: the Khajuraho temples are widely known for their sculptures, including stone carvings of men and women in various sexual positions.
"Did they look at the walls of the Khajuraho temple before asking for this?" asked one Twitter user. Another posted a picture of some of the statues with the message: "That awkward moment when those protesting the sale of Kamasutra books at Khajuraho look up at the temples."
When asked by the Hindustan Times, Agarwal said she wasn't opposed to the sculptures remaining in the temples, but argued that they shouldn't be heavily promoted.
Her view didn't stop thousands of critics of Bajrang Sena, a right-wing nationalist group, from tweeting about the controversy, many using the hashtag "Khajuraho".
Image copyright Twitter
Image copyright Twitter
A Unesco world heritage site, the Khajuraho temples attract millions of tourists from across the world. The group of about 20 temples in India's central Madhya Pradesh state were built over a thousand years ago and belong to two different religions - Hinduism and Jainism.
The debate over erotic art is the latest episode in India's culture wars, with some arguing that Hindu nationalist groups have become bolder since the arrival of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the national scene in 2014. But amid all the outrage, there were plenty of jokes.
"Sexual reproduction is against Indian culture," Facebook user Vageesh Vishnoi sarcastically wrote. "Please use morally approved techniques like parthenogenesis and binary fission."
"Could it be that the only purpose of sites like Khajuraho was pornographic?" tweeted @CholericCleric. "For all we know they had a subscription based business model."
Blog by Vineet Khare
You can find BBC Trending on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @BBCtrending. All our stories are at bbc.com/trending.It’s time for the birthday of another 49ers legend! Roger Craig turns 57 today, so wish him a happy birthday! The 49ers social media team put together a video to celebrate it with some comments from a host of 49ers legends.
One notable comment from former 49ers running back Bill Ring was about seeing him one day in the Hall of Fame. Ring said, “that’s just a matter of time.”
Craig put together some big years for the 49ers in the 1980s. Most notably, in 1985 he rushed for 1,050 yards, and hauled in 1,016 receiving yards. It was the first time a running back had surpassed 1,000 yards in each category in the same season.
His traditional counting stats likely are not enough for some Hall of Fame voters, but his importance to the 49ers West Coast offense can not be denied. My guess is he won’t get in with the regular committee, but instead might have a chance one day with the veterans’ committee.
In the meantime, we can at least celebrate his greatness on his birthday! Happy birthday to Roger Craig!NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that voters had a fundamental right to know about the educational background of people contesting polls and that election of a candidate could be set aside for making false declaration on educational qualifications in the nomination paper.The ruling came when a bench of Justice AR Dave and Justice L Nageswara Rao quashed the election of Manipur Congress MLA, Mairembam Prithviraj, for falsely declaring in his nomination papers that he had an MBA degree. The court held that the right to vote would be meaningless unless citizens were well-informed about the antecedents of candidates, including their educational qualification.It said all information about a candidate contesting elections must be available in public domain as exposure to public scrutiny was one of the surest means to cleanse the democratic governing system and have competent legislators. “This court held that the voter has a fundamental right to information about the contesting candidates. The voter has the choice to decide whether he should cast a vote in favour of a person involved in a criminal case. He also has a right to decide whether holding of an educational qualification or holding of property is relevant for electing a person to be his representative,” the bench said.“It is clear from the law laid down by this court that every voter has a fundamental right to know about the educational qualification of a candidate. It is also clear from the provisions of the Representation of the People Act, Rules and form 26 that there is a duty cast on the candidates to give correct information about their educational qualifications,” the bench said.The Congress MLA contended that there was a “clerical error” on the part of his lawyer and agent who had filed the nomination papers in 2012 and pleaded to the court not to quash his election as the defect was not of substantial nature. Prithviraj had mentioned in the nomination papers that he had passed MBA in 2004 from Mysore University. The bench, however, rejected his plea saying the election result was materially affected by the false declaration and it had to be quashed. The court noted that he had made the false declaration in the 2008 assembly election as well.“The contention of the appellant that the declaration relating to his educational qualification in the affidavit is a clerical error cannot be accepted. It is not an error committed once. Since 2008, he was making the statement that he has an MBA degree. The information provided by him in the affidavit filed in form 26 would amount to a false declaration. The said false declaration cannot be said to be a defect which is not substantial,” the court said.“It is no more res integra (issue not decided by court) that every candidate has to disclose his educational qualification to subserve the right to information of the voter. Having made a false declaration relating to his educational qualification, he cannot be permitted to contend that the declaration is not of a substantial character,” the bench added.Donald Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page has invoked the name of Martin Luther King Jr. in a letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ) accusing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of carrying out a witch hunt against him and members of the new administration over possible ties to Russia.
Furthermore, Carter argues that the Russia investigation is motivated by the Clinton family, which he refers to as a “regime” in his letter. Page speculates that he has found himself in the crosshairs for being Catholic, a man, and a military veteran. He goes on to request that the DOJ look into the “disinformation, suppression of dissent, hate crimes and other abuses” that were carried out by Hillary and her team during the 2016 presidential elections.
“The actions by the Clinton regime and their associates may be among the most extreme examples of human rights violations observed during any election in U.S. history since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was similarly targeted for his anti-war views in the 1960’s.”
Carter Page was named a potential foreign policy adviser during Donald Trump's presidential campaign last year, but allegations that he met with Russian officials pushed him away from that post in September. He now claims that those efforts are part of a Clinton conspiracy. [Photo by Pavel Golovkin/AP Photo]
When pressed further by investigative journalism site, The Intercept, about how the Clinton campaign has committed hate crimes, Carter Page responded that he had faced constant harassment from Hillary’s team.
“It all seems to be pretty textbook definition to me (and my lawyers). I’ve been harassed non-stop for the last year, based on these and other lies originated by the Clinton campaign.”
Formerly, Carter was a Merrill Lynch investment banker in Moscow, and now he heads a New York consulting firm. After the president had named him as one of five potential security advisers last March, Trump’s own administration sought to downplay Page’s involvement in foreign policy decision-making.
In September, he became a larger problem for the Trump campaign when Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid called for an investigation into reported meetings between Page and sanctioned members of the Russian government. These efforts, particularly coming from the FBI and CIA, appear to be where he draws parallels with Martin Luther King Jr.
Carter himself has also diminished his role in the White House. Speaking with PBS Newshour in an interview where he referred to the allegations against him as “fake news,” Page highlighted that he had never actually met privately with Trump, nor did he consider himself to have a significant voice in the government. Still, he did claim that Russia was being used unfairly as a device to discredit him and Donald Trump, largely at the behest of establishment Democrats.
“It comes from deep animosity and deep negative feelings against the Russians. And I think, you know, you just have to look back at the history of the last 70 years, and it’s pretty clear where that originates from. And Mrs. Clinton and her team did a great job of ramping that up. And it continues to this day, with the help of the likes of Sally Yates and others that were holdovers from the Obama administration.”
Carter is likely referring to the work of federal intelligence agencies to discredit and intimidate King when he became the face of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Widespread surveillance of Dr. King’s life has been well-documented, including a letter released in 2014 that appears to indicate that the FBI was encouraging the activist to commit suicide, saying the agency had proof of extramarital affairs that would prove what a “fraud” he was. The organization also repeatedly sent such information to his wife in an attempt to break up their marriage, reported Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“No person can overcome the facts, no even a fraud like yourself. Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself and in all your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time…. Listen to yourself, you filthy, abnormal animal. You are on the record… there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it.”
In recent years, the FBI has made an example of what current director Jamey Comey refers to as the agency’s “shameful” legacy on Martin Luther. New agents are expected to undergo training meant to root out racial biases that have plagued such organizations for years, specifically focusing in on their treatment of King Jr. Such classes also include explorations of other times that the FBI took a controversial stance on racial issues, such as when J. Edgar Hoover refused an investigation into the murder of Emmett Till, saying the uproar around the case was likely the work of Communist agitators, reported LA Times.
In 2013, Comey ordered that all new agents must visit the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Washington, in addition to a trip to the Holocaust memorial, reported Reuters.
“It will serve as a different kind of lesson – one more personal to the bureau – of the dangers of becoming untethered to oversight and accountability.”
Though Martin Luther King did briefly consider running for president, he ultimately decided against any such aspirations, reported Rolling Stone. Dr. King thought it best to put his energy behind grassroots organizing such as the Poor People’s Campaign rather than face an uphill battle for the nation’s highest office that he was guaranteed to lose.
“I have come to think of my role as one which operates outside the realm of partisan politics.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. faced a concentrated effort from federal intelligence agency's to undermine his work in the 1960s civil rights movement, something that Carter Page, a former Trump foreign policy adviser, sees happening today with the current administration over ties with Russia. [Photo by William Lovelace/Express/Getty Images]
Do you think it’s fair for Carter Page to compare the investigation into links between Russia and the Trump administration to the FBI’s efforts to destroy Martin Luther King Jr.?
[Featured Image by Express Newspapers/Getty Images]International Day of Happiness
Yup! Today is the #InternationalDayofHappiness!
#InternationalDayOfHappiness Tweets
Days of Happiness: Day Nineteen
The 30 days of Happy Thoughts series is inspired by the International Day of Happiness (March 20th, 2017).
There was such a huge turnout of responses for our Happiness celebrations. We’ve got a HUGE mashup of Q&As from fellow bloggers and business owners today! Twenty-eight Q&As today to be exact and so I split them into two posts because one post was just too big! I want to again thank everyone for the many incredible and thoughtful answers that have been given. Enjoy reading!
#HappyActs #MakeItHappy #ChooseHappiness
Day of Happiness Celebrations: Q&A | Part One
Q&A ONE | Early Retirement Now Happiness means different things to different people, what does Happiness mean to you? A happy retirement, or a happy life in general, means that I have ample time to spend with my loved-ones, I’m healthy enough to enjoy that time and I have the financial resources to cover my basic living expenses and a good travel budget. So, for me, happiness is a function of three ingredients: Time, Health and Money. I have no qualm including money. After all, in the context of the Declaration of Independence 200+ years ago (Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness), happiness meant essentially prosperity. But to be sure I know of the limitations and the “Money doesn’t buy happiness” cliche. Most of the time folks with money are unhappy because of the lack of health or the lack of time with their loved-ones. Or worse, the lack of loved-ones! Do you believe happiness is an emotion or more of a state of mind? One doesn’t rule out the other. Emotion is the more short-term version, while a happy state of mind is a more long-term version of happiness. But it’s mostly the the state of mind I’m after when pursuing early retirement. In fact, sometimes emotions are in the way of achieving early retirement, for example when wasting money on “stuff” that gives a short-term emotional boost, not unlike a sugar high, but mostly emptiness afterward. Do you consider being happy important to you? Why? My background is in economics and there we call it “Utility” rather than happiness. We got utility functions, not happiness functions, but the idea is the same. Of course, in economics it sometimes sounds like utility is purely based on materialistic ingredients: u(c) and c is consumption. But there is no reason why utility shouldn’t include health and time (=leisure) as well. I try to maximize happiness/utility subject to a sequence of budget constraints. In that sense, happiness/utility is not just important. It’s what life’s all about! What do you consider a fundamental barrier to Happiness in your life? If we consider Money, Time, and Health the three main ingredients to happiness then for the average person going through his or her life there is always one element missing: When you’re young, you got health and time, but no money. When you’re middle-aged you got health and money but not enough time. When you’re old you got time and money but potentially failing health. One of the three is always missing. I currently feel the constraint of not having enough time with my family, and with family I mean not just my wife and daughter but also extended family. As a member of the FIRE community I try to square this circle by saving aggressively to build a nest egg large enough so that I can “buy” time – and have all three ingredients in my early to mid-40s. How important is wealth and money to your own happiness? Wealth and money alone will not make me happy, but the easy substitutability between money and time is worth a lot. With a large enough nest egg in my 40s I am able to chop off not years but decades from my working life and “buy back” my time. There was a great post by Physician on FIRE, on how money used to buy him stuff, now it buys him time – check it out! How important is health and wellness to happiness? As I indicated above, health is one of the three ingredients to a happy life and it is the hardest to replace or renew. It’s possible to make more money. It’s possible to “buy time” but “buying health” is much harder! In that sense, health and wellness have to be cherished and guarded and I try to stay healthy and fit. I hiked the Grand Canyon North Rim to South Rim last year without too much trouble (took me about ten hours for 24 miles) and I hope I will stay fit throughout my retirement years. What has been the happiest moment in your life? I would argue it’s a tie between my wedding day and the day my daughter was born. Do you have any specific goals or resolutions for 2017? If so, would your share your top two that directly relate to your own Pursuit of Happiness? My projected retirement date is early 2018. If there is another “International Day of Happiness” in March that year, I might even be able to retire on that day. Preparing for that change in lifestyle will be the plan for 2017. One issue I grapple with right now, is how much money is enough to buy myself out of the workforce? That’s another way of saying “What’s a safe withdrawal rate?” So, I have been doing a lot of research on that topic, see our series on safe withdrawal rate research. Do you consider giving to others or charity work an important part of your own Pursuit and why? Volunteering and charity work will certainly be a good part of my retirement. Currently, I give to charities and my church. It’s mostly money not so much time. Once I retire I will likely shift that balance and dedicate more of my time. What 2 things have you learned in your own pursuit that you would like to share with others? 1: Be happy with what you have. When I got a pay raise, I kept my lifestyle (mostly) unchanged and saved the extra income. Over time there was undoubtedly some lifestyle inflation, going from graduate student to working in finance. Without ever feeling constrained or depraved or unhappy I accumulated a pretty generous nest egg. If I can do it everybody can. 2: Don’t stress out over market fluctuations. Especially if you’re still saving for retirement view a market dip as a buying opportunity. I made a lot of money with the equity purchases from 2001-2003 and 2008/9. If you could recommend only three websites/books/articles to anyone reading this, what would they be, and why? I found a lot of great blogs and articles. So many, in fact, that I feel guilty I can’t read them all and I can’t comment on all of them and I can’t write guest posts on all of them. I don’t have enough time right now (but I might once I’m retired). If I mention only three of them it wouldn’t feel right leaving out the others. If your readers want to find three great blogs then do this: First, click on the blogroll of one of your favorite blogs and check out one new site. Second, go through the comments section and explore the blog of one of the commenters. Third, go to the new RockstarFinance blog directory and check out one new random blog. At least one of them, probably all three of them will be awesome! What is your blog/website address and theme (if you want to share) for 2017? I blog at EarlyRetirementNow.com. My motto is “You can’t afford not to retire early”
Q&A TWO | Abovare Happiness means different things to different people, what does Happiness mean to you? Philosophically, happiness, to me, is finding balance. Happiness is the right balance between easy and hard, fast and slow, struggle and calm, and cheap and expensive. Too much of something, no matter how good it seems on the surface, always leaves me numb. More concretely, and from a personal point of view, happiness is a whole day spent with my spouse doing nothing in particular, and celebrating Christmas Eve with my entire family. And happiness is hours spent traversing the forests or mountains on cross-country skis, and it is an evening spent in a cabin, playing cards with my closest friends. And happiness is discovering or rediscovering an incredible record. More than anything else, happiness is the moments I get to share with the people who mean the most to me. Do you believe happiness is an emotion or more of a state of mind? I believe that, just as some can run farther and quicker than others, some have a larger capacity for happiness than others. And I think that, just as we can train our stamina and our pace, we can work on improving our capacity for happiness. To answer the question, though, I suppose I would say that happiness is an emotion we need to be in the right state of mind to experience properly. Do you consider being happy important to you? Why? Yes, being happy is an essential part of life. But, as I alluded to in my answer to the first question, it is all about balance. Sadness, sorrow and misery are, just as much as happiness is, feelings we also need to experience to grow as human beings. And, I would argue, the conflicting emotions are integral for us to derive joy from our happy moments. A flat line is just a flat line, no matter how high up on the emotional register it appears. What do you consider a fundamental barrier to Happiness in your life? Myself, and my mindset. I have yet to encounter something standing between me and happiness that I don’t have the power to remove by adapting my mindset. I think that is true for most people who have been as lucky as me and had all their primary needs covered throughout their lives. How important is wealth and money to your own happiness? Honestly, not very important. Wealth is about freedom of choice and security for my family and me, but happiness should come before that. As long as one can cover their primary needs, I think that is the point you start to design your life in a way that maximises your happiness, and then you start focusing on accumulating money and building wealth. In practice, though, I think discovering one often leads to the other. How important is health and wellness to happiness? Mental illnesses directly impede your capacity to experience joy and happiness, so mental wellness is vital. Physical health restrictions I think you can overcome regarding letting them restrict your happiness, but I have immense respect for those who manage to stay positive in the face of severe health issues. I’m not certain I’d have the strength to emulate them if it were me. What has been the happiest moment in your life? I could list a hundred different moments that were pure happiness, but not for the life of me would I be able to rank them in any meaningful way. Do you have any specific goals or resolutions for 2017? If so, would your share your top two that directly relate to your own Pursuit of Happiness? Yes, I do have goals for the year. Firstly, all research I’ve come across points to physical activity as an important factor for happiness, so I have set some goals to try and improve my physical shape further. Among others, I want to run a 10K in less than 40 minutes, and I want to try and log at least 120 workout sessions throughout the year. Secondly, I have found that one of the best ways to keep expanding my mind and keeping it somewhat focused, is by reading books. Sure, I love reading articles online and whatnot, but reading a book from cover to cover requires a level of attention and effort that is becoming sparse in today’s world of endless quick stimuli. So I have set a goal of reading more books than I did in 2016. Do you consider giving to others or charity work an important part of your own Pursuit and why? Empowering change and growth in others is always a great feeling, and one that I hope to make a much bigger part of my life in the years to come. Sending money to charity without any personal engagement means little to me, however. What 2 things have you learned in your own pursuit that you would like to share with others? Challenge the societal norms and assumptions most people take for granted, and examine whether they hold true for you and align with your values before centring your life around them. And don’t ever compare yourself to others. “Comparison is the death of joy,” Mark Twain said, and those word ring as true as ever now, more than a century later. If you could recommend only three websites/books/articles to anyone reading this, what would they be, and why? My first recommendation is the website WaitButWhy (http://waitbutwhy.com) because Tim Urban sees the world and writes about it in a way that makes me think. And we could all do with a bit more thinking. Next, I’m going to do something as unorthodox as to recommend not only a book that is not only fiction but fantasy, no less. And, when I recommend a Neil Gaiman book, it’s not even American Gods! My recommendation is the book The Ocean and the End of the Lane because it resonated with something deep inside me, tackling themes such as reconciling with the past and trying to find peace. My overall point is that everyone should read a bit of fiction now and then, because it helps us reflect and indulge in introspection in a way that the facts of non-fiction never will. My last recommendation is the poem The Road Not Taken (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/44272), by Robert Frost. It is only four stanzas or twenty lines long, yet it tackles themes such as life and mortality, contemplation, regret, and, of course, happiness. What is your blog/website address and theme (if you want to share) for 2017? My website is Abovare (https://abovare.com/), and it centers around personal finance, but I also sway into adjacent topics, such as lifestyle and motivation.
Q&A THREE | Dollar Habits Happiness means different things to different people, what does Happiness mean to you? Happiness is definitely subjective and is open to individual interpretation. Different strokes for different folks. For me, I equate happiness with enjoyment and contentment. Happiness is the ability to thoroughly and completely enjoy family, friends and life in general. Contentment lends itself to happiness by making us feel grateful and appreciative for what we have and what we’ve been given. It’s certainly okay to want more out of life. I’m a driven person with Big Hairy Audacious Goals and I want more out of life for myself and my family, but I am also simultaneously content with where I am. Two things I do not equate with happiness are material possessions and status. Attempting to derive happiness from these things is a fool’s errand, in my opinion and can lead to a host of problems, financial and otherwise. Do you believe happiness is an emotion or more of a state of mind? I wholeheartedly believe happiness is, or at least should become, a state of mind. I will go one step further and say happiness is a choice. If we view happiness as a feeling or emotion, we can set ourselves up for failure in our pursuit. Feelings come and go and emotions can be temporary. I’ve learned to view happiness as a conscious choice. I choose happiness as my default state of mind. If something happens that encroaches on my happiness, I just have to change the programming back to the default setting. As much as I’d like to believe I am in control of my emotions, I know I have more control over the choices I make. Regardless of my feelings or emotions, which naturally ebb and flow, I try to always make a conscious choice to be happy. Do you consider being happy important to you? Why? Does a bear poop in the woods? What fun is life if we are not happy? For me, happiness is of utmost importance and is a primary goal in my life. We only get one chance at life and I don’t want to waste it being unhappy. I am now, more than ever, focusing on the things that make me happy or will make me happy in the future. What do you consider a fundamental barrier to Happiness in your life? At times, we can be our own worst enemies and I am no exception. For me, a fundamental barrier to happiness is not being present in the here and now and not living enough in the current moment. What do I mean by this? I am guilty of spending far too much time and mental energy focused on the past (that which I cannot change) or the future (that which may be out of my control and may never materialize). The shoulda, coulda, wouldas, if you will. There are so many things about my past and past decisions I would change that I often let regret creep in. One of the best ways to curb regret is to focus on the present. This ginger turmeric tea I’m drinking is delicious. It’s a really beautiful day outside today. My mama always tells me to stop and smell the roses. So, there you have it, one of my primary (self-inflicted) barriers to happiness. Acceptance is the first step, right? I’m making a conscious effort to be better at this and it is one of my personal goals for 2017. How important is wealth and money to your own happiness? Wealth usually gets equated with money. To me, there are many ways one can be wealthy without possessing monetary wealth. I am incredibly wealthy already … as long as we are not talking about wealth as it relates to money. Monetary wealth is important to me as well and is a goal I am pursuing. It is most important to me because of the freedom, options and security it can afford me, not because of the stuff I can buy with the money. How important is health and wellness to happiness? Without our health, we have nothing. Health and wellness should be of utmost importance. What good is all the money in the world if you do not have your health (not to mention longevity) to enjoy it? Over the last several years, we have made great strides in adopting a healthier diet and lifestyle. What has been the happiest moment in your life? For this one, I will do what politicians do and quasi-answer the question. The top three happiest moments of my life were saying “I do” to my wife and hearing her say the same words to me and the births of my two children. These are defining moments in my life, all of which forever changed me for the better. Other happy moments worth mentioning include buying our first home and graduating with my MBA (two long-held personal goals). Thanks for prompting the walk down memory lane. I’m pretty darn happy now. Do you have any specific goals or resolutions for 2017? If so, would your share your top two that directly relate to your own Pursuit of Happiness? I do. The first is to focus on being more present in the moment, more mindful, if you will. As I mentioned earlier, this is something I struggle with. I want to spend more time focusing on the present, rather than the past or future. The second goal related to my overall pursuit of happiness is to land a remote position. Leaving my family for 10 to 11 hours a day and sitting in traffic do not contribute to my happiness, in fact, quite the contrary. The idea of working remotely, on an awesome team, doing cool stuff, while enjoying the many benefits of working from home really excites me. Working remotely is actually part of my plan on my way to reaching financial independence. Do you consider giving to others or charity work an important part of your own Pursuit and why? I definitely do and often dream about being in a financial position to give more. I also read something once that said “Charity begins at home.” This may be somewhat of an unpopular notion, but it really resonated with me. We are working hard to get our financial house in order to one day be in a position to give more and more freely. In the interim, we enjoy volunteering and giving of our time when we can. Also, a positive side benefit of being an aspiring minimalist and paring down the excess means we have lots to donate to those in need, which we regularly do. I’ve even got the receipts to prove it. What 2 things have you learned in your own pursuit that you would like to share with others? Keep things in perspective. Keeping things in perspective can contribute a great deal to overall happiness. For example, if I compare myself to Warren Buffet or Bill Gates (two of the world’s richest men) I will likely feel poor and maybe even sorry for myself. Contrast this with comparing myself to someone in a Third World country. I would likely feel grateful and appreciative for my current situation and thankful for the many opportunities I’ve been given by being born in the U.S. See the difference a little perspective makes? Don’t worry too much about what other people think. Blaze your own trail and let the haters hate. Usually, when people start hating on you it means you are doing something right, something different than the norm. Not caring too much what other people may think can be good for more reasons than just adding to overall happiness. Do what makes you happy (within the confines of law and ethics, of course). We only get one life to live, live it for you, not someone else. This is something I wish I had learned to do earlier on. If you could recommend only three websites/books/articles to anyone reading this, what would they be, and why? Oh, this is a hard one. There is so much incredible and helpful information out there. It’s hard to pare down my recommendations to |
that gives a determination of whether someone is cleared to be fair to compete, although this of course comes with its own set of issues. Another complication is any potential challenges to a trans person’s participation, as there needs to be some way to respond to complaints about unfair competitive advantage.
Simply having a year deadline may be good enough in some cases but in others it may be lacking. These issues are complex and not easily answered, but they are necessary to consider and address for the sake of trans athletes’ participation in sports and fairness to them and their competitors.
Trans Policy in Ultimate
Looking forward, these questions need to be examined by the ultimate community. The WFDF recently updated their transgender policies and USAU is in the process of updating theirs, and these issues should be kept in mind when deciding how to best legislate transgender policy. The best policy will ensure competitive fairness while not making it near impossible for trans people to participate in ultimate at every level.
While I have discussed many different questions and issues in this article, I am just one trans woman in a small segment of the ultimate community. There are other trans people in ultimate who have their own experiences and thoughts and there will only continue to be more in the months and years going forward. Ultimate and sports more generally need to have honest dialogues about the place trans people have, and how to best make flexible policies that are both fair and inclusive. These conversations are not easy or simple, but are necessary for the good of the sport, and I for one am confident in ultimate’s ability to have them and create open, inclusive, and fair policies for all.
Have any questions or opinions about anything I talked about? Feel free to leave comments below to continue this discussion and contribute to the growing discourse around transgender people in ultimate.NASA has announced existence of a solar system.
New record! We've found 7 Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone around a single star outside our solar system: https://t.co/GgBy5QOTpKpic.twitter.com/pPzEcKhTqL - NASA (@NASA) February 22, 2017
© Thomson Reuters 2017
Astronomers have found a nearby solar system with seven Earth-sized planets, three of which circle their parent star at the right distance for liquid surface water, raising the prospect of life, research published on Wednesday showed. The star, known as TRAPPIST-1, is a small, dim celestial body in the constellation Aquarius. It is located about 40 light years away from Earth.Researchers said the proximity of the system, combined with the proportionally large size of its planets compared to the small star, make it a good target for follow-up studies. They hope to scan the planets' atmospheres for possible chemical fingerprints of life."I think that we've made a crucial step towards finding if there is life out there," University of Cambridge astronomer Amaury Triaud told reporters on a conference call on Tuesday.The discovery, published in this week's issue of the journal Nature, builds on previous research showing three planets circling TRAPPIST-1. They are among more than 3,500 planets discovered beyond the solar system, or exoplanets.Researchers have focussed on finding Earth-sized rocky planets with the right temperatures so that water, if any exists, would be liquid, a condition believed to be necessary for life.The diameter of TRAPPIST-1 is about 8 percent of the sun's size. That makes its Earth-sized planets appear large as they parade past.From the vantage point of telescopes on Earth, the planets' motions regularly block out bits of the star's light. Scientists determined the system's architecture by studying these dips."The data is really clear and unambiguous," Triaud wrote in an email to Reuters.Because TRAPPIST-1 is so small and cool, its so-called "habitable zone" is very close to the star. Three planets are properly positioned for liquid water, said lead researcher Michael Gillon, with the University of Liege in Belgium."They form a very compact system," Gillon said on a conference call. "They could have some liquid water and maybe life."Even if the planets do not have life now, it could evolve. TRAPPIST-1 is at least 500 million years old, but has an estimated lifespan of 10 trillion years. The sun, by comparison, is about halfway through its estimated 10-billion-year life.In a few billion years, when the sun has run out of fuel and the solar system has ceased to exist, TRAPPIST-1 will still be an infant star, astronomer Ignas Snellen, with the Netherlands' Leiden Observatory, wrote in a related essay in Nature."It burns hydrogen so slowly that it will live for another 10 trillion years," he wrote, "which is arguably enough time for life to evolve."We had a free couple of hours recently, so we decided to re-watch Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, naturally. It’s one of favorite movies ever. There’s no such thing as too much Jack Sparrow, we’re in love with Commodore Norrington, and Will and Elizabeth always make us smile. While there is 0% of the film that we aren’t obsessed with, it does raise some questions. Here are said questions, because if we can’t ramble internet, then we’re just talking to ourselves like crazy people. So indulge us. Please.
1. How does young Elizabeth know “A Pirate’s Life for Me”?
It’s a song that pirates sing. She’s a little girl on what we can only conclude is her one and only sea voyage from England to the Caribbean.
2. Why doesn’t Will just say that he made the sword himself?
We get that he’s trying to be loyal to the blacksmith, but he could really do with some good tidings from Governor Swann.
3. Where did Jack Sparrow get all those beads for his hair?
It’s not like he could go to a craft store.
4. How did Commodore Norrington get to be so sassy?
We’ll always remember this as the day that Norrington wasn’t even close to almost getting away from the special place he holds in our hearts.
5. How does that metal container of hot coals not light Elizabeth’s entire bed on fire every night?
This seems really dangerous to us.
6. Could Will and Jack’s water walk actually work?
We aren’t scientists but this doesn’t seem possible in real life. We want to try it, but we also don’t want to drown.
7. How did Cotton train his parrot to talk if he can’t speak?
WE NEED TO KNOW.
8. Why does Jack the monkey hate Jack Sparrow so much?
It seems that Barbossa got Jack the monkey after the mutiny, so how does the monkey know to hate Captain Jack so immediately?
9. How does Elizabeth’s hair retain its shininess when she’s been at sea for ages with all that salt water splashing about?
Because our hair would be a hot mess at this point.
10. What happened that one time that Jack impersonated a cleric of the Church of England?
We feel like there’s probably a really good story there.
What are some questions you had after watching the film? Tell us in the comments!
Posted 4 years Ago☆ Wicca Herbal Magic ☆
Are you just getting into Wicca?
Are you unsure how herbs affect magic?
Do you want to know what herbs to start with?
Then this book can help
Herbs are extremely important in Wicca, and you’ll find that there are many herbs that are easy to start with. Many of these herbs you can grow in your own garden and this book will teach you everything from what the herb is used for and how to cultivate it all the way to what spells you can use them in.
Inside you will read about...
✓ Some Herbal Basics
✓ Basic Herbs to Start With
✓ Some Herbal Baths
✓ Herbal Pouches & Medicine Bags
✓ Magical Teas to Start With
✓ Magical Oils to Help
✓ More Herbal Magic to Try
✓ A Guide to Purchasing Your Herbs
✓ A Little about Gathering Herbs
✓ How to Dry & Store Herbs
In this book, you’ll find spells for luck, love, divination and so much more. You can kiss bad dreams goodbye, and these spells and rituals will help to enhance your quality of life.UKIP leader Nigel Farage is facing legal action from an ex-UKIP MEP who defected to the Tories, the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire show has learned.
Amjad Bashir's lawyers have written to Mr Farage asking him to publicly withdraw a range of allegations he made in January and pay damages.
The letter says otherwise he could face possible libel action in the High Court.
A UKIP spokesman said: "UKIP does not take part in trial by television."
But it said it could not comment further while the legal case was ongoing.
Defection
Mr Bashir - MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber - joined the Conservatives in January, saying that UKIP had become a "party of ruthless self-interest" and had a "ridiculous" lack of policies.
But hours before his defection was to be made public he was suspended by UKIP, which said in a press release it was over "unanswered financial and employment questions".
The following day, Mr Farage said he had become "increasingly alarmed" by Mr Bashir's behaviour and that his "only surprise" was that the Conservative Party had accepted him as a member.
At the time Mr Bashir dismissed all the allegations - made on BBC One's Andrew Marr programme and an interview on the Daily Telegraph and ITV websites - as "totally wrong" and an attempt to "muddy the waters".
Image caption Mr Bashir appeared alongside UKIP leader Nigel Farage at the launch of the party's 2014 local and European elections campaign
Now the Victoria Derbyshire programme has seen a nine-page legal letter from Mr Bashir's solicitors, Atkins Thompson, sent in mid-March to Mr Farage and UKIP chairman Steve Crowther.
The letter says: "There can be no other conclusion that [the allegations] were published as part of a deliberate campaign on the part of UKIP and its most senior officers to discredit Mr Bashir in retaliation for his decision to join the Conservative Party."
It demands that a press release detailing the allegations is removed from the UKIP website; that an apology to Mr Bashir is made in open court; and that damages and legal costs are paid.
"Contrary to the impression given by the press release, [Mr Bashir] had no forewarning of what UKIP had decided to allege," the letter says.
In a statement, Mr Bashir said: "As soon as the various allegations were made it became clear that I had no choice but to pursue legal advice.
"I have taken that advice, we have compiled a case, and this now remains in the hands of my lawyers."
He said he would not comment further on the case while it is still ongoing.
The BBC understands that lawyers representing both Mr Farage and Mr Crowther have asked for extra time to consider the letter and will respond by mid-April.
Victoria Derbyshire is broadcast weekdays from 09:15-11:00 BST on BBC Two and BBC News Channel. Follow the programme on Facebook and Twitter, and find all our content online.Note: Brewery President, Mike Stevens, told an industry publication this week that 1,000 cases will be allocated across 15 states. Original post here.
Below: Press Release
(Grand Rapids, MI) – Founders Brewing Co. Vice President/Director of Marketing Dave Engbers announced today that the highly anticipated Canadian Breakfast Stout (CBS) will be the second release in the company’s 750mL “Backstage Series”. It will be released to the market on October 3, 2011, with a taproom release party on October 1.
There has been a great deal of anticipation and speculation regarding the upcoming release after the success of Blushing Monk, the series’ debut, earlier this year. Canadian Breakfast Stout is the epitome of why Founders launched the Backstage Series: it brings some of the brewery’s most sought-after beers, which have been available primarily at the taproom or at a few select events, to a much larger audience.
Canadian Breakfast Stout is an Imperial Stout brewed with a blend of coffees and imported chocolates, then aged in spent bourbon barrels that have most recently been aging pure Michigan maple syrup. The final product has had stellar reviews and is currently the fifth highest rated beer in the world on www.BeerAdvocate.com.
“Releasing small specialty batches is a great way for us to connect to our core beer enthusiast,” Engbers explains. “Fundamentally, we are a small brewery, and we love to do things our own way. This isn’t about flooding the shelves with a beer that we hope people will try; it’s about producing the best damn beer we can brew and offering it to those enthusiasts who have supported our passion for great beer.”
The company is not revealing any additional releases in the series, but Engbers says they will consist of many of the “popular one-offs” that have been offered in the taproom over the years and have become favorites among patrons and brewery staff. “I think part of what people love about Founders, besides our beer, is that we listen to what they are saying,” says President Mike Stevens. “With our new line, now we can offer them more of what they’ve been asking for.”
The company expects to release one more product in the 2011 Backstage Series later this year.
Founders Brewing Company opened their doors in 1997 with the vision of creating some of the most unique craft beer in the world. Today, Founders has a loyal following with several beers lauded as winners of national and international awards in their respective categories. In 2009, they were ranked as the second fastest growing brewery in the United States, and they are currently rated the second highest brewery in the world by RateBeer.com.
Founders Brewing Company, 235 Grandville Avenue SW in downtown Grand Rapids, is a proud member of the Michigan Brewers Guild. www.michiganbrewersguild.org.Watch Jon Stewart's SOPA Rant On The Daily Show By Leslie Kasperowicz Random Article Blend The Daily Show but you woke up this morning wondering what Jon Stewart had to say, the answer is plenty.
In usual form Stewart skewered SOPA and the people behind it, pointing out that half of them don’t even know what the Act is about and allowing lawmakers to make themselves look ridiculous with clips where they repeatedly refer to internet experts as “nerds”. He topped it off with a clip from the classic film Revenge of the Nerds, asking “When did Congress turn into Ogre?” He then pointed out that he had just used copyrighted material.
With a backdrop of clips of himself over the years on The Daily Show with copyrighted material on the screen, Stewart proceeded to rant about “parasites” who exploit the work of others and “rationalize(s) the use of it by claiming “fair use”. Stewart closed his rant by adding “If you post any of this on YouTube, you will be hunted down and sued.” So, you didn’t get this from us, but here’s the clip. You can also see the entire episode on
Wikipedia went dark, even Google “censored” their logo, and protests made their way around Facebook, all because of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. If protesting left you too exhausted last night to stay up forbut you woke up this morning wondering what Jon Stewart had to say, the answer is plenty.In usual form Stewart skewered SOPA and the people behind it, pointing out that half of them don’t even know what the Act is about and allowing lawmakers to make themselves look ridiculous with clips where they repeatedly refer to internet experts as “nerds”. He topped it off with a clip from the classic film, asking “When did Congress turn into Ogre?” He then pointed out that he had just used copyrighted material.With a backdrop of clips of himself over the years onwith copyrighted material on the screen, Stewart proceeded to rant about “parasites” who exploit the work of others and “rationalize(s) the use of it by claiming “fair use”. Stewart closed his rant by adding “If you post any of this on YouTube, you will be hunted down and sued.” So, you didn’t get this from us, but here’s the clip. You can also see the entire episode on The Daily Show website. Blended From Around The Web Facebook
Back to topAt a youth town hall in London on April 23, President Obama got an emotional question from an audience member. Maria Munir broke into tears when asking about the rights of transgender people. Munir also brought up North Carolina's transgender bathroom use law. (The White House)
At a youth town hall in London on April 23, President Obama got an emotional question from an audience member. Maria Munir broke into tears when asking about the rights of transgender people. Munir also brought up North Carolina's transgender bathroom use law. (The White House)
“I’m about to do something terrifying, which is I’m coming out to you as a non-binary person,” Maria Munir, a 20-year-old student, told President Obama at his recent town-hall meeting in London. The president, who has readily embraced LGBT rights, took the comment in stride and called Munir “brave.” For Munir, it was the first time they had stood up and publicly disclosed their gender identity to anyone, including their parents. (Munir uses gender-neutral pronouns, as do the others quoted in this column.)
The audience applauded Munir for self-identifying as non-binary (sometimes referred to as genderqueer or gender-nonconforming). But others are likely to be confused by, some perhaps afraid of, what they don’t understand. “These terms are new to many people outside of LGBTQ+ communities,” said Genny Beemyn, director of the Stonewall Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Beemyn also told me that the “tremendous ignorance” about gender identity creates a space for “scare tactics and lies,” resulting in acts of violence and a plethora of anti-trans legislation, such as the bathroom laws in Houston, Mississippi and North Carolina.
In fact, these terms are fairly new and often puzzling to me, too. It’s only in the past three or four years that I’ve come to know a number of people who identify as non-binary, which means that they don’t identify as either male or female.
Truth be told, I’m a black-and-white kind of guy: Hot and cold. Good and evil. And yes, man or woman. So this has been a journey for me, too, to see the gray space and to understand that not all things are “this” or “that.”
“The best way to understand someone is to know them,” Beemyn told me. So let me introduce you to 21-year-old Ji-Ho Park, a chemistry major at Duke University, whom I met last fall when I was lecturing on campus. Masculine in appearance and with a commanding voice, Park looked like one of the many jocks on the Duke campus.
Ji-Ho Park, 21, identifies as genderqueer, which can also be termed “non-binary” or “gender non-conforming.” (Steven Petrow/The Washington Post)
The only hint that something was different was on Park’s name card. These folded pieces of paper provided me with each student’s name and the appropriate pronouns to use. Park’s read “they, their and theirs”— not “he, him and his.”
Last week, I watched Park in a queer theater performance. They were sporting a glossy coat of blue lipstick that perfectly matched the nail polish on their fingers. Their body now appeared softer, more “feminine” to my eye. Park was clad in a black T-shirt and blue jeans, but they tell me they sometimes “love” wearing heels and a dress.
The next day we sat down to talk about gender identity. Park’s nails remained blue, but their lips were now painted fuchsia. Frankly, I was afraid I’d mess up — mostly my pronouns, but also the distinction between sexual orientation and gender identity. Park reminded me of the adage that “sexual orientation is who you go to bed with; gender identity is who you go to bed as.”
Park uses “queer,” meaning “not heterosexual,” for their sexual orientation, and “genderqueer” for their gender identity. Park added that the latter could also be called “gender-nonconforming, bi-gender, non-binary, or just being fluid.” That’s a lot of new vocabulary, even for me. (All these terms fall under the transgender umbrella, which includes those whose gender identity differs from what’s typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth.)
During our talk, I started to become hyper-aware of the challenges that non-binary people face. School registration and insurance forms, driver’s license and college applications, even (especially) dating sites — all binary. And of course, restrooms. You must choose male or female. But for Park, there’s no box to check.
Still, this discussion about gender identity is not about wordplay or politically correct talk. Language matters because, as Park said, “the development of vocabulary is crucial to understanding.” They haven’t even discussed any of this with their Korean-born parents, because “genderqueer doesn’t even exist in that language.”
I get that: With language comes awareness, which leads to familiarity, and, with any luck, acceptance.
I asked Park what they wanted people to take away from our talk. “That we exist,” they said quickly. “That’s it’s okay for things not to be on the binary.”
They added: “There needs to be general awareness and education about all these issues. Even in high schools, we’re talking about sex but not about gender identity. There is such a vocabulary that should be available to these individuals who could benefit a lot from it.” For Park, a change in public perception — and acceptance — can’t come soon enough. Although there may not be 50 shades of gray, I’m learning that the world is not black or white, this or that. Nor is my new friend, Ji-Ho Park.
Agree or disagree? Let me know in the comments section below.
Join Petrow for a live online chat at washingtonpost.com on Tuesday at 1 p.m.
Email questions to stevenpetrow@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @stevenpetrow.The month of June was woefully unkind to North Carolina FC, yielding zero wins, one draw, and four losses between their NASL and U.S. Open Cup matches. That ended on Saturday night, with a 1–2 loss to Indy Eleven, the second loss to the previously winless side in eight days time.
How did such ineptitude cast a dark shadow over a once-celebrated and confident team from just one month ago? The Oaks had seemed to be finding a rhythm in May, earning four wins in six matches, and the team was firmly in the hunt for an NASL Spring title, as well as poised for another U.S. Open Cup run. With NCFC fortunes now turned on their head, fractures are spreading across the fanbase, pointing fingers, calling for changes, and trying to rationalize the lack of success on the pitch.
Excuses for underperforming, and promises for better results ahead are no longer resonating among the frustrated and numbed hearts of the NCFC faithful. The most telling quote I heard in the stands in NCFC’s latest loss on Saturday that optimizes what NCFC is going through was: “It’s too bad we can’t practice luck.”
Being unlucky is an understatement for the boys in blue right now. Let’s take a quick look back at some prime examples:
6/24 — Loss 1–2 at home against Indy Eleven
Indy’s second goal came from a deflection off of our own defender, which found Brian Sylvestre driving in the wrong direction. Sylvestre clearly had the ball covered if the Indy shot only evaded our defender’s desperate jab at the ball.
6/17 — Loss 0–2 away against Indy Eleven
Indy’s first goal came from a deflection, when one of our defenders attempted to clear the ball off the goal line, which went straight to an Indy player’s chest only a couple of feet away for an effortless goal.
The back-to-back Indy losses came at the only time Indy has played with a full-strength roster. Indy Eleven was the 2016 NASL runners-up, and after very minimal off-season turnover, they were poised to repeat their success in 2017. However, Indy unexpectedly struggled through eleven straight winless NASL matches due to constant injuries and suspensions. NCFC had the pleasure of catching a healed Indy at their best, which coincided with NCFC season-worst run of their own injuries and fatigue.
6/14 — Loss 2–3 at home against Houston Dynamo
Aside from NCFC missing a few late-game empty net opportunities, which was heartbreaking enough, fans had to bear witness to NCFC’s defensive errors catalyzing Houston’s offense, especially after a long and disheartening lightning delay. Houston’s initial goal originated from an uncontested cross due to one of our most consistent defenders uncharacteristically slipping on the pitch.
6/10 — Draw 2–2 away against New York Cosmos
The Cosmos’ game tying goal from Kalif Alhassan was not only Alhassan’s first goal of the season for the Cosmos, but it came in his first Cosmos appearance. Another right place — right time for NCFC opponents. Alhassan, a former Portland Timbers winger, has been an NASL journeyman for the past few years, never quite finding the same offensive game he had in his younger playing days. This chip shot over NCFC’s Brian Sylvestre in the 84th minute crushed the hearts of the Oaks.
6/4 — Loss 0–1 at home against New York Cosmos
Heading into the match, NCFC was forced to play with a fatigued roster after participating in the U.S. Open Cup match earlier in the week. Opting to focus on the U.S. Open Cup, NCFC had nothing left to throw against the hyper-aggressive Cosmos. New York had already been defeated in the Open Cup tournament, and took advantage of over a week of rest, and pushed the pace beyond what NCFC could manage to match.The security breach at Neiman Marcus, which wasn’t acknowledged officially until a few days ago, went on for much longer than initially believed, the New York Times reports. While the retail store is yet to confirm to the public when the system was first hacked, it told credit card companies in a conference call on Monday that it all started in mid-July and that it wasn’t fully contained until Sunday, unnamed sources revealed. In its initial disclosure to the public, Neiman Marcus said it first learned about the breach in mid-December although it only decided to reveal it in January. In its notes to customers, the retailer said that key personal data, including Social Security numbers and birth dates, were not compromised. Furthermore, the company said that it doesn’t collect card PINs in its stores, and that it had “no knowledge of any connection” between the Target hack and the one it suffered. The retail chain is yet to reveal how many credit and debit cards were compromised during the attack.
In a letter to consumers, Neiman Marcus chief executive Karen Katz apologized for the data breach, the Washington Post reports. “We deeply regret and we are very sorry that some of our customers’ payment cards were used fraudulently after making purchases at our stores,” she said. ” We want you always to feel confident shopping at Neiman Marcus and your trust in us is our absolute priority.” The exec added that the company will provide a free year of credit monitoring to any customer who used a card at Neiman Marcus stores last year.
Even so, the company was criticized for not disclosing the matter sooner, before the holiday shopping season was over. Neiman Marcus told credit card companies around Christmas in an industry phone call that it had evidence it system was breached but chose not to reveal the hack until January. The company now says that the holiday season had nothing to do with the decision to disclose the heck to the public. “We quickly began our investigation and hired a forensic investigator. Our forensic investigator discovered evidence on January 1 that a criminal cyber security intrusion had occurred,“ a spokeswoman said. ”the forensic and criminal investigations continue.”Nevada’s monopoly electric utility, NV Energy, has been embroiled in a bruising campaign for over two years to make it more expensive for its customers to install solar power. The latest skirmish is over a contentious proposal by the monopoly to raise charges on all of its customers in ways that would disadvantage rooftop solar power, a plan which state regulators rejected today.
Throughout the long-simmering conflict between NV Energy and rooftop solar advocates, the utility has relied on one core argument: that rooftop solar customers are not paying their fair share for the electric grid, and thus are making electricity more expensive for their peers who don’t have the solar panels.
NV Energy’s claims are dubious on their own merits: multiple studies have shown that solar customers actually provide more benefits than costs to all electric customers.
But the utility has another big problem in choosing that argument: NV Energy’s own documents reveal that it has been profiting from its customers by tens of millions of dollars per year more than regulators allowed since 2012.
In total, the utility has “overearned” in Nevada by $180 million from 2012 to 2016 beyond the profit it was supposed to be allowed to earn: that comes out to about $144 that each NV Energy customer has overpaid to the utility over that period.
Before getting into NV Energy’s history of overearning, here’s some context on its efforts to slow down solar in the Silver State:
NV Energy won a victory in late 2015, when it petitioned the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada (PUCN) to reduce the payments that NV Energy had to make to customers when buying the excess solar power they produced, part of a program known as net metering.
But public sentiment turned dramatically against NV Energy for its hostility toward solar, and Nevada politicians saw the writing on the wall. In 2016, Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval appointed commissioners who disagreed with the 2015 decision once in office. And then in June of this year, the monopoly lost the biggest battle yet, when Sandoval signed bipartisan legislation which mostly restored net metering.
NV Energy continues to falsely argue that rooftop solar rips off customers
During the net metering debate in the legislature this past June, NV Energy’s lobbyists showed legislators a chart which claimed that AB 405, the legislation to restore net metering, would raise rates by a total of $63 million a year. (The company later downgraded that number to $42.3 million after some changes to the bill, but it continues to make the same basic argument to the PUCN.)
The utility’s claims are not supported by countless studies which have looked at the issue. NV Energy rests its math on the notorious argument, peddled by many investor-owned utilities, that solar customers are “shifting costs” to non-solar customers. But the Nevada Public Utilities Commission found that there no unreasonable cost shift is occurring. When the PUC restored net metering rates to Northern Nevada customers, the commissioners found that “the average Nevada ratepayer will see a decrease of $0.01 per month on monthly utility bills.”
NV Energy has over-earned by millions of dollars
Like all regulated monopoly utilities, NV Energy’s business model revolves around a basic deal that it has with the stat: NV Energy gets a monopoly; in exchange, to prevent the utility from using that monopoly to gouge customers, the state gets to determine how much the utility is allowed to profit every year via a number called the “authorized rate of return.”
In 2015, the authorized rate of return was 8.09% – which meant that for every dollar NV Energy invested into Nevada’s grid, the PUC allowed it to take about 8 cents of profit.
But a document that NV Energy filed with the PUC on May 12 of 2017 reveals that in 2016, it actually took a 9.24% return – or over 9 cents on the dollar. That penny might not sound like much of a difference, but in aggregate it means that NV Energy over-earned by $50 million last year.
That’s more than the $42 million that the utility (inaccurately) claims the net metering law will cost ratepayers.
To be clear, it’s not illegal or even necessarily rare for utilities to over-earn; ratemaking is forward-looking and involves estimates about how much money the utility will invest. If the utility can cut costs or make other adjustments that saves money, it does not have to pay back those savings to consumers on an annual basis.
But NV Energy’s 2015 over-earning wasn’t an isolated event. A look through similar disclosures shows that the utility over-earned in every year since 2013. If a utility consistently is over-earning, it’s a sign it may be overestimating its costs in rate cases as a way to take more money from captive customers. Some customers, such as MGM Resorts, have taken issue with the habit.
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 Adjusted Income $451,096,000 $438,194,000 $450,458,000 $431,145,000 $431,957,000 Net Rate Base $5,178,601,000 $5,163,622,000 $5,023,503,000 $4,718,335,000 $4,675,092,000 Allowed Return 8.17% 8.17% 8.17% 8.17% 8.17% Actual Return 8.71% 8.49% 8.97% 9.14% 9.24% Excess Return 0.54% 0.32% 0.80% 0.97% 1.07% Excess Earnings $27,964,445.40 $16,523,590.40 $40,188,024.00 $45,767,849.50 $50,023,484.40
Above data from NV Energy’s own filings from 2016, 2015, 2014 and 2013.
NV Energy’s total over-earnings sums to $180 million over the five-year period, or an average of $144 for each of the utility’s 1.25 million customers.
NV Energy’s latest effort would raise fixed charges, hurting low-income customers
In August, NV Energy petitioned the PUCN to change its rate structure in ways that would make solar more expensive by increasing fixed charges on all of its customers’ monthly bills. Those fixed fee increases would make solar more expensive, but also have the knock-on effect of harming low-income customers who tend to buy less electricity than wealthier ones.
As the AARP has said, fixed charge increases “disproportionately burden those who are living on low or fixed incomes and struggling to pay for food, rent, medicine and utility bills.”
The NAACP called efforts to increase fixed charges “part of an insidious trend in shifting the economic and health burden of the fossil fuel economy onto vulnerable populations.”
NV Energy’s push for the regressive charges is ironic, given the utility has justified its attack on net metering as a defense of the poor. A spokesperson for an NV Energy-backed front group said last August that “If the big rooftop solar companies get what they want, it would really hurt low-income families and punish those Nevadans who do not have solar panels.
The PUCN issued a draft decision last night, which it is expected to finalize today, batting away NV Energy’s latest effort for these charges, saying it must apply for them in an upcoming general rate case. There’s no indication that NV Energy won’t try to do that.
Between NV Energy’s habit of over-earning on its profits, and its new efforts to raise fixed charges, the utility hardly has a leg to stand on when it makes dubious that rooftop solar is driving people’s bills up. NV Energy seems to be doing that all on its own.- Gamwich for creating almost all of the new textures - Krucify for the changes from Hearthfire Display Case Fix - hl84 for children's clothing meshes from Little Caravans and More Children Wears - PrinceShroob for allowing me to use scripts from Appropriately Attired Jarls - Unofficial Patch team for various fixes that have been incorporated into this mod, for the female elf circlet meshes, the beast race meshes for the fineclothes02 hat, and many of the 1stPerson clothing meshes.
You are not allowed to upload or distribute this file on any other website or platform. You are not allowed to use the assets included in this file without permission from the creator of those assets. You are not allowed to package this mod as part of a mod collection. You are not allowed to use this file in any mods/files/collections that are being sold or distributed for money. You are allowed to create compatibility patches for this mod as long as the patch requires that the user download the main file from this page in order to work. You are allowed to include keywords, item stat changes, and other record edits in your mod for the purpose of maintaining compatibility and consistency with CCF. However, other assets, including all texture and mesh files, require additional permission before you may include them in your mod. All assets that originate from other authors require permission from those authors. TRANSLATIONS If you wish to translate this mod into a language other than English, your translation MUST require that the user download the original file from this page in order to work. You have permission to upload and distribute, on nexusmods.com, only those portions of this mod that are required for the translation. Do not post translations on additional platforms or websites without written permission from the mod author. You are NOT permitted to release any stand-alone translations that would work without the user first downloading the file from this page. You may opt-in to earn donation points for any mods (patches, translations, etc) that use my work, provided you've adhered to the permissions and terms of use as stated above. For questions or to seek additional permissions, contact the author at [email protected]
F EATURES
More consistent values & weights for clothing and misc items.
Some previously unplayable or inaccessible items are now playable and/or accessible in game.
Almost all instances of hooded robes have been removed from the game and replaced with separate robe and hood combinations.
Allows circlets to be worn with hoods.
Adds more diversity to the robed outfits worn by NPCs.
Changes the outfits of certain NPCs to be more appropriate to their rank and position.
New Jarls and their appointees will change into more appropriate clothing when they take over those roles during the progression of |
ism’s visible witness in a republic that takes pride (sometimes obsessively) in its secularity. In those dioceses where Lustiger’s model prevails, no-one can mistake the Church as just another NGO or as resembling the moribund state of Swiss, German, and Belgian Catholicism.
New bishops, new laity, new life
So who are the post-Lustiger bishops shaking up French Catholicism? First, there is Cardinal André Vingt-Trois of Paris. Viewed as Lustiger’s spiritual son, he is carrying out his predecessor’s program, certainly in a less bulldozer-esque manner, but in ways that continue to make the Archdiocese of Paris an active presence in the capital. The Latin tag fortiter in re, suaviter in modo (“resolute in action, gentle in manner”) aptly describes Vingt-Trois’s pastoral style.
More bulldozer-like is Cardinal Philippe Barbarin of Lyons. He has the distinction of being not only a Sorbonne graduate, but also a marathon-runner who spent several years as a missionary in Madagascar. Whether it’s his homilies, regular television appearances, or Middle East trips to highlight Christian persecution, Barbarin is a veritable force of nature. Another of the new breed of bishops is Bishop Dominque Rey of Fréjus-Toulon. Possessing a doctorate in economics, Rey worked in France’s finance ministry—where France’s most talented civil servants are traditionally sent to begin their careers—before entering the seminary. Not only has Rey attracted plenty of vocations. Numerous lay movements also flourish in his diocese. Similarly, the summer university associated with the Observatoire sociopolitique de Fréjus-Toulon, a think-tank created by Rey in 2005, has become the must-go place for many French students.
Yet another bishop to watch is Olivier de Germay of Ajacco. A graduate of Saint-Cyr (France’s West Point) who served as an army officer in France’s elite paratroop regiments and did tours in Chad, Central Africa, and Iraq, Bishop de Germay has taken the lead in warning France’s politicians against the dangers involved in social engineering. Also worth highlighting is Bishop Éric de Beaufort-Moulin, an auxiliary in Paris with higher degrees in political science and economics. He has a formidable reputation as an educator and is the author of an excellent book on de Lubac’s thought.
Often is the public eye is Bishop Marc Aillet of Bayonne. He comes from a background in classics, studied medicine for a while, and has since emerged as a prominent moral theologian and liturgist. Equally prominent is France’s military bishop, Luc Revel. A graduate of the elite École polytechnique, Revel has injected a degree of moral seriousness into French discussion of topics like war and Islamic terrorism which contrasts with the wishful-thinking and crypto-pacifism that often characterizes Western European Catholic contributions to this subject.
Many bishops conferences would, I suspect, kill to have men of such talent and backgrounds among their number. By no means aggressive, they represent a type of bishop who is, as is often said in France, décomplexé. Broadly-speaking, this means they aren’t overawed by secular France (not least because they know it and its problems inside-out) and have moved past the post-Vatican II generation’s preoccupations. Free of the disease of clericalism, they happily empower lay people to spread the Gospel. Above all, these bishops are intensely focused on the Church’s central business: i.e., evangelizing and finding creative ways of doing so. It’s a model replicated by many young French priests. Not surprisingly, their parishes and ministries are the ones attracting people, converts, and vocations.
Then, of course, there are the movements. A standard joke among observant French Catholics is that while many of them are only loosely associated with parishes, everyone belongs to a movement. Groups such as the Communauté de l’Emmanuel, Communauté du Chemin Neuf, Foyers de Charité, La Famille St-Jean, and Communauté Saint-Martin originated and have flourished in the francophone world. Often with charismatic Catholic roots, the movements have produced many vocations to the priesthood and religious life. They also enable thousands of lay people to live “high-intensity Catholicism” in—rather than apart from—the world. Again, the contrast with the depressing state of affairs in Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium is remarkable.
A long way to go
Of course, this needs to be put into perspective. Consider the numbers: about 56 percent of France’s total population has been baptized Catholic. Weekly Mass-going Catholics are about 6 percent of the overall population; another 15 percent of France is considered occasional-practicing Catholics. Together, these two groups amount to 13 million out of 66 million French citizens. All these figures represent steep declines from even 30 years ago.
Many rural French churches are increasingly devoid of parishioners, a trend that began with the population’s steady exodus into urban areas after World War I. And while it’s true that, as one observer of French Catholicism writes, “we have witnessed the disappearance of Christians of the left” since the 1980s, many older clergy cling to accomodationist mindsets. France also has its share of theologians apparently anxious to empty the Catholic faith of any moral content beyond non-judgmentalism (except, of course, on environmental and economic issues). Like everywhere else in the West, those religious orders that opted for social and political activism are facing extinction.
In short, a considerable amount of what two sociologists have called “catholicisme zombie” exists in today’s France. On the other side of the ledger, there is the genuine risk that the néocatholiques could become preoccupied with politics. That’s a perennial temptation, and rarely ends well for the Church.
Nonetheless, as the Le Figaro journalists noted, the momentum in French Catholicism is with the néocatholiques, not least because of the alternative’s manifest failures. In many circles, it’s now très chic to be one of les cathos. If you attend Sunday Mass in Paris, for example, it’s hard not to notice the growth in numbers attending middle-class and working-class parishes, but also, as Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry points out, just how many Mass-goers are married couples with young children. Likewise, many at the canonizations of John Paul II and John XXIII in 2014 were, as Michael Matheson Miller reported, struck by the sheer number of French participants, waving flags and singing enthusiastically.
In recent years, we’re heard much about the Church as a field-hospital. It’s true that the French Church finds itself providing much help to the many people damaged by the culture of cynicism, economic statism, self-loathing, and hedonism bequeathed by France’s May 1968 generation. The new Catholics, however, also recognize that no-one is supposed to remain perpetually in a field-hospital. Nor are they interested in affirming mediocrity. Instead they have chosen to live out what Benedict XVI suggested would be Western European Catholics’ role for the foreseeable future: a creative minority—one that imaginatively engages culture from an orthodox Catholic standpoint in order to draw society closer to the truth, instead of meekly relegating Catholics to the role of bit-players in various secular-progressive agendas.
France, Charles de Gaulle once wrote, is a secular republic with a Catholic heart. That Catholic soul has a long, long way to go before it’s even close to being fully-beating. Nor can the obstacles associated with a society marked by an especially inward-looking secular-progressivism and bewildered by nihilistic-Islamist atrocities be underestimated. Thanks, however, to the new Catholics, the Church’s eldest daughter may well be off the operating table. And the only way to go from there is up.
Revolutions have started on much less.I joined some friends for a fun summer day riding mountain bikes at Brown County in Bloomington Indiana yesterday. We had a great time enjoying the weather and trails.
We all stopped for a great dinner at Upland Brewery before going our own ways. The restaurant and brewery have expanded since I was last there a few years ago, but the quality and atmosphere was as good as ever.
Driving home listening to good music, watching the bugs accumulate on my windshield in true summertime tradition, and taking in the warm glowing summer sun was the perfect ending to the trip. It was one of those great kinds of trips that I’ll remember for a while.
Enjoy what you read? Subscribe to be notified of future posts via email by either clicking the Follow button at the bottom or the Subscribe section on the right!Segye Ilbo via Nate1. [+987, -123] So that was his DNA? ㅡㅡ So they did do it. F*ck this, I'm leaving the fandom bye2. [+946, -89] His fans have already left, it doesn't really matter whether he sexually assaulted her or if she was a kkot-baem or not. His career is over.3. [+775, -72] See~~~ I knew they did it ㅋㅋㅋㅋ those two are the same anyway ㅋㅋㅋ4. [+85, -6] Here are the facts: He went to a room salon in the middle of his army service, solicited prostitution, and did it in the bathroom. However, police cannot prove that there was force involved with DNA on the underwear alone. He likely won't serve jail time but his career as a celebrity is certainly over...5. [+60, -31] In America, you have to pull out even if the woman says "NO" in the middle of sex or it's considered sexual assault. The woman in the lawsuit was holding on to the door knob to leave but he pushed her. How is that not considered assault??6. [+56, -4] ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ What was the point of testing his DNA if it can't prove the point of the lawsuit? ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ This country's so funny7. [+30, -4] So it's fact that they did it in the bathroom..8. [+26, -5] He was doing it with a prostitute and didn't even bother wearing a condom?????For two intoxicating seasons, Western Sydney Wanderers was the best sport story going around in Australia and everyone wanted in on a slice of the action.
Hacks from rival football codes attended matches at Pirtek Stadium then waxed lyrical about their Damascus road-style conversion to the world game as they scribbled furiously for a column inch of the attention.
Rusted on cynics sat among the Red and Black Bloc and debunked their own perpetuated myths about football fans, as Sydney media's love affair with the A-League took on a red and black hue.
Wanderland pulsed with the refrains of enchanted fans as emboldened players became superstars. Some of them, like marquee Shinji Ono, were bona fide superstars.
The football community welcomed the attention with cautious optimism as the domestic game - more often than not a labour of love in this country - burst onto the mainstream like a Tim Cahill volleyed World Cup goal.
Through it all the Wanderers kept winning. In fact, as Les Murray recently pointed out, in their first two seasons, the Wanderers were the most consistent winning team in the A-League.
As any Sydney Swans or NSW Waratahs fan will tell you, there is no better way to capture the attention of the fickle Sydney sport market than by winning. Unlike Australia's other capital cities, Sydney loves a winner but it won't bleed for its losers. It just won't turn up.
This season the wins stopped and so did Sydney's love affair with the Wanderers.
As Tony Popovic's team labored to its worst finish in three years – ninth, with four wins from 27 matches - the fans voted with their feet. The Wanderers posted their lowest average attendance since entering the competition, 12,520. The A-League suffered, reflecting it's worst average gate since season 2011-2012 - the year prior to the debut of the Wanderers.
Mainstream news outlets became more concerned with what those supporters turning up may or may not have been sparking up and hurling from the stands than what was happening on the pitch, as the fickle nature of Sydney's sporting landscape reared its ugly head.
As fans came to terms with the abrupt end to the fairytale, off the back of a gruelling second season that reached its zenith with the Wanderers' historic AFC Champions League triumph, the competition appeared to lose some of its lustre.
During the past three years the Wanderers have attracted the largest 'away' crowds, with and average of 15,642 watching Popa's boys. They have become a team to love and a team to loathe.
As the Wanderers' fortunes took a dive on the pitch this year, was the A-League deprived of one of its star protagonists, thereby denying the competition one of its marquee drawcards?
Lyall Gorman, the inaugural executive chairman of the Wanderers during the club's existence under FFA rule, acknowledged that success on the field played a significant role in its rise to popularity but asserted the club had set out to avoid relying solely on results to engage its fans.
"It would undermine the [region's] heritage, that had been there, to say it is just about winning," Gorman said. "These are football-loving people who get the game, who celebrate the game and who are proud of their game and their club no matter what.
"We did seven forums across the Sydney region when we started and one of the things I wanted to get from those various participants was what success looked like to them, not to me. As you know you can't win grand finals every year.
"Our fans told us very clearly that the job was to stand up for the west, to be competitive, to make them proud, have a crack never die wondering, never let them down and stay true to our values.
"That removed some pressures from just winning on the field.
"I think one of the fundamental differences between really successful sporting clubs and those who aren't is that they have this emotional connectivity with their fan base. Just winning games isn't the enduring measure of the partnership.
"Having said that I have little doubt success aids and abets that process."
When asked whether the media jumped on the bandwagon due to the Wanderers' success, Gorman replied: "Yes, but we also had some very unique personalities and characters.
"The club represented the hearts and minds and souls of over 2.5 million people in western Sydney it's a very logical market for networks like Seven and Nine to want to reach out to as well."
There is little doubt the difference between the Wanderers' winning and losing has had an impact on the popularity of the A-League this season, a trend acknowledged by Gorman, who stressed the league lives and dies by the fortunes of its biggest clubs.
"I think a strong Wanderers has certainly been a turbo charge for significant increase for the metrics of the A-League since they came into the competition," Lyall Gorman.
"I used to say prior to them that I felt the league also needed a strong Sydney FC and a strong Melbourne Victory. Those core large population markets that are attractive to broadcasters and corporate partners need to be strong and vibrant," he said.
But Gorman was quick to differentiate between engaged fans and hype, recounting the club's rise to popularity in its first year.
"The first five matches there was a 0-0 against the Mariners in Round 1 then the next four games they didn't score a goal or win a game," he recalled.
"The coach and I said 'listen we can see the fundamental building blocks happening here and when it does we'll really give it to someone'. We gave it to Adelaide 6-1 in Round 6.
"For those first five rounds the crowds came and the memberships were surging, there wasn't even a goal scored let alone a win."
The message is two-fold: the Wanderers don't need to be winning to have the hearts and minds of their supporters represented and engaged but a strong Wanderers is required to thrust the A-League into the mindset of a fickle sporting market, just as willing to ditch as a loser as it is to embrace a winner.Dr. Jane Goodall is a giant in her field. But in person she’s a slight woman with a quiet voice and a commanding presence. She’s also full of surprises. Goodall, famous for her research into the social structures of wild chimpanzees, says she’s open to the possibility that Bigfoot exists. “I guess I’m romantic,” Goodall said during an interview with KUOW Tuesday. “I don’t want to disbelieve.” Goodall said she’s heard many stories from people who have no reason to lie about a Sasquatch sighting. And that makes her believe. “It’s bizarre that we’ve never found any remains,” Goodall said. “Maybe it’s a spiritual creature. The closest I come when I think about ‘what could it be’ is like the remnant of Neanderthals.”
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On a visit to rural Ecuador, Goodall asked her translator to ask local hunters a question. “All I said was, ‘Ask if he’s seen a monkey without a tail.’ I didn’t say anything more than that … four of those hunters said, ‘Oh yes, we’ve seen a monkey without a tail. It’s about six foot tall and it walks upright.’” As for the appeal of these kinds of myths, Goodall said the prospect of discovering something new is exciting. “I think to have an element of mystery in life is very, very important,” she said. Goodall is focused on possibilities, not what’s impossible. That may come from spending much of her career upending expectations.
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Goodall’s discovery that chimps use and modify tools was groundbreaking in the 1960s. Until that point, researchers assumed that toolmaking was uniquely human. She made that discovery as a young woman with no college education. Goodall had been studying chimps with anthropologist Louis Leakey for about two years when he told her it was time for her to get a degree. “He said, ‘Jane, I won’t always be around to get money for you. You will have to get a degree to get your own money,” Goodall told a small crowd gathered for a Seattle Foundation function Tuesday night. Despite not having a bachelor’s degree, Goodall enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge. “I got to Cambridge, and all of these professors that I was nervous of, some of them told me that I’d done everything wrong,” Goodall said.
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Goodall was told she’d committed some of the worst academic sins in her research, including naming the chimpanzees instead of numbering them. And she talked about the chimps having emotions and personalities. “That was the height of anthropomorphic sin, attributing human characteristics to non-human animals,” Goodall said. She learned to write in a more scientific way but continued to call the chimps by names. And she continued to note their emotions and personalities. Goodall’s deep love of animals is a driving force throughout all of her work. “I popped out of the womb loving animals,” Goodall said.
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There weren’t many women scientists when Goodall was young, but she wanted to be a naturalist. Goodall said some people laughed at her when she said she wanted to go to Africa and write about animals. She credits her mother for supporting and nurturing her interest in animals during childhood. Goodall said there were many times when her mother could have squashed the instincts of a small scientist. The time she hid in a hen house for more than four hours so she could find out where eggs came from, for example. “You can imagine how worried my mother was,” Goodall said. “They’d even called the police. And yet, when she saw me running towards the house, instead of getting angry – ‘how dare you go off without telling us. Don’t you dare do it again’ – she sat down to hear the wonderful story of how a hen lays an egg.” Now 83 years old, Goodall still remembers the advice her mother gave to her when she was young.
SponsorJudge Martin's tipstaff, Ernie Trotter, hoped that on such a quiet morning he would be able to catch up on some paperwork. He hardly noticed a denim-clad figure slipping into court. He soon would. It was Mark ''Chopper'' Read, who from behind his sunglasses had eyes only for the judge. He was about to embark on a plan that even for the pathological standover man was dipped in madness. This was the culmination of a hasty promise he made a year earlier in the exercise yard of Pentridge's notorious H-Division to his best mate, Jimmy Loughnan. ''He had just escaped from jail and broke both his ankles when he jumped the fence,'' Read wrote once. ''He was in the yard there, it was raining, he was crying, his feet were blue and he thought he was going to lose them both. He had four, five or six years to go. I said, 'Listen Jim, when I get out, give me six months, then write to me, and then I'll come and get you'.'' The off-the-cuff remark resulted in Read entering the court with a shotgun down his trousers. He planned to hold a judge hostage until Loughnan was released from the insane division of Ararat Prison.
Read walked into the old County Court (a building so rancid that even self-respecting rats left it to cockroaches and legal aid lawyers) and asked the nearest policeman which courts were in session. There were only two, so: ''I walked into the first one I saw. Judge Martin was the first cab off the rank. ''I climbed onto the judge's bench, put the gun to his head and demanded Jimmy's release. I knew it would never work but I had given my word to try.'' Trotter had spent 25 years in the army, retiring as a sergeant-major. Raised in a Salvation Army family, he joined the services after a romance with a Ballarat girl went sour. An accomplished drummer, he joined the army band, which meant he was not expected to confront armed opponents. This was about to change. Not that band work was for the Devonshire tea set. Trotter was stationed in Malaya for two years, where musicians doubled as stretcher bearers and as porters ferrying rations to troops on patrol.
Now 82, he recalls that when he saw the man in court dressed in what was described as a ''denim suit'' (Read should have got five years for that alone) he remained unconcerned, as he knew there were at least 12 police just metres away in the corridor. Head down over his paperwork he did not notice Read moving towards the bar table until: ''He rushed past me and sprang up the steps to the bench. He then produced a single-barrel sawn-off shotgun from under his jacket and knelt to the left of the judge, pressing the barrel against his throat. ''Ashamed that I had been unable to prevent this incident, I stood on the bottom step and indicated to the judge I would follow his lead. Judge Martin bravely pushed the gun aside, stood and went through the bench door with 'Denim' in hot pursuit. At this point, the judge turned to face the assailant and gave him a hefty kick in the knackers.'' A novel version, it would seem, of a hanging judge. For a man well over 100 kilos, Trotter was quick on his feet. He leapt up to the door, pushing Read against the frame and grabbing the shotgun barrel.
Here, the most remarkable Trotter is able to dispel a piece of underworld folklore. It has long been held that Judge Martin broke the stunned silence after he was grabbed by yelling: ''Will someone get this bastard off me?'' (Bastard has been used to replace a word not fit for a family newspaper.) Not according to Trotter: ''The judge didn't utter a word.'' But someone did. While wrestling Read for the gun, the former military man yelled: ''Give me the f-----g thing.'' Read recalls some swearing, but was unsure who uttered the expletives. ''I was shocked to hear such foul language in a hallowed hall of justice, as I have never been a big swearer myself.'' Chopper believed he had rendered the round in the barrel harmless by removing the shot from the cartridge. At his later trial he was shocked to learn the ''blank'' would have killed the judge if discharged at close range. ''I remember the judge opened his mouth, and the barrel slipped in. I'm glad I didn't pull the trigger, it would have killed him.
''Old Ernest was a military fellow with a big English moustache. It took quite a bit of bravery to attack me. I was 18½ stone (117 kilos) of muscle, I was bench-pressing 330 pounds (150 kilos) and I had a gun.'' As Trotter continued to wrestle the gunman, police raced in to help, grabbing Read by the legs and pulling his feet from under him. ''Six of the coppers carried him to the side of the court, laid him face down on a row of seats and sat on him,'' says Trotter. ''Would you believe, there wasn't a set of handcuffs between the lot of them, so a couple of rozzers removed their waist belts to secure his arms and feet.'' After Read was taken to the cells: ''I went down to the judge's chambers and made him a cup of tea.
''The judge was the real hero. If it wasn't for his leadership I wouldn't have done anything.'' A deeply religious man, Judge Martin attended church every morning and was known to slip down to St Francis' to seek advice from a higher authority when a jury went out to deliberate. ''We would have to go and get him when the jury came back,'' Trotter remembers. About 18 months later, the tipstaff was presented with the Queen's Gallantry Medal by the then governor, Sir Henry Winneke. Read, who was sentenced to 13 years for the attempted abduction, said: ''I'm glad he got a medal. He deserved it.'' Once convicted, Read wrote to Judge Martin to apologise, and the judge wrote back to say he knew it wasn't personal.
''He was a real gentleman,'' according to the retired standover man. Trotter also holds no grudges. ''I bear him no ill-will, and regret his state of health.'' (Read has cancer.) But not everyone is so forgiving. To add salt to a life-threatening wound, Loughnan repaid Read for his efforts by stabbing him in a premeditated jail attack. ''I should have broken his neck, the treacherous bastard,'' Read says. (Much later Loughnan was one of five prisoners to die in a deliberately lit fire.) Now you would think Read and his boys (the feared Overcoat Gang in Pentridge) would have worked out that hostage plots usually end badly. But criminals are not usually renowned for their judgment on such matters. Later that year, Amos Atkinson, armed with two shotguns, fired at police before climbing the stairs to the Italian Waiters' Club to hold 30 people hostage.
He said if Read was not released within 24 hours he would start killing his captives. But Amos lost interest after four hours when his mother (a regular diner there) arrived to act as a go-between. She walked up the stairs in her dressing gown, ending the tense standoff by hitting her son on the head with her handbag while telling him to stop being stupid. He then released his captives and surrendered. The siege was a heinous crime on many levels. Shots were fired and victims terrorised - that much is certain. But worse, the Waiters' was a Melbourne institution where reporters, politicians, detectives and the occasional Italian waiter could get a decent feed and a passable claret well after legal closing. The hostage drama brought publicity and with it stricter policing of the establishment's liberal interpretation of the licensing laws.
Atkinson did his jail time and was released, although he still had problems when dining out. We understand that during a robust race-related discussion with a South African gentleman in a peninsula fish-and-chip shop, Amos threw a large container of pickled onions at him. Loading He missed. JOHN SILVESTER collaborated with Read on his original books, proving neither could spell.Both types of integrals are tied together by the fundamental theorem of calculus. This states that if `f(x)` is continuous on `[a,b]` and `F(x)` is its continuous indefinite integral, then `int_(a)^(b) f(x)\ dx = F(b) - F(a)`. This means `int_(0)^(pi) sin(x)\ dx = (-cos(pi))-(-cos(0)) = 2`. Sometimes an approximation to a definite integral is desired. A common way to do so is to place thin rectangles under the curve and add the signed areas together. Wolfram|Alpha can solve a broad range of integrals.
The indefinite integral of `f(x)`, denoted `int f(x)\ dx`, is defined to be the antiderivative of `f(x)`. In other words, the derivative of `int f(x)\ dx` is `f(x)`. Since the derivative of a constant is zero, indefinite integrals are defined only up to an arbitrary constant. For example, `int sin(x)\ dx = -cos(x) + "constant"`, since the derivative of `-cos(x) + "constant"` is `sin(x)`. The definite integral of `f(x)` from `x = a` to `x = b`, denoted `int_(a)^(b) f(x)\ dx`, is defined to be the signed area between `f(x)` and the `x` axis, from `x = a` and `x = b`.
How Wolfram|Alpha calculates integrals
Wolfram|Alpha computes integrals differently than people. It calls Mathematica's Integrate function, which represents a huge amount of mathematical and computational research. Integrate doesn't do integrals the way people do. Instead, it uses powerful, general algorithms that often involve very sophisticated math. There are a couple of approaches that it most commonly takes. One involves working out the general form for an integral, then differentiating this form and solving equations to match undetermined symbolic parameters. Even for quite simple integrands, the equations generated in this way can be highly complex and require Mathematica's strong algebraic computation capabilities to solve. Another approach that Mathematica uses in working out integrals is to convert them to generalized hypergeometric functions, then use collections of relations about these highly general mathematical functions.
While these powerful algorithms give Wolfram|Alpha the ability to compute integrals very quickly and handle a wide array of special functions, understanding how a human would integrate is important too. As a result, Wolfram|Alpha also has algorithms to perform integrations step by step. These use completely different integration techniques that mimic the way humans would approach an integral. This includes integration by substitution, integration by parts, trigonometric substitution, and integration by partial fractions.MAIN Pop Culture
January 8 - Happy Birthday, Elvis!
Elvis Aron Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi on January 8, 1935.
Beginning the age of 21 -- with his first No. 1 hit, "Heartbreak Hotel" -- he rose to become one of rock's most enduring legends.
Although Elvis tragically left us at the age of 42 back in 1977, he still remains in the hearts and minds of millions of fans around the world.
2019 Elvis Celebrations
This year, watch for the Elvis All-Star Tribute Special to be televised on February 17, 2019 on NBC beginning at 8PM ET.
Hosted by country singer Blake Shelton, it will feature an all-star performance lineup with Keith Urban, Post Malone, Jennifer Lopez, and John Fogerty among the artists set to perform some of Elvis Presley's most popular songs. Other musical guests will include Ed Sheeran, Dierks Bentley, John Legend, Josh Groban, Carrie Underwood, Yolanda Adams, Darius Rucker, Mac Davis, Adam Lambert, Shawn Mendes, Alessia Cara, Kelsea Ballerini and the Pistol Annies.
The TV special is being aired in honor of the 50-year anniversary of the famous special "Singer Presents …. Elvis" that aired in 1968, marking the King's comeback and relaunching his career.
Other guests will include Priscilla Presley, Lisa Marie Presley, and Steve Binder, director of the original "Comeback Special."
Stay tuned!
Viva Elvis!
His amazingly versatile voice won him countless admirers, and his generous warm nature along with his handsome good looks has ensured his renditions of many of the most loved songs ever written will continue to attract discerning listeners.
also see in the Party Blog:
Elvis Birthday Party Ideas
Elvis movies also managed to win the hearts of generations of moviegoers young and old.
Unique in many ways, Elvis lived an enigmatic life which even to this day attracts the efforts of countless biographers, from close friend's reminiscences, to academic investigations.
A legend in his own lifetime, Elvis has also become the icon of an era. His voice, at it's very best, has an uncanny addictive nature. No wonder millions of people once ensnared, rarely escape it's seductive tones - even if they wanted to.
Most recently, the 80th anniversary of Elvis' birth was celebrated in 2015 at his famous home in Graceland. The day was marked with special Graceland tours, Elvis fan club get-togethers, guest performances, and other rockin' musical tributes in honor of The King.
DID YOU KNOW? Elvis Presley fun facts
Elvis performing on The
Milton Berle Show, 1956.
• In 1956, just before Elvis' first major television appearance on the Milton Berle Show, the host advised the fledgling rocker to perform without a guitar, adding "Let 'em see you, son." And the rest, as they say, is history. Elvis' gyrating hips caused a sensation nationwide, earning him the nickname Elvis the Pelvis.
• Elvis' natural hair was sandy blond, but as a teenager he began dying it black to look cool.
• Elvis was famous for his unusual food cravings, but his No. 1 favorite was the peanut butter-banana-honey-and-bacon sandwich.
• With the Beatles and the British music revolution, Elvis Presley's star began to fade in 1968 until he returned with a comeback television special that year simply titled "Elvis", which reignited his career.
• Live concert fans were often entertained just as much by his music as his funny banter in-between songs. To find out what a live performance was like, check out the 1974 album, "Having Fun with Elvis on Stage".
More about Elvis around the Web:
Graceland Mansion - The official site with information on ticket purchase and entry fees, special tours and packages, and a library of information, photos and video of the King.
Elvis Presley - Wikipedia - Extensive biography with details on his professional rise and fall, personal details, family life and more with photos, related references and resources.
History of Rock.com - Elvis Presley - Great read with childhood and personal photos, career highlights.
Worldwide Elvis - Everything Elvis, with a long list of fan sites and information from around the planet.Exclusive: State Department quietly warning region on Syrian WMDs
The State Department has begun coordinating with Syria’s neighbors to prepare for the handling of President Bashar al-Assad’s extensive weapons of mass destruction if and when his regime collapses, The Cable has learned.
This week, the State Department sent a diplomatic demarche to Syria’s neighbors Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, warning them about the possibility of Syria’s WMDs crossing their borders and offering U.S. government help in dealing with the problem, three Obama administration officials confirmed to The Cable. For concerned parties both inside and outside the U.S. government, the demarche signifies that the United States is increasingly developing plans to deal with the dangers of a post-Assad Syria — while simultaneously highlighting the lack of planning for how to directly bring about Assad’s downfall.
Syria is believed to have a substantial chemical weapons program, which includes mustard gas and sophisticated nerve agents, such as sarin gas, as well as biological weapons. Syria has also refused IAEA requests to make available facilities that were part of its nuclear weapons program and may still be in operation.
The State Department declined to provide access to any officials to discuss the private diplomatic communication on the record, such as the author of the demarche Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation Tom Countryman. In a meeting with reporters earlier this year, Countryman expressed confidence that the United States knows where Syria’s WMD stockpiles are, but warned that they could become a very serious security issue for Syria and the region going forward.
"We have ideas as to the quantity and we have ideas as to where they are," Countryman said. "We wish some of the neighbors of Syria to be on the lookout… When you get a change of regime in Syria, it matters what are the conditions — chaotic or orderly."
Today, in response to inquiries from The Cable, a State Department official offered the following statement:
"The U.S. and our allies are monitoring Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile. These weapons’ presence in Syria undermines peace and security in the Middle East, and we have long called on the Syrian government to destroy its chemicals weapons arsenal and join the Chemical Weapons Convention," the State Department official said. "We believe Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile remains under Syrian government control, and we will continue to work closely with like-minded countries to prevent proliferation of Syria’s chemical weapons program."
The demarche made four specific points, according to other U.S. officials who offered a fuller account to The Cable. It communicated the U.S. government’s recognition that there is a highly active chemical warfare program in Syria, which is complemented by ballistic-missile delivery capability. It further emphasized that that any potential political transition in Syria could raise serious questions about the regime’s control over proliferation-sensitive material.
Third, the State Department wanted Syria’s neighbors to know that should the Assad regime fall, the security of its WMD stockpile — as well as its control over conventional weapons like MANPADS (shoulder-fired rocket launchers) — could come into question and could pose a serious threat to regional security. Lastly, the demarche emphasized that the U.S. government stands ready to support neighboring countries to provide border-related security cooperation.
"It’s essentially a recognition of the danger to the regional and international community of the stockpiles that the regime possesses and the importance of working with countries, given the potential fall of the regime, to |
, before passing through Hama city on its winding route to empty into the Mediterranean.
Syria Direct could not independently confirm what caused the drop in the river's level. What is clear, however, is that something has dramatically altered the flow of the Orontes in northern Homs and Hama.
After the Rastan lake dried up, the structure of an electrical factory built during the French Mandate period in Syria, that was covered when the lake was first formed, appeared again, “for the first time in 100 years,” Yaarub a-Dali, an activist in the area told Syria Direct.
“The regime controls the body of the Rastan dam, and it is fortified with soldiers and tanks,” a-Dali said. “Only the lake is in the opposition area.”
An early-twentieth century electrical plant was exposed after the Rastan lake dried up in recent weeks. Photo courtesy of Abu Ahmad.
In Rastan, the loss of the area’s lake is devastating farmers and fishermen. In Hama, the lowering water levels and the subsequent halting of the norias threaten to damage the structures, Ahmad Sabah, the former director of the Hama Artifacts Office who currently lives in opposition-held territories in the province told Syria Direct.
"With the water drying up and the wood of the norias being exposed to the burning summer sun for long periods, they could be damaged,” Sabah said.
With the river low, not only have the wheels stopped, but the water that remains is sluggish, and wastewater and trash usually carried away by the current is lingering, giving off a “loathsome smell,” local correspondent Baraa said.
Pictures provided to Syria Direct show extremely low water levels and trash floating in still, scummy water.
The waterwheels, symbols of the city and once a site for picnics and restaurants, family outings and groups of tourists, are still, their wooden voices silent. Below, the river smells of rot and waste.
“The history of Hama is filled with massacres,” Sabah told Syria Direct. “There may be beautiful memories on the banks of the Orontes, but its drying up, the norias no longer turning; none of it matters much to those who have lost much more precious things.”
Additional reporting by Hasaan Idrees.Click Here for Details
Brettanomyces Character in Wine
©Richard Gawel
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Introduction
The desirability or otherwise of the wine character known as "Brett" is one of the most controversial issues of recent times. Arguments have been made for Brett character being a complexing and a legitimate expression of natural, uncomplicated winemaking, while others view it simply as an unattractive wine fault that results from poor winery hygiene and sloppy winemaking.
Figure 1: Brettanomyces bruxellensis forming pseudomycelium
© 2004 High Power Ultrasonics Pty Ltd
The Aroma and Flavour of Brett Character
But what is Brett character and how and why does it appear in some wines? The wine character described as "Bretty" comes in various forms. It is the combined result of the creation of a number of compounds by the yeast Brettanomyces bruxellensis, and its close relative, Dekkera bruxulensis. The three most important known aroma active compounds are 1) 4-ethyl phenol (4-ep), which has been variously described as having the aromas of Band-aids®, antiseptic and horse stable 2) 4-ethyl guaiacol (4-eg) which has a rather pleasant aroma of smoked bacon, spice or cloves and 3) isovaleric acid which has an unpleasant smell of sweaty animals, cheese and rancidity. Other characters associated with Brett include wet dog, creosote, burnt beans, rotting vegetation, plastic and (but not exclusively caused by Brett) mouse cage aroma and vinegar.
The Formation of Brett Character in Wine
Brettanomyces has been isolated from the outside of grapes and from winery equipment. However its, favoured winery haunt is the oak barrel as it often provides for conditions that strongly favours its growth.
Certain conditions are known to favour the growth of Brettanomyces during winemaking. If low free sulfur dioxide levels are coupled with high wine pH and warm temperatures during barrel maturation, then issues may arise. If older oak is used and the wine has a reasonable amount of dissolved oxygen, …. look out! Furthermore it is thought that Brett can also multiply after bottling if the wine contains residual fermentable sugars, a situation made more likely if the wine was minimally filtered. Lets look at the why's of these factors.
Brettanomyces proliferates under warm cellaring conditions. Twenty degrees C is an ideal temperature, with even small reductions in temperature seriously hamper its growth. Sulfur dioxide is an anti-microbial agent that is added by winemakers throughout the winemaking process. If it is added in sufficient amounts, and the pH of the wine is reasonably high (SO2 is more effective at higher acidity levels), then the growth of Brett will be retarded. On the other hand, high alcohol levels and the existence of even small amounts of fermentable sugars such as glucose suit the growth of Brett, as they are its preferred source of energy for growth. Some recent research under laboratory conditions suggest that Brett does not grow at alcohol levels above 13%. However, this result is not consistent with the observation that many wines with alcohols far in excess of this have gone bretty under winery conditions.
Filtering the wine before bottling can reduce the numbers of Brett cells, and hence the incidence of Brett character that develops in the bottle. However, there is anecdotal evidence that filtered wines that are sound at the time of bottling can randomly become infected with Brettanomyces after a period of time, probably as a result of the bottled wine containing residual sugar and being stored in warm conditions.
It is widely acknowledged that the majority of wines with Brett character, became that way during the period of barrel maturation, particularly if second use (or older) oak barrels were used. Brett can colonise a barrel between fills, and can begin to reproduce when the barrel is refilled with new wine. Figure 1 shows Brett extending pseudomycilium into the surface of an oak stave. Topping up barrels with a wine which contains Brett cells, may also contribute to those barrels 'going Bretty'. Shaving and re-toasting the inside of re-used barrels significantly reduces the incidence of Brett growth. However, it is also worth noting that the use of new barrels does not guarantee that Brett will not appear. Recent work in California has shown that new barrels filled with sterilised wine can still sustain populations of Brett high enough to produce above threshold levels of 4-ep.
But why does oak maturation particularly favour Brett growth? Firstly, Brett is a slow growing yeast that does not compete well against other micro-organisms. During alcoholic fermentation the wine yeast Saccharomyces out easily out-competes it. Two possible reasons are that it naturally grows slower than Saccharomyces, and that it prefers aerobic conditions for growth. During primary ferment, the wine is saturated with carbon dioxide which makes for a hostile environment for Brettanomyces. On the other hand, barrel maturation is a step in conventional winemaking that provides both the time and the lack of competition needed for Brett to successfully grow to levels which results in sensory modification to the wine. Wines stored in barrel are usually lower in SO2 and are kept warmer than at any other time (other than during ferment of course). This is necessary so as to encourage malolactic fermentation (MLF). Lastly, the necessary processes of racking off lees and regularly topping up barrels ensures that there are always reasonable levels of dissolved oxygen in the wine. For all these reasons, it is thought that the time between the completion of primary fermentation and the start of MLF this is the most likely time that Brett multiplies and produces brettiness in wine.
Brettanomyces Character is Seen Primarily in Red Wine. Why?
One final matter concerning Brett is rarely mentioned. It occurs almost exclusively in red wines. Why is this so? Red wines have a much higher level of tannin like substances called coumaric and ferulic acid than do white wines as they are extracted from the skins of grapes during red wine fermentation. The wine yeast Saccharomyces and some lactic acid bacteria such as Lactobacillis have enzymes which degrade these acids to weakly smelling intermediates called 4-vinyl phenol and 4-vinyl guaiacol (Step 1 of Figure 2). These compounds are then enzymatically degraded over a period of months by Brettanomyces to the strong smelling 4-ethyl phenol and 4-ethyl guaiacol respectively (Step 2 of Figure 2). Incidentally Brettanomyces is the only major micro-organism in wine that has the ability to transform 4-vinyl-phenol into the potent band-aid® smelling, 4-ethyl phenol. Hence 4-ethyl phenol is rightly considered to be the "trademark" aroma of Brettanomyces growth in wine. Where you find 4-ethyl phenol you will invariably find Brett, and vice versa.
Surveys of Australian wines have shown that detectable levels of 4-ethyl phenol is more likely to be seen in darker coloured wines, with Shiraz and Cabernet wines than wines made from either Pinot noir and Grenache. The reason for this is unclear, but may involve the coumarates which are a form of coloured anthocyanins found in red wines.
The Prevalence of Brett Character
Has Brett character become apparently more prevalent in recent years? Some commentators believe that we have simply become more aware of it and that it has always been around. I am sure that there is some truth in this. Upon personal reflection, I feel that classic Hunter Shiraz with its'sweaty saddle' aroma and flavour is a very likely case in point. However, in my opinion, the overpowering, fruit destroying, antiseptic like aromas and flavours that are now occasionally encountered in wines sourced from every winemaking region of Australia is a relatively new phenomenon. The trend in this country today is to produce red wines picked from riper grapes. In addition to maximizing flavour development in some varieties, this also results in wines that are on average higher in pH and alcohol. Furthermore, residual sweetness is being retained in some commercial red wines in an attempt to fill out the palate and to give it greater apparent fruitiness. These trends together with the use of minimal SO2 and filtration, has enhanced the conditions under which Brett is retained and thrives.
The Desirability or Otherwise of Brett Character in Wine
But is the action of Brett desirable? In my humble opinion, the answer depends on degree. As well as producing a band-aid aroma, Brett can create an array of 'interesting' smells that can excite those that are inclined to be excited by them. Furthermore, the ratio of the rather unattractive 4-ethyl phenol to the rather pleasant smelling 4-ethyl guaiacol varies substantially from wine to wine, with reports varying from 3:1 to over 40:1. In the latter case, it is highly likely that the wine would smell like the inside of a band-aid box, while in the former, the aroma would in all likelihood be far more spicy and savoury like. The reason for these differences between wines are not completely understood but are likely to be either due to differing ratios between wines coumaric and ferulic acids (the respective precursors of 4-ep and 4-eg), or to different strains of Brettanomyces being more effective in producing one compound relative to the other. Very recent research with five different strains of Brettanomyces has not lent much support to the latter possibility. Under laboratory conditions the different strains produced roughly equal proportions of 4-ep to 4-eg in the same red wine. But the search for strains of Brett which may be low 4-ep producers will no doubt continue.
In some wine growing regions such as Bordeaux, the Rhone and, dare I say it, the Hunter Valley, it is now acknowledged that some wine producers have developed 'house styles' over time that have actually been defined by some form of Brett character. Many of these producers, or the media, or both, have naively attributed these unusual and sometimes complexing characters to being 'an expression of the soil'. However, overwhelming scientific evidence in the form of elevated 4-ethyl phenol levels in their wines have forced them to admit to the less romantic notions of the microbiological origin of these characters. This is not to say that they necessarily will, or indeed should, do anything different in the future, as many Bretty house styles have become widely accepted and in some cases revered by the wine tasting public. But in the cases where a wine smells more of a hospital ward than it does wine, surely the wine-maker should begin to reflect on what wine drinkers seriously value. That is, real fruit and real complexity. Unfortunately some winemakers (possibly in an attempt to save their career), have attributed the accidental making of overtly Bretty wines as a serious attempt at making something different and complex. Wine diversity is a wonderful thing and should be encouraged in the face of continued 'internationalisation' of wines. But as Pascal Chattonet once argued. Brettyiness has nothing to do with a wines 'typicity' as claimed by some French wine producers. His counterclaim is that wines that are overly Bretty do indeed smell and taste much the same, so overt Brettyness mitigates against 'typicity' and diversity. I'm in Pascal's camp. Real 'typicity' and 'expression' indeed come from the fruit. A message that I hope is not lost on the winemaking fraternity.BOSTON (Reuters) - Campaigns to legalize recreational marijuana use in Massachusetts and Maine launched their first television ads on Monday, hoping to boost public awareness and support ahead of November votes on the issue.
Marijuana plants are examined under a magnifying glass at Ganja Farms marijuana store in Bogota, Colombia January 7, 2016. REUTERS/John Vizcaino
The ads began just over a month before Election Day, when voters in five U.S. states will determine whether to legalize the recreational use of the drug, following the lead of Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska, as well as the District of Columbia.
The Massachusetts ads feature Tom Nolan, a former Boston Police Department officer and current professor of criminal justice at Merrimack College, advocating for legalization as a way to better regulate marijuana use.
“Question 4 requires strict product labeling and child-proof packaging and bans consumption by kids,” Nolan says in the 30-second spot, citing the question’s position on the Nov. 8 ballot, the start of a $650,000 ad campaign.
The Maine advertisement also features an ex-law enforcement official, former Cumberland County Sheriff Mark Dion, who argues that legalizing the use of the drug by adults would free up police resources to investigate violent crimes. The Maine group has budgeted $1 million for its ad spending.
The campaigns launch a week after the group Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol in Arizona launched its first blast of TV ads. Voters in California and Nevada will also face ballot questions on the issue this year.
Nevada campaigners plan to begin a TV campaign in the “very near future,” a spokesman said.
Both the Massachusetts and Maine campaigns face stiff opposition from local officials, with Boston Mayor Martin Walsh, a recovering alcoholic, among the most prominent Democratic voices against the idea. Walsh has stressed the perceived risk that legalizing marijuana could lead users to become addicted first to pot and then other drugs.
Maine Governor Paul LePage, a Republican, has also repeatedly voiced his opposition.
Recent opinion polls have shown voters in both northeastern states favoring legalization. Some 53 percent of respondents to a WBZ/UMass Amherst poll of 700 likely Massachusetts voters last month supported the measure.
The result in Maine was much the same, with 53 percent of 505 likely voters polled by the Portland Press Herald saying they favored the idea.
The Massachusetts group said its initial campaign would last a week with a potential extension.
“It’s a matter of how much money we have and how much TV we can afford,” said Jim Borghesani, a spokesman for the group.The world's top banks are changing their strips
A DECADE ago, Europe counted five banks among the world's top ten. Today there is only one, HSBC. During that time Chinese banks not only made the list, but vaulted into the top two places, according to annual rankings by The Banker released on June 30th. Last year China Construction Bank shoved aside America's JPMorgan Chase to become second largest in terms of tier-one capital. ICBC (formerly known as Industrial and Commercial Bank of China) kept the top spot; with more than $200 billion, it is also the world's most profitable bank. Though Japan's Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group is close to leaving the list altogether, until 2007 its $117 billion heft would have made it the world's biggest bank. Despite regulations designed to keep banks' ambitions modest so that none are too big to fail, today's groups are larger than ever. Global banking profits are at a record high of $920 billion—a third from Chinese banks alone.Advertisement Steven Avery sends WISN 12 a letter: 'Truth will set me free' Share Shares Copy Link Copy
WISN 12 News investigative reporter Colleen Henry wrote convicted Steven Avery to see if he would be willing to talk about how the Netflix documentary series “Making a Murderer” has affected him.Thursday afternoon, she received his three-page response.Read the letterAvery is serving life in prison for Teresa Halbach’s murder in 2005.He's maintained his innocence all this time. In the letter he said, “Here, put this on and I will talk to you, and do an investigation of the sheriff of Manitowoc County."Avery focused on his former girlfriend Jodi Stachowski. She professed his innocence in the documentary, but recently told Nancy Grace he was a monster who threatened her and her family, and she now believes he killed Halbach.Avery suggested the state paid his former girlfriend to change her story writing, "How much money Jodi get to talk bad!"With Avery's handwritten note came a typed statement in which he wrote, "The real killer is still out there. Who is he stalking now? I am really innocent of this case and that is the truth!!! The truth will set me free!!!!!!!"Avery said he's willing to do an interview, but the Department of Corrections said it will not allow interviews.Over the years, Avery and his family have written to WISN 12 News as he worked his way through the appeals process. This was the first communication since the documentary.His new Illinois attorney has issued statements saying Avery will be exonerated, but she's not talking to reporters.The state Justice Department asked a judge to deny Avery's latest effort to be released from prison.Avery filed an appeal last week claiming his property was illegally searched and asked for a new trial and to be released.The state responded Thursday arguing Avery is a flight risk and shouldn't be released from custody.Members of an international research team, including paleontologists from the University of Alberta, know what it's like to touch a Tyrannosaurus rex.
Scott Persons, a paleontology fellow at the University of Alberta, and a team of international researchers have discovered the first record of skin samples from Tyrannosaurus rex, Albertosaurus and other tyrannosaurids dating back at least 60 million years.
"My first instinct when I saw the specimens was 'Oh my gosh, I really want to touch it,' " Persons said Tuesday.
"It was the fulfilment of my childhood dream."
Recently discovered skin fossils found in Alberta and South Dakota show that tyrannosaurids were covered in tiny scales. (Anna Desmarais/CBC) Team Rex, as the research team is known, found fossilized samples of the scaly skin from what they believe were the necks, flanks and tails of tyrannosaurids. The fossils were found in Alberta, South Dakota and Mongolia.
The Albertosaurus skin fossil was found in the province. While it's not the T. rex itself, Persons said the texture of the skin is the same for both species.
'Feels more like tiles'
"The skin is actually pretty bumpy," he said. "It's not like the skin of snakes or lizards where the scales overlap. It feels more like tiles."
The researchers' paper will be published in Royal Society journal Biology Letters this month.
The findings may change the way biologists think about the evolution of the tyrannosaurid family, including T. rex.
According to past research, the first dinosaurs were covered in scales, but later evolved to have hair-like feathers over the scales.
The new discovery indicates a different evolutionary tale.
"This is a very strange finding," Persons said. "[These findings] make for a more complex evolutionary story because the group developed feathers, and then reduced them."
Palaeontologist Scott Persons says the fossilized skin is bumpy to the touch. (Scott Persons)
Persons believes T. rex lost its feathers as it evolved and grew larger, needing less insulation from the tropical Alberta sun.
Other animals have reduced their skin coverings over time.
The elephant, hippopotamus and rhinoceros are "almost hairless now," Parsons said. He said they lost their hair as they evolved and grew larger, as a way to reduce body heat.
'Absolutely fascinating'
Team Rex member Phil Bell, an earth sciences professor at the University of New England, believes paleontology hasn't paid enough attention to dinosaur skin in the past.
"Dinosaur skin is absolutely fascinating," Bell said. "It gives us a real idea of what these animals actually looked like."
A University of Edinburgh study released in 2014 suggested that all living birds are thought to be descended from the tyrannosaurid family because of their capacity to stand on two legs.
The actual fossils are only for the hands of the paleontologists, but Persons hopes museums will be able to make rubber or cast models of the skin so children everywhere can realize their dreams of touching a T. rex.
"It has the potential to be that wow factor and to bring people to museums," he said.Now that the Indians have removed Eric Wedge from managerial duties, the search is on. It has been widely assumed that nobody currently managing at a different level within the Indians system will be promoted. This leaves a couple of hard choices for management. I figured I would add my two cents (in case the great Mark Shapiro googles his name and hits this article) to post choices which would merit strong consideration. Without hesitation, here are my top candidates to manage the Cleveland Indians:
#1. Reuben Kincaid
For all of my younger readers who have no idea, Reuben Kincaid managed The Partridge Family. He propelled the Partridge’s to the top of the charts in the 1970’s. He even has experience keeping eyesore Danny Partridge (Danny Bonaduce) in line. If you hire Kincaid, you also gain a bench coach in Shirley Jones. The only drawback on the Kincaid proposal would be having to suffer through “I Think I Love You” instead of “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” for the 7th-inning stretch.
#2. Captain Lou Albano
Why not bring in Captain Lou Albano? He has managed champions throughout his career. If he can keep The Wild Samoans and George “The Animal” Steele under control, why would he struggle with Kerry Wood or Travis Hafner? Pro wrestling and baseball are about neck-in-neck on the steroid abuse charts, it would be a magical fit. The Indians may have to allow facial rubber banding, but what a small price to pay for someone with such a brilliant track record.
#3. Pete Rose
The legalization of casino gambling is a hot topic in the State of Ohio these days. Some argue that they hate seeing the tax dollars earned go to surrounding states that Ohioans are frequenting. By bringing in Pete Rose, you would have a win-win situation regardless of what happens to the proposed gaming legislation. Someone has to bet on the Indians, why not Pete? The bookies are dying for a fish to start betting consistently on the Tribe. Yeah he may concede every third game by chewing up his bullpen to win some money but people know he would be firing on his own team causing a contagious reaction to betting on Cleveland to win.
#4. Sir George Martin
This guy was able to make Beatles albums without the Beatles around each other. He and his son then remix everything 40 years later and are making a killing in Vegas on the “improved” product. Why don’t the Indians owners take a chance on Sir George Martin coming in to ‘remix’ the Indians? Teach Grady Sizemore how to throw a curve, show Kelly Shoppach how to be the cutoff man on a single to right, work with Jensen Lewis on stealing second. Remix things. Could it be worse than it was most of this past season?
#5. LeBron James
This may be the most realistic choice on the menu. Think about it. He is now wearing #6 because he wanted to change things up. He won a gold medal wearing #6, he is now #6 for the Cavs. Braylon Edwards punches his little buddy and ends up in New York. LeBron was instrumental, intentional or not, in getting Braylon sent away. It is probably a blessing for Cavs fans that Edwards is a jet. The only bad scenario would be if LeBron went to New York after the season ended, he may order the Jets to ship Edwards back to Cleveland.
The Indians can use that kind of stroke. If you don’t think James has more power in Cleveland than anyone else than you are naive. He pretty much dictates what the Cavs do, he is now dictating what the Browns do. Hell, give him all of the keys to the city, let him say what the Indians should do too.Getty Images
It’s officially Christmas shopping season, and that means the iPads and Kindle Fires are being plucked off the shelves in droves. These gifts come with some hefty price tags – but the presents are staunchly from the present. If you’re seeking a more vintage gift-giving routine this holiday season, might we remind you of the centuries-old song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas?” The song highlights 12 gifts for 12 days to give to your true love. And though the gifts are rather old-school, be prepared to shell out as well, to the tune of $101,119.84.
This year, for the first time ever, the price of purchasing every item in the song, all 364 of them, has risen above $100,000. That’s the cost of what PNC Wealth Management calls the “True Cost of Christmas,” calculating the cost of buying every item throughout all verses (fair warning: you’ll end up with 42 swans-a-swimming and 42 geese-a-laying if you do). Each year since 1984, PNC Wealth Management has put a dollar figure on the gifts in the song.
(LIST: The 9 Most Christmas-y Towns in America)
Last year, the total cost was just under $97,000. This year, in mirroring the nation’s general economic trend, the index increased by 4.4% to $101,000. Blame it on the partridges and the turtle doves, both of which have seen double-digit price hikes in the past year. We hope your true love is a fowl lover, as winged animals dominate the list, followed by artistic services. And while paying skilled musicians can be a budget-buster, the true pain in the wallet comes with the swans. Seven of them total $6,300, making them the most expensive item on the list.
How do they come up with the numbers? In the same way a normal shopper would, in fact. PNC consults the National Aviary in Pittsburgh for a majority of the birds’ prices, including the partridge, two doves, six geese and seven swans, and their shoppers head to PetSmart to buy the more accessible calling birds (four) and French hens (three). The Pennsylvania Ballet offers the price of the ten lords-a-leaping and a Philadanco, a dance company based in Philadelphia, prices out the services for the nine ladies dancing. The two retail goods on the list, the pear tree and the five golden rings, are both rung up at Philadelphia stores. A musicians union calculates the cost of the twelve drummers drumming and the eleven pipers piping. And finally, the unskilled maids-a-milking, eight of them, are paid the $7.25 minimum wage for their services.
And if you’re not feeling quite as generous – or if 364 separate gifts would simply not fit in your house – there’s still the option to buy just one day’s worth of goods for $24,263. The cost of the index has more than doubled since PNC began indexing the items in 1984, when the price of one complete set was $12,673.
Ouch, that’s quite a price bump. However, don’t think you can cut costs with a little cybershopping: PNC notes that the price of shipping birds is exorbitant, putting an Internet-purchased list at $174,382.
Courtesy PNC Wealth Management
LIST: The 12 CDs of ChristmasLast month, I covered an NFL football game in which I had freedom to roam once what I shot what I needed for ESPN the Magazine (that story to be published this month).
I was done with my pregame shoot and portrait session the night prior, and so I had a decision to make: drive four hours home or spend four hours over four quarters making pictures at a game that, in the terms of the NFL this season, was a little off the grid.
The Jacksonville Jaguars and Houston Texans currently have records of 2-5 and 3-5, respectively, but they are still in the hunt to make playoffs in their division! Regardless of win/loss record, there are always interesting photos to be made.
I roamed about the stadium playing with shutter speed, lenses, and such to see what I could grab for stock, but moreover it was just visual practice in finding details and making photos that I enjoy and that wouldn’t normally be made. I was half successful, but in the end, this edit is a little more interesting than what game action would have been, I’m sure.
Most of my gigs usually involve following player X around all day to make the best photo, but having that X in the bag and some time to play around, it’s always fun and worth spending the extra time making friends with a 400mm and converter again.
About the author: Chip Litherland is a photographer and self-diagnosed color addict based in Sarasota, Florida. He has spent over 12 years in photojournalism and commercial photography, and his award-winning photos can regularly be seen in publications such as The New York Times, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, ESPN the Magazine, and USA TODAY. You can find more of his work on his website and on Instagram. This article was also published here.
Image credits: All photographs copyright Chip Litherland and were used with permissionState of the Postgres project
By Greg Sabino Mullane
January 4, 2010
It’s been interesting watching the MySQL drama unfold, but I have to take issue when people start trying to drag Postgres into it again by spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). Rather than simply rebut the FUD, I thought this was a good opportunity to examine the strength of the Postgres project.
Monty recently espoused the following in a blog comment:
“...This case is about ensuring that Oracle doesn’t gain money and market share by killing an Open Source competitor. Today MySQL, tomorrow PostgreSQL. Yes, PostgreSQL can also be killed; To prove the case, think what would happen if someone managed to ensure that the top 20 core PostgreSQL developers could not develop PostgreSQL anymore or if each of these developers would fork their own PostgreSQL project.”
Later on in his blog he raises the same theme again with a slight bit more detail:
“Note that not even PostgreSQL is safe from this threat! For example, Oracle could buy some companies developing PostgreSQL and target the core developers. Without the core developers working actively on PostgreSQL, the PostgreSQL project will be weakened tremendously and it could even die as a result.”
Is this a valid concern? It’s easy enough to overlook it considering the Sturm und Drang in Monty’s recent posts, but I think this is something worth seriously looking into. Specifically, is the Postgres project capable of withstanding a direct threat from a large company with deep pockets (e.g. Oracle)?
To get to the answer, let’s run some numbers first. Monty mentions the “top 20” Postgres developers. If we look at the community contributors page, we see that there are in fact 25 major developers listed, as well as 7 core members, so 20 would indeed be a significant chunk of that page. To dig deeper, I looked at the cvs logs for the year of 2009 for the Postgres project, and ran some scripts against them. The 9185 commits were spread across 16 different people, and about 16 other people were mentioned in the commit notes as having contributed in some way (e.g. a patch from a non-committer). So again, it looks like Monty’s number of 20 is a pretty good approximation.
However (and you knew there was a however), the catch comes from being able to actually stop 20 of those people from working on Postgres. There are basically two ways to do this: Oracle could buy out a company, or they could hire (buy out) a person. The first problem is that the Postgres community is very widely distributed. If you look at the people on the community contributors page, you’ll see that the 32 people work for 24 different companies. Further, no one company holds sway: the median is one company, and the high water mark is a mere three developers. All of this is much better than it was years ago, in the total number and in the distribution.
The next fly in the ointment is that buying out a company is not always easy to do, despite the size of your pockets. Many companies on that list are privately held and will not sell. Even if you did buy out the company, there is no way to prevent the people working there from then moving to a different company. Finally, buying out some companies just isn’t possible, even if you are Oracle, because there are some big names on the list of people employing major Postgres developers: Google, Red Hat, Skype, and SRA. Then of course there is NTT, which is a really, really big company (larger than Oracle). NTT’s Postgres developers are not always as visible as some of the English-speaking ones, but NTT employs a lot of people to work on Postgres (which is extremely popular in Japan).
The second way is hiring people directly. However, people can not always be bought off. Sure, some of the developers might choose to leave if Oracle offered them $20 million dollars, but not all of them (Larry, I might go for $19 million, call me :). Even if they did leave, the depth of the Postgres community should not be underestimated. For every “major developer” on that page, there are many others who read the lists, know the code well, but just haven’t, for one reason or another, made it on to that list. At a rough guess, I’d say that there are a couple hundred people in the world who would be able to make commits to the Postgres source code. Would all of them be as fast or effective as some of the existing people? Perhaps not, but the point is that it would be nigh impossible to thin the pool fast enough to make a dent.
The project’s email lists are as strong as ever, to such a point that I find it hard to keep up with the traffic, a problem I did not have a few years ago. The number of conferences and people attending each is growing rapidly, and there is a great demand for people with Postgres skills. The number of projects using Postgres, or offering it as an alternative database backend, is constantly growing. It’s no longer difficult to find a hosting provider that offers Postgres in addition to MySQL. Most important of all, the project continues to regularly release stable new versions. Version 8.5 will probably be released in 2010.
In conclusion, the state of the Postgres project is in great shape, due to the depth and breadth of the community (and the depth and breadth of the developer subset). There is no danger of Postgres going the MySQL route; the PG developers are spread across a number of businesses, the code (and documentation!) is BSD, and no one firm holds sway in the project.
community database mysql postgresUnshackled Trump: ISIS To Conquer America If Clinton Wins
According to Donald Trump, the Islamic State is “hoping and praying” Hillary Clinton wins the presidency so that the Mideast terror group can take over the United States. However hard that may be to believe, it’s not out of line with what the Republican presidential nominee’s political surrogates have said in the past.
Speaking Wednesday during a rally in Ocala, Florida, and still reeling from plummeting polls and abandonment from some within the GOP, Trump said ISIS will “take over not only that part of the world, they’ll take over this country, they’ll take over this part of the world. Believe me. They are hoping. They are hoping.”
“And by the way, you know, she likes to say they want me — I will be their worst nightmare,” he added. “I’m gonna be their worst nightmare. Ugh.”
For the record, Trump has yet to reveal his plan to defeat the Islamic State, other than to “bomb the hell out of” it.
He also used Wednesday’s rally to bash Clinton and President Barack Obama, Democrats both, for failing to use the term “radical Islamic terrorism.” He also promised to keep radical Islamists “the hell out of our country.”
Trump isn’t alone in his belief that a Clinton victory would allow the Islamic State to conquer America. In his recent book, The Field of Fight, top Trump adviser retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, wrote he is “totally convinced that, without a proper sense of urgency, we will be eventually defeated, dominated, and very likely destroyed” by Islamic militants.
“[T]here’s no doubt,” Flynn added, “that they are dead set on taking us over and drinking our blood.”
Since House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin earlier this week said he would not campaign for Trump, the businessman has been on a tear that is unprecedented in modern politics — b |
3 million people in state jails, were serving time for drug offenses. 700,000 were incarcerated for violent offenses.[25]
Violent crime was not responsible for the quadrupling of the incarcerated population in the United States from 1980 to 2003. Violent crime rates had been relatively constant or declining over those decades. The prison population was increased primarily by public policy changes causing more prison sentences and lengthening time served, for example through mandatory minimum sentencing, "three strikes" laws, and reductions in the availability of parole or early release. 49% of sentenced state inmates were held for violent offenses.
Perhaps the single greatest force behind the growth of the prison population has been the national "War on Drugs". The War on Drugs initiative expanded during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. During Regan's term, a bi-partisan Congress established the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, galvanized by the death of Len Bias. According to the Human Rights Watch, legislation like this led to the extreme increase in drug offense imprisonment and "increasing racial disproportions among the arrestees".[39] The number of incarcerated drug offenders has increased twelvefold since 1980. In 2000, 22 percent of those in federal and state prisons were convicted on drug charges.[40][41] In 2011, 55.6% of the 1,131,210 sentenced prisoners in state prisons were being held for violent crimes (this number excludes the 200,966 prisoners being held due parole violations, of which 39.6% were re-incarcerated for a subsequent violent crime).[42] Also in 2011, 3.7% of the state prison population consisted of prisoners whose highest conviction was for drug possession (again excluding those incarcerated for parole violations of which 6.0% were re-incarcerated for a subsequent act of drug possession).[42]
Recidivism [ edit ]
A 2002 study survey, showed that among nearly 275,000 prisoners released in 1994, 67.5% were rearrested within 3 years, and 51.8% were back in prison.[43] However, the study found no evidence that spending more time in prison raises the recidivism rate, and found that those serving the longest time, 61 months or more, had a slightly lower re-arrest rate (54.2%) than every other category of prisoners. This is most likely explained by the older average age of those released with the longest sentences, and the study shows a strong negative correlation between recidivism and age upon release.
Comparison with other countries [ edit ]
[3] A map of incarceration rates by country
With around 100 prisoners per 100,000, the United States had an average prison and jail population until 1980. Afterwards it drifted apart considerably. The United States has the highest prison and jail population (2,121,600 in adult facilities in 2016), and the highest incarceration rate in the world (655 per 100,000 population in 2016),.[3][44][45] According to the World Prison Population List (11th edition) there were around 10.35 million people in penal institutions worldwide in 2015.[46] The US had 2,173,800 prisoners in adult facilities in 2015.[47] That means the US held 21.0% of the world's prisoners in 2015, even though the US represented only around 4.4 percent of the world's population in 2015,[48][49]
Comparing other English-speaking developed countries, whereas the incarceration rate of the US is 655 per 100,000 population of all ages,[3] the incarceration rate of Canada is 114 per 100,000 (as of 2015),[50] England and Wales is 146 per 100,000 (as of 2016),[51] and Australia is 160 per 100,000 (as of 2016).[52] Comparing other developed countries, the rate of Spain is 133 per 100,000 (as of 2016),[53] Greece is 89 per 100,000 (as of 2016),[54] Norway is 73 per 100,000 (as of 2016),[55] Netherlands is 69 per 100,000 (as of 2014),[56] and Japan is 48 per 100,000 (as of 2014).[57]
A 2008 New York Times article,[45] said that "it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher."
The U.S. incarceration rate peaked in 2008 when about 1 in 100 US adults was behind bars.[29] This incarceration rate exceeded the average incarceration levels in the Soviet Union during the existence of the Gulag system, when the Soviet Union's population reached 168 million, and 1.2 to 1.5 million people were in the Gulag prison camps and colonies (i.e. about 0.8 imprisoned per 100 USSR residents, according to numbers from Anne Applebaum and Steven Rosefielde).[58][59] In The New Yorker article The Caging of America (2012), Adam Gopnik writes: "Over all, there are now more people under 'correctional supervision' in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height."[60]
Ethnicity [ edit ]
2010. Inmates in adult facilities, by race and ethnicity. Jails, and state and federal prisons.[61] Race, ethnicity % of US population % of U.S.
incarcerated population National incarceration rate
(per 100,000 of all ages) White (non-Hispanic) 64 39 450 per 100,000 Hispanic 16 19 831 per 100,000 Black 13 40 2,306 per 100,000
[62] The 2015 US prison population by race, ethnicity, and gender. Does not include jails.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) in 2013 black males accounted for 37% of the total male prison population, white males 32%, and Hispanic males 22%. White females comprised 49% of the prison population in comparison to black females who accounted for 22% of the female population. The imprisonment rate for black females (113 per 100,000) was 2x the rate for white females (51 per 100,000.[63] Out of all ethnic groups, African Americans, Puerto Rican Americans, and Native Americans have some of the highest rates of incarceration.[64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72] Though, of these groups, the black population is the largest, and therefore make up a large portion of those incarcerated in US prisons and jails.[clarification needed][73]
Hispanics (of all races) were 20.6% of the total jail and prison population in 2009.[74] Hispanics comprised 16.3% of the US population according to the 2010 US census.[75][76] The Northeast has the highest incarceration rates of Hispanics in the nation.[77] Connecticut has the highest Hispanic-to-White incarceration ratio with 6.6 Hispanic males for every white male. The National Average Hispanic-to-White incarceration ratio is 1.8. Other states with high Hispanic-to-White incarcerations include Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York.[78][79]
In 2010, adult black non-Hispanic males were incarcerated at the rate of 4,347 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents. Adult white males were incarcerated at the rate of 678 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents. Adult Hispanic males were incarcerated at the rate of 1,755 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents.[1] (For female rates see the table below.) Asian Americans have lower incarceration rates than any other racial group, including whites.[80]
There is general agreement in the literature that blacks are more likely to commit violent crimes than are whites in the United States. Whether this is the case for less serious crimes is less clear.[81] Black majority cities have similar crime statistics for blacks as do cities where majority of population is white. For example, white-plurality San Diego has a slightly lower crime rate for blacks than does Atlanta, a city which has black majority in population and city government.[82]
In 2013, by age 18, 30% of black males, 26% of Hispanic males, and 22% of white males have been arrested. By age 23, 49% of black males, 44% of Hispanic males, and 38% of white males have been arrested.[83] According to Attorney Antonio Moore in his Huffington Post article, "there are more African American men incarcerated in the U.S. than the total prison populations in India, Argentina, Canada, Lebanon, Japan, Germany, Finland, Israel and England combined." There are only 19 million African American males in the United States, but collectively these countries represent over 1.6 billion people.[84] Moore has also shown using data from the World Prison Brief [85]& United States Department of Justice[86] that there are more black males incarcerated in the United States than all women imprisoned globally. To give perspective there are just about 4 billion woman in total globally, there are only 19 million black males of all ages in the United States.[citation needed]
Mass incarceration of African American is often referred to as a racial caste-like system. This system has been blindly created to position African Americans into an “underclass”, a group that is not able to reach opportunity. Groups like these have been around since the 1940’s, resembling to the “Jim Crow Laws”, laws that were put into place to segregate and take rights away from African American citizens. 75% of African Americans or Latinos are incarcerated for drug related crimes (Alexander, 2010).[87]
Gender [ edit ]
2010 adult incarceration rates
by race, ethnicity, and sex
per 100,000 adult US residents[1] Race or
ethnicity Male Female
White 678 91 Black 4,347 260 Hispanic 1,775 133
In 2013, there were 102,400 adult females in local jails in the United States, and 111,300 adult females in state and federal prisons.[2] Within the US, the rate of female incarceration increased fivefold in a two decade span ending in 2001; the increase occurred because of increased prosecutions and convictions of offenses related to recreational drugs, increases in the severities of offenses, and a lack of community sanctions and treatment for women who violate laws.[88] In the United States, authorities began housing women in correctional facilities separate from men in the 1870s.[89]
In 2013, there were 628,900 adult males in local jails in the United States, and 1,463,500 adult males in state and federal prisons.[2] In a study of sentencing in the United States in 1984, David B. Mustard found that males received 12 percent longer prison terms than females after "controlling for the offense level, criminal history, district, and offense type," and noted that "females receive even shorter sentences relative to men than whites relative to blacks."[90] A later study by Sonja B. Starr found sentences for men to be up to 60% higher when controlling for more variables.[91] Several explanations for this disparity have been offered, including that women have more to lose from incarceration, and that men are the targets of discrimination in sentencing.[92]
Youth [ edit ]
Juveniles in residential
placement, 1997–2015. US[9] Year Male Female Total
1997 90,771 14,284 105,055 1999 92,985 14,508 107,493 2001 89,115 15,104 104,219 2003 81,975 14,556 96,531 2006 78,998 13,723 92,721 2007 75,017 11,797 86,814 2010 61,359 9,434 70,793 2011 53,079 8,344 61,423 2013 46,421 7,727 54,148 2015 40,750 7,293 48,043
Through the juvenile courts and the adult criminal justice system, the United States incarcerates more of its youth than any other country in the world, a reflection of the larger trends in incarceration practices in the United States. This has been a source of controversy for a number of reasons, including the overcrowding and violence in youth detention facilities, the prosecution of youths as adults and the long term consequences of incarceration on the individual's chances for success in adulthood. In 2014, the United Nations Human Rights Committee criticized the United States for about ten judicial abuses, including the mistreatment of juvenile inmates.[93] A UN report published in 2015 criticized the US for being the only nation in the world to sentence juveniles to life imprisonment without parole.[94]
According to federal data from 2011, around 40% of the nation's juvenile inmates are housed in private facilities.[95]
The incarceration of youths has been linked to the effects of family and neighborhood influences. One study found that the "behaviors of family members and neighborhood peers appear to substantially affect the behavior and outcomes of disadvantaged youths".[96]
Aged [ edit ]
The percentage of prisoners in federal and state prisons aged 55 and older increased by 33% from 2000 to 2005 while the prison population grew by 8%. The Southern Legislative Conference found that in 16 southern states, the elderly prisoner population increased on average by 145% between 1997 and 2007. The growth in the elderly population brought along higher health care costs, most notably seen in the 10% average increase in state prison budgets from 2005 to 2006.
The SLC expects the percentage of elderly prisoners relative to the overall prison population to continue to rise. Ronald Aday, a professor of aging studies at Middle Tennessee State University and author of Aging Prisoners: Crisis in American Corrections, concurs. One out of six prisoners in California is serving a life sentence. Aday predicts that by 2020 16% percent of those serving life sentences will be elderly.[97][98]
State governments pay all of their inmates' housing costs which significantly increase as prisoners age. Inmates are unable to apply for Medicare and Medicaid. Most Departments of Correction report spending more than 10 percent of the annual budget on elderly care.[97][98]
The American Civil Liberties Union published a report in 2012 which asserts that the elderly prison population has climbed 1300% since the 1980s, with 125,000 inmates aged 55 or older now incarcerated.[99]
LGBT people [ edit ]
Transgender adults and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender) youth are disproportionately more likely than the general population to come into contact with the criminal justice system. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, 16 percent of transgender adults have been in prison and/or jail, compared to 2.7 percent of all adults.[100] It has also been found that 13–15 percent of youth in detention identify as LGBT, whereas an estimated 4-8 percent of the general youth population identify as such.[101]
The reasons behind these disproportionate numbers are multi-faceted and complex.[citation needed] Poverty, homelessness, profiling[citation needed] by law enforcement, and imprisonment are disproportionately experienced by transgender and gender non-conforming people.[101] LGBT youth not only experience these same challenges, but many also live in homes unwelcoming to their identities.[102] This often results in LGBT youth running away and/or engaging in criminal activities, such as the drug trade, sex work, and/or theft, which places them at higher risk for arrest. Because of discriminatory practices and limited access to resources, transgender adults are also more likely to engage in criminal activities to be able to pay for housing, health care, and other basic needs.[102]
LGBT people in jail and prison are particularly vulnerable to mistreatment by other inmates and staff. This mistreatment includes solitary confinement (which may be described as "protective custody"), physical and sexual violence, verbal abuse, and denial of medical care and other services.[100][103] According to the National Inmate Survey, in 2011–12, 40 percent of transgender inmates reported sexual victimization compared to 4 percent of all inmates.[104]
Mental illness [ edit ]
In the United States, the percentage of inmates with mental illness has been steadily increasing, with rates more than quadrupling from 1998 to 2006.[105] Many have attributed this trend to the deinstitutionalization of mentally ill persons beginning in the 1960s, when mental hospitals across the country began closing their doors.[106][107] However, other researchers indicate that "there is no evidence for the basic criminalization premise that decreased psychiatric services explain the disproportionate risk of incarceration for individuals with mental illness".[108]
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, over half of all prisoners in 2005 had experienced mental illness as identified by "a recent history or symptoms of a mental health problem"; of this population, jail inmates experienced the highest rates of symptoms of mental illness at 60 percent, followed by 49 percent of state prisoners and 40 percent of federal prisoners.[109] Not only do people with recent histories of mental illness end up incarcerated, but many who have no history of mental illness end up developing symptoms while in prison. In 2006, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that a quarter of state prisoners had a history of mental illness, whereas 3 in 10 state prisoners had developed symptoms of mental illness since becoming incarcerated with no recent history of mental illness.[109]
According to Human Rights Watch, one of the contributing factors to the disproportionate rates of mental illness in prisons and jails is the increased use of solitary confinement, for which "socially and psychologically meaningful contact is reduced to the absolute minimum, to a point that is insufficient for most detainees to remain mentally well functioning".[110] Another factor to be considered is that most inmates do not get the mental health services that they need while incarcerated. Due to limited funding, prisons are not able to provide a full range of mental health services and thus are typically limited to inconsistent administration of psychotropic medication, or no psychiatric services at all.[107][110] Human Rights Watch also reports that corrections officers routinely use excessive violence against mentally ill inmates for nonthreatening behaviors related to schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Inmates are often shocked, shackled and pepper sprayed.[111]
Although many argue that prisons have become the facilities for the mentally ill, very few crimes point directly to symptoms of mental illness as their sole cause.[110][112] Despite the disproportionate representation of mentally ill persons in prison, a study by American Psychological Association indicates that only 7.5 percent of crimes committed were found to be directly related to mental illness.[112] However, some advocates argue that many incarcerations of mentally ill persons could have been avoided if they had been given proper treatment,[105][106][113] which would be a much less costly alternative to incarceration.[105]
Mental illness rarely stands alone when analyzing the risk factors associated with incarceration and recidivism rates.[109][112] The American Psychological Association recommends a holistic approach to reducing recidivism rates among offenders by providing "cognitive–behavioral treatment focused on criminal cognition" or "services that target variable risk factors for high-risk offenders" due to the numerous intersecting risk factors experienced by mentally ill and non-mentally ill offenders alike.[112]
To prevent the recidivism of individuals with mental illness, a variety of programs are in place that are based on criminal justice or mental health intervention models. Programs modeled after criminal justice strategies include diversion programs, mental health courts, specialty mental health probation or parole, and jail aftercare/prison re-entry. Programs modeled after mental health interventions include forensic assertive community treatment and forensic intensive case management. It has been argued that the wide diversity of these program interventions points to a lack of clarity on which specific program components are most effective in reducing recidivism rates among individuals with mental illness.[108]
Students [ edit ]
The term "school-to-prison-pipeline", also known as the "schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track", is a concept that was named in the 1980s. The school-to-prison pipeline is the idea that a school's harsh punishments—which typically push students out of the classroom—lead to the criminalization of students' misbehaviors and result in increasing a student's probability of entering the prison system.[114] Although the school-to-prison pipeline is aggravated by a combination of ingredients, zero-tolerance policies are viewed as main contributors.[115]
Zero-tolerance policies are regulations that mandate specific consequences in response to outlined student misbehavior, typically without any consideration for the unique circumstances surrounding a given incident.[116] Zero-tolerance policies both implicitly and explicitly usher the student into the prison track. Implicitly, when a student is extracted from the classroom, the more likely that student is to drop out of school as a result of being in class less. As a dropout, that child is then ill-prepared to obtain a job and become a fruitful citizen.[117] Explicitly, schools sometimes do not funnel their pupils to the prison systems inadvertently; rather, they send them directly.[118] Once in juvenile court, even sympathetic judges are not likely to evaluate whether the school's punishment was warranted or fair. For these reasons, it is argued that zero-tolerance policies lead to an exponential increase in the juvenile prison populations.[119]
The national suspension rate doubled from 3.7% to 7.4% from 1973 to 2010.[120] The claim that Zero Tolerance Policies affect students of color at a disproportionate rate is supported in the Code of Maryland Regulations study that found black students were suspended at more than double the rate of white students.[121] This trend can be seen throughout numerous studies of this type of material and particularly in the south.[122][123] Furthermore, between 1985 and 1989, there was an increase in referrals of minority youth to juvenile court, petitioned cases, adjudicated delinquency cases, and delinquency cases placed outside the home.[124] During this time period, the number of African American youth detained increased by 9% and the number of Hispanic youth detained increased by 4%, yet the proportion of White youth declined by 13%.[123] Documentation of this phenomenon can be seen as early as 1975 with the book School Suspensions: Are they helping children?[125]
Transfer treaty [ edit ]
The BOP receives all prisoner transfer treaty inmates sent from foreign countries, even if their crimes would have been, if committed in the United States, tried in state, DC, or territorial courts.[126] Non-US citizens incarcerated in federal and state prisons are eligible to be transferred to their home countries if they qualify.[127]
Operational [ edit ]
U.S. federal prisoner distribution since 1950
Security levels [ edit ]
In some, but not all, states' department of corrections, inmates reside in different facilities that vary by security level, especially in security measures, administration of inmates, type of housing, and weapons and tactics used by corrections officers. The federal government's Bureau of Prisons uses a numbered scale from one to five to represent the security level. Level five is the most secure, while level one is the least. State prison systems operate similar systems. California, for example, classifies its facilities from Reception Center through Levels I to V (minimum to maximum security) to specialized high security units (all considered Level V) including Security Housing Unit (SHU)—California's version of supermax—and related units. As a general rule, county jails, detention centers, and reception centers, where new commitments are first held while either awaiting trial or before being transferred to "mainline" institutions to serve out their sentences, operate at a relatively high level of security, usually close security or higher.
Supermax prison facilities provide the highest level of prison security. These units hold those considered the most dangerous inmates, as well as inmates that have been deemed too high-profile or too great a national security risk for a normal prison. These include inmates who have committed assaults, murders, or other serious violations in less secure facilities, and inmates known to be or accused of being prison gang members. Most states have either a supermax section of a prison facility or an entire prison facility designated as a supermax. The United States Federal Bureau of Prisons operates a federal supermax, A.D.X. Florence, located in Florence, Colorado, also known as the "Alcatraz of the Rockies" and widely considered to be perhaps the most secure prison in the United States. A.D.X. Florence has a standard supermax section where assaultive, violent, and gang-related inmates are kept under normal supermax conditions of 23-hour confinement and abridged amenities. A.D.X. Florence is considered to be of a security level above that of all other prisons in the United States, at least in the "ideological" ultramax part of it, which features permanent, 24-hour solitary confinement with rare human contacts or opportunity to earn better conditions through good behavior.
In a maximum security prison or area (called high security in the federal system), all prisoners have individual cells[128] with sliding doors controlled from a secure remote control station. Prisoners are allowed out of their cells one out of twenty four hours (one hour and 30 minutes for prisoners in California). When out of their cells, prisoners remain in the cell block or an exterior cage. Movement out of the cell block or "pod" is tightly restricted using restraints and escorts by correctional officers.
U.S. state prisoner distribution in 2016; excludes jail inmates. Data Source: https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=6226
Under close security, prisoners usually have one- or two-person cells operated from a remote control station. Each cell has its own toilet and sink. Inmates may leave their cells for work assignments or correctional programs and otherwise may be allowed in a common area in the cellblock or an exercise yard. The fences are generally double fences with watchtowers housing armed guards, plus often a third, lethal-current electric fence in the middle.
Prisoners that fall into the medium security group may sleep in cells, but share them two and two, and use bunk beds[128] with lockers to store their possessions. The cell may have showers, toilets and sinks, but it's not a strictly enforced rule.[129] Cells are locked at night with one or more correctional officers supervising. There is less supervision over the internal movements of prisoners. The perimeter is generally double fenced and regularly patrolled.
Prisoners in minimum security facilities are considered to pose little physical risk to the public and are mainly non-violent "white collar criminals". Minimum security prisoners live in less-secure dormitories,[128] which are regularly patrolled by correctional officers. As in medium security facilities, they have communal showers, toilets, and sinks. A minimum-security facility generally has a single fence that is watched, but not patrolled, by armed guards. At facilities in very remote and rural areas, there may be no fence at all. Prisoners may often work on community projects, such as roadside litter cleanup with the state department of transportation or wilderness conservation. Many minimum security facilities are small camps located in or near military bases, larger prisons (outside the security perimeter) or other government institutions to provide a convenient supply of convict labor to the institution. Many states allow persons in minimum-security facilities access to the Internet.
Correspondence [ edit ]
Research indicates that inmates who maintain contact with family and friends in the outside world are less likely to be convicted of further crimes and usually have an easier reintegration period back into society.[citation needed] Many institutions encourage friends and families to send letters, especially when they are unable to visit regularly. However, guidelines exist as to what constitutes acceptable mail, and these policies are strictly enforced.
Mail sent to inmates in violation of prison policies can result in sanctions such as loss of imprisonment time reduced for good behavior. Most Department of Corrections websites provide detailed information regarding mail policies. These rules can even vary within a single prison depending on which part of the prison an inmate is housed. For example, death row and maximum security inmates are usually under stricter mail guidelines for security reasons.
There have been several notable challenges to prison corresponding services. The Missouri Department of Corrections (DOC) stated that effective June 1, 2007, inmates would be prohibited from using pen pal websites, citing concerns that inmates were using them to solicit money and defraud the public.[130] Service providers such as WriteAPrisoner.com, together with the ACLU, plan to challenge the ban in Federal Court. Similar bans on an inmate's rights or a website's right to post such information has been ruled unconstitutional in other courts, citing First Amendment freedoms.[131] Some faith-based initiatives promote the positive effects of correspondence on inmates, and some have made efforts to help ex-offenders reintegrate into society through job placement assistance.[132] Inmates' ability to mail letters to other inmates has been limited by the courts.[133] Inmate correspondence with members of society is typically encouraged because of the positive impact it can have on inmates, albeit under the guidelines of each institution and availability of letter writers.[citation needed]
Conditions [ edit ]
[134] Living facilities in California State Prison (July 19, 2006)
The non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch claims that prisoners and detainees face "abusive, degrading and dangerous" conditions within local, state and federal facilities, including those operated by for-profit contractors.[135] The organization also raised concerns with prisoner rape and medical care for inmates.[136] In a survey of 1,788 male inmates in Midwestern prisons by Prison Journal, about 21% responded they had been coerced or pressured into sexual activity during their incarceration, and 7% that they had been raped in their current facility.[137]
In August 2003, a Harper's article by Wil S. Hylton estimated that "somewhere between 20 and 40% of American prisoners are, at this very moment, infected with hepatitis C".[138] Prisons may outsource medical care to private companies such as Correctional Medical Services (now Corizon) that, according to Hylton's research, try to minimize the amount of care given to prisoners in order to maximize profits.[138][139] After the privatization of healthcare in Arizona's prisons, medical spending fell by 30 million dollars and staffing was greatly reduced. Some 50 prisoners died in custody in the first 8 months of 2013, compared to 37 for the preceding two years combined.[140]
The poor quality of food provided to inmates has become an issue, as over the last decade corrections officials looking to cut costs have been outsourcing food services to private, for-profit corporations such as Aramark, A'Viands Food & Services Management, and ABL Management.[141] A prison riot in Kentucky has been blamed on the low quality of food Aramark provided to inmates.[142] A 2017 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that because of lapses in food safety, prison inmates are 6.4 times more likely to contract a food-related illness than the general population.[143]
Also identified as an issue within the prison system is gang violence, because many gang members retain their gang identity and affiliations when imprisoned. Segregation of identified gang members from the general population of inmates, with different gangs being housed in separate units often results in the imprisonment of these gang members with their friends and criminal cohorts. Some feel this has the effect of turning prisons into "institutions of higher criminal learning."[144]
Many prisons in the United States are overcrowded. For example, California's 33 prisons have a total capacity of 100,000, but they hold 170,000 inmates.[145] Many prisons in California and around the country are forced to turn old gymnasiums and classrooms into huge bunkhouses for inmates. They do this by placing hundreds of bunk beds next to one another, in these gyms, without any type of barriers to keep inmates separated. In California, the inadequate security engendered by this situation, coupled with insufficient staffing levels, have led to increased violence and a prison health system that causes one death a week. This situation has led the courts to order California to release 27% of the current prison population, citing the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.[146] The three-judge court considering requests by the Plata v. Schwarzenegger and Coleman v. Schwarzenegger courts found California's prisons have become criminogenic as a result of prison overcrowding.[147]
In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court case of Cutter v. Wilkinson established that prisons that received federal funds could not deny prisoners accommodations necessary for religious practices.
According to a Supreme Court ruling issued on May 23, 2011, California — which has the highest overcrowding rate of any prison system in the country — must alleviate overcrowding in the state's prisons, reducing the prisoner population by 30,000 over the next two years.[148][149][150][151]
Solitary confinement is widely used in US prisons, yet it is underreported by most states, while some don't report it at all. Isolation of prisoners has been condemned by the UN in 2011 as a form of torture. At over 80,000 at any given time, the US has more prisoners confined in isolation than any other country in the world. In Louisiana, with 843 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, there have been prisoners, such as the Angola Three, held for as long as forty years in isolation.[152][153]
In 1999, the Supreme Court of Norway refused to extradite American hashish-smuggler Henry Hendricksen, as they declared that US prisons do not meet their minimum humanitarian standards.[154]
In 2011, some 885 people died while being held in local jails (not in prisons after being convicted of a crime and sentenced) throughout the United States.[155] According to federal statistics, roughly 4,400 inmates die in US prisons and jails annually, excluding executions.[156]
As of September 2013, condoms for prisoners are only available in the U.S. State of Vermont (on September 17, 2013, the California Senate approved a bill for condom distribution inside the state's prisons, but the bill was not yet law at the time of approval)[157] and in county jails in San Francisco.[158]
In September 2016, a group of corrections officers at Holman Correctional Facility have gone on strike over safety concerns and overcrowding. Prisoners refer to the facility as a "slaughterhouse" as stabbings are a routine occurrence.[159]
Privatization [ edit ]
Prior to the 1980s, private prisons did not exist in the U.S. During the 1980s, as a result of the War on Drugs by the Reagan Administration, the number of people incarcerated rose. This created a demand for more prison space. The result was the development of privatization and the for-profit prison industry.[160][161][162]
A 1998 study was performed using three comparable Louisiana medium security prisons, two of which were privately run by different corporations and one of which was publicly run. The data from this study suggested that the privately run prisons operated more cost-effectively without sacrificing the safety of inmates and staff. The study concluded that both privately run prisons had a lower cost per inmate, a lower rate of critical incidents, a safer environment for employees and inmates, and a higher proportional rate of inmates who completed basic education, literacy, and vocational training courses. However, the publicly run prison outperformed the privately run prisons in areas such as experiencing fewer escape attempts, controlling substance abuse through testing, offering a wider range of educational and vocational courses, and providing a broader range of treatment, recreation, social services, and rehabilitative services.[163]
According to Marie Gottschalk, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, studies that claim private prisons are cheaper to run than public prisons fail to "take into account the fundamental differences between private and public facilities," and that the prison industry "engages in a lot of cherry-picking and cost-shifting to maintain the illusion that the private sector does it better for less."[164] The American Civil Liberties Union reported in 2013 that numerous studies indicate private jails are actually filthier, more violent, less accountable, and possibly more costly than their public counterparts. The ACLU stated that the for-profit prison industry is "a major contributor to bloated state budgets and mass incarceration – not a part of any viable solution to these urgent problems."[165] The primary reason Louisiana is the prison capital of the world is because of the for-profit prison industry.[166] According to The Times-Picayune, "a majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt."[166]
In Mississippi, a 2013 Bloomberg report stated that assault rates in private facilities were three times higher on average than in their public counterparts. In 2012, the for-profit Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility was the most violent prison in the state with 27 assaults per 100 offenders.[167] A federal lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of prisoners at the privately run East Mississippi Correctional Facility in 2013 claims the conditions there are "hyper-violent," "barbaric" and "chaotic," with gangs routinely beating and exploiting mentally ill inmates who are denied medical care by prison staff.[168][169] A May 2012 riot in the Corrections Corporation of America-run Adams County Correctional Facility, also in Mississippi, left one corrections officer dead and dozens injured. Similar riots have occurred in privatized facilities in Idaho, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Florida, California and Texas.[170][171][172]
Sociologist John L. Campbell of Dartmouth College claims that private prisons in the U.S. have become "a lucrative business."[173] Between 1990 and 2000, the number of private facilities grew from five to 100, operated by nearly 20 private firms. Over the same time period the stock price of the industry leader, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which rebranded as CoreCivic in 2016 amid increased scrutiny of the private prison industry,[174] climbed from $8 a share to $30.[173] According to journalist Matt Taibbi, major investors in the prison industry include Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, General Electric and The Vanguard Group.[175] The aforementioned Bloomberg report also notes that in the past decade the number |
unasked questions that the steep climb and precipitous fall of individuals in the IE power list tells a story, of course.
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Large meanings can also be prised from the small shifts.
The top three of 2016-17 remain the same as in 2015-16 — Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP president Amit Shah and RSS sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat — but with a difference. While Modi remains numero uno, Shah trades places with Bhagwat. The moving up of Shah, the stepping down of Bhagwat, if only by a rung each, speaks of an unfolding realignment within the Sangh Parivar — the dramatic electoral successes of the Modi-Shah election machine are helping them pull ahead of not just their opponents and rivals but also their friends.
The year 2015-2016 was when the political Opposition struck back at the BJP dominance established by its 282-seat triumph in 2014 — first Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP routed the BJP in Delhi, then the Nitish Kumar-Lalu Prasad Mahagathbandhan trounced it in Bihar.
It was also the year when the BJP’s political project seemed challenged by events and stories outside the political arena that snowballed, acquired power, became writ large — the murder of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri over rumours of beef in September 2015, the suicide of Dalit student Rohith Vemula at the Hyderabad University campus in January 2016. This was followed by the spreading protests against the arrest of students in JNU on charges of sedition, which also stoked a wide and vibrant debate on the meaning of nationalism.
Yet, in 2017, that agitation and those debates seem frayed and faded already. Their dramatis personae, like the fiery JNU student leaders, are no longer prominent on the stage. They have been relegated by the inevitable return to business-as-usual, yes, but also by the sound and spectacle of the BJP’s electoral victories, especially and most recently in Uttar Pradesh.
Unsurprising, then, that a host of Opposition leaders move down the power list: Arvind Kejriwal slips from No. 8 to 33, Mayawati who was at 30 last year is now at 50, and Lalu Prasad is down from 26 to 42.
The Gandhis, Sonia and Rahul, may not show as great a fall — from 5 to 9 and from 9 to 10, respectively. But there is a settled stolid dullness to their ranking, especially when you contrast it with the blistering trajectory of Yogi Adityanath, a new entrant at No. 8, or Himanta Biswa Sarma who left the Congress to become powerful in the BJP, and who is also a new entry in the list, at 37.
Nitish Kumar, who had seemed for a while last year to be the emerging rallying point for anti-BJP forces, has receded only from 12 to 13, but in his case, the rungs he hasn’t climbed are more telling.
All those who are on the list are there because of the individuals that they are and because of the institutions and offices that they represent. But the rise in the list of Chief Justice Khehar, from 41 to 4, and the entry of Dipak Misra at 15 and Justice Lodha at 78, owes more to their institution — the judiciary — at a time when other checks and balances on concentrated executive power are waning. How these individuals act on their institutions, steer their course, will determine their ranking in next year’s list.
And what about the non-political powerful of 2016-17? Except for the feisty Kangana Ranaut gatecrashing this list of 90 men and 10 women,
as she has done Bollywood, in the most powerful and empowering way possible, well, what about them?
Here is the list:
Also Read | The Most Powerful Indians in 2017, 51 to 100: Aamir Khan moves up to 61, Chidambaram at 71
1. Narendra Damodardas Modi, 66
Prime Minister of India
(Rank 2016: 1)
Why
Because nearly three years into his term, he remains the unchallenged Number 1. Because under him, the BJP looks unstoppable, forcing the Opposition to continually play catch-up. Every key move the Modi government makes — from surgical strikes to demonetisation — is done in his name. Under him, the Prime Minister’s Office wields almost absolute power, inviting awe and criticism in equal measure. His relentless campaigning fuelled the party’s sweep in Uttar Pradesh, setting the stage for 2019. His constant communication underlines the power of his politics.
Power Punch
Demonetisation. Its economics may have been suspect but its politics was pure gold. He proved his critics wrong and projected the hugely disruptive note ban as a transformational reform that people must support for the greater good. And they did.
What Next
Halfway into his term, he’s looking beyond 2019. Economy and employment, rising expectations of the young remain his key challenges at home that will also define his place in the world.
By the way
He loves photography, shoots a lot and always directs photographers even as he poses for them.
2. Amit Shah, 52
BJP President
(Rank 2016: 3)
Why
He pushes the RSS chief down one rank because he has established himself as the BJP’s trump card. Despite the criticism over his style of functioning, Shah has proved he is the most effective strategist, whether in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra or Manipur. He not only led the party to historic victories in UP and Uttarakhand by stitching together a new social coalition, but also choreographed the BJP takeover of Goa and Manipur.
Power Punch
Shah stuck to his handpicked candidates for Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, including some who joined the party on the eve of the release of the list.
What next
Elections in Gujarat later this year. He realises the party’s performance here is tied to his prestige as well as that of the PM.
By the way
He has been on a strict weight-loss programme and has already lost over 15 kg.
3. Mohan Bhagwat, 66
RSS sarsanghchalak
(Rank 2016: 2)
Why
Without rocking any boats, like in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee years, he has ensured that the RSS and the BJP government remain in step and in sync. Despite the rebellion in the Goa unit and some swayamsevaks carping over tickets in UP and Uttarakhand, Bhagwat’s Sangh has emerged as the perfect foil to the Modi government.
Power Punch
His public disagreements are keenly heard. For instance, his disapproval of the draft education policy prompted the Centre to review it.
What Next
To push the RSS agenda on triple talaq and empowerment of Dalits and other backward classes, especially in southern states.
By the way
Finds time to watch movies with close friends from Nagpur.
4. J S Khehar, 64
Chief Justice of India
(Rank 2016: 41)
Why
With the judiciary and the executive locked in a struggle over delay in appointments to the higher judiciary and a new Memorandum of Procedure (MoP), the CJI, who heads the collegium that clear the names of judges for high courts and the apex court, plays a key role. Besides, he will hear all important PILs in the Supreme Court.
Power Punch
The SC collegium under him has stood its ground, virtually rejecting every contentious clause that the Modi government wanted in the new MoP.
What Next
He is expected to head the Constitution bench that will decide the validity of Aadhaar and the contours of the right to privacy.
By the way
He often refers to his wife as ‘Sher Khan’ and ‘Tiger’.
5. Ajit Doval, 72
National Security Advisor
(Rank 2016: 18)
Why
Because he is the most important bureaucrat in the Modi government. He has the Prime Minister’s ear on everything, from foreign policy and the challenges of terror to negotiations with the Naga rebels.
Power Punch
Following the public announcement of the surgical strikes in PoK last November, he is said to have controlled the flow of information and played a key role in shaping the narrative.
What Next
To quickly gauge the Trump administration and work on common areas so that New Delhi is able to tap into the new Washington.
By the way
Still responds to every single soldierly salutation in his office with a loud and brisk “vishraam, araam se”.
6. Arun Jaitley, 64
Union Finance Minister
(Rank 2016: 4)
Why
The effective No 2 in the Modi cabinet, Jaitley has the task of steering the economy towards higher growth amid a slowdown resulting from demonetisation. With Manohar Parrikar heading to Goa, Jaitley holds additional charge of the crucial defence ministry.
Power Punch
After a series of hectic negotiations with states and political parties, Jaitley was able to get the Constitutional amendment related to GST passed by Parliament. A crucial indirect tax reform, consensus on which once seemed impossible, GST is likely to be implemented from
July 1.
What Next
Improving the country’s tax base and ensuring that people stay the course on digital transactions.
By the way
He is on very friendly terms with Captain Amarinder Singh, the man who defeated him in the bitterly fought Amritsar Lok Sabha contest.
7. Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani, 59
Chairman, Reliance Industries
(Rank 2016: 5)
Why
Continues to remain the richest Indian with a net worth of Rs 1,75,400 crore (US $26 billion), according to the Hurun Global Rich List. He is now focusing on his telecom venture, Reliance Jio, which is making aggressive plans in the segment, giving established players such as Airtel a run for their money. The group’s sprawling media ownership is now a role model for other corporates.
Power Punch
Jio has secured over 10 crore customers in less than six months.
What Next
With Jio set to charge customers from April, his next move in the intensely competitive telecom sector will be keenly watched.
By the way
A nature buff, Ambani loves to visit wildlife hotspots such as Kruger National Park in South Africa.
8. Yogi Adityanath, 44
Chief Minister, Uttar Pradesh
(Rank 2016: New entry)
Why
For being chief minister of India’s most populous state, where the BJP and its allies have come to power with a thumping mandate, winning 325 of 403 seats in the assembly elections. A key Hindutva face of the BJP, he surprised nearly everyone by becoming the party’s choice to lead the state government.
Power Punch
When he pipped about half-a-dozen aspirants to the post of CM. Long seen as the fringe in the state BJP, he now represents the ‘mainstream’.
What Next
He faces the daunting task of balancing the demands of his office with those of his restive and aggressive supporters. How he does that will decide how effectively the BJP reaps its electoral harvest in UP. The crackdown on meat and the anti-Romeo squads have dominated headlines but the Yogi story is yet to unfold.
By the way
He is fond of watches. Wears a Rado on his left wrist.
9. Sonia Gandhi, 70
Congress president
(Rank 2016: 5)
Why
Despite her conscious decision to stay away from the limelight and make way for son Rahul, Sonia Gandhi remains the paramount leader of the Congress. The longest-serving president of the Grand Old Party, she is still the last word and the final arbiter in the party. Though her ill health has forced her to curtail her public appearances, she remains accessible to all leaders.
Power Punch
Her strategic absence from the Congress Working Committee meeting, in which her loyalist AK Antony broached the topic of Rahul’s elevation, was a message loud and clear for Rahul baiters to fall in line and reconcile with the new normal.
What Next
With the party battered at the polls, she could step down as president but will remain the figurehead.
By the way
She opens all official communication from Congress office bearers and administrative staff all by herself. Also, she personally puts her replies into envelopes and seals them herself.
10. Rahul Gandhi, 46
Congress vice-president
(Rank 2016: 9)
Why
With mother Sonia Gandhi taking a back seat, Rahul is now in effective control of the Grand Old Party. With the BJP unlikely to have the numbers in the Rajya Sabha, the Congress remains the fulcrum of any Opposition unity in Parliament.
Power Punch
Even though under him the party has seen a string of electoral reverses, he doesn’t face any major challenge within the party.
What Next
His long-awaited elevation as Congress president could happen this year.
By the way
Rahul dabbles in a number of sports. He is a licensed scuba diving instructor, a black belt in Aikido and a squash player. He is currently reading the English translation of the Upanishads.
11. Rajnath Singh, 65
Union Home Minister
(Rank 2016: 7)
Why
One of the heavyweights of the NDA government, Singh has also been the BJP national president. He has enjoyed key posts in the government, in part because he has the complete backing of the RSS. In UP, Singh conducted 102 election rallies, the maximum by a central minister.
Power Punch
Singh was the soft face of the government during the 2016 Kashmir unrest and has been instrumental in pushing back Left Wing Extremism to an all-time low.
What Next
With a change of guard in the United States, the next big challenge for the home minister is the upcoming Indo-US homeland security dialogue. Back home, he will have to build a new narrative in Kashmir, along with handling infiltration from across the border.
By the way
Singh is not part of any family WhatsApp group and does not keep a mobile with him.
12. Piyush Goyal, 52
MoS, Independent for Power, Coal, New & Renewable Energy and Mines
(Rank 2016: 46)
Why
His ministry has ensured that there is no scarcity of coal. As a result, while transmission and distribution issues persist, power generation has been sorted out — the country’s ‘power surplus’. In spite of his responsibilities as a senior minister, Goyal was appointed to the two-member ministerial group that was to work out a strategy to promote cashless transactions during the demonetisation period.
Power Punch
Has been tasked with executing PM’s targets, such as “power for all” and annual renewable energy generation of 175 GW by 2022. His ministry has already electrified 70 per cent of the 18,452 villages that the PM wants power to reach by May 2018. He is expected to meet this deadline comfortably.
What Next
Has to successfully supervise non-coal auctions being conducted by the states, and sort out transmission and distribution issues with their help. Will also have to reach target of renewable power generation.
By the way
He hasn’t slept for more than five hours a day since he took charge. Is spiritual and meditates.
13. Nitish Kumar, 66
Chief Minister, Bihar
(Rank 2016: 12)
Why
For being the face of the Opposition and the nucleus of the anti-BJP camp. He is likely to play a key role in putting up a consensus candidate from the non-BJP camp for the post of President of India.
Power Punch
He was the only Opposition leader to back demonetisation, though with a caveat: ‘a good idea, but poorly implemented’.
What Next
In his third term as chief minister, Nitish is definitely looking national with an eye on the 2019 parliamentary elections.
By the way
Has a fascination for the digit ‘7’. Despite moving to the CM’s official 1, Anne Marg residence, he retained his previous address at 7, Circular Road, Patna.
14. Mamata Banerjee, 62
Chief Minister, West Bengal
(Rank 2016: 15)
Why
In her second term as chief minister, she remains the most resolute voice critical of PM Modi and the BJP in a country where the opposition space is increasingly shrinking. Banerjee has been most vocal on the debate regarding federalism, repeatedly accusing the BJP-led Centre of attempting to weaken the federal structure and centralise power.
Power Punch
After her landslide victory in 2011, which ended the 34-year-old Left Rule in Bengal, Banerjee pulled off an even bigger victory in the 2016 Assembly polls.
What Next
Her party will have to contend with the Narada investigations, in addition to the ongoing investigations into chit funds.
By the way
She walks 5-6 km on her treadmill every morning. She has repeatedly walked up to 10 kms at a stretch, leaving those behind her puffing away at a distance.
15. Dipak Misra, 63
Supreme Court Judge
(Rank 2016: New Entry)
Why
He is set to take over as the Chief Justice of India in August this year and will have a tenure of over a year. With tension between the Centre and Opposition-ruled states, as well as the ruling BJP and Opposition parties, showing no signs of abating, the Supreme Court headed by him could be called upon more frequently to be the final arbiter in Constitutional matters. He will also head the collegium that will have the opportunity to appoint a large number of Supreme Court and high court judges.
Power Punch
To instill “committed patriotism and nationalism”, he made it mandatory for all cinema halls in India to play the national anthem before a movie begins, with those present in the hall obliged to stand up to show respect.
What Next
The Supreme Court bench headed by him is seized of some very important cases, which include reforms in the BCCI, plea seeking a refund for Sahara investors, the Delhi December 16 gangrape-cum-murder, entry of women into Kerala’s Sabarimala temple and the Cauvery water-sharing dispute.
By the way
He can quote extempore from Shakespeare’s works.
16. Sushma Swaraj, 65
External Affairs minister
(Rank 2016: 10)
Why
Despite her ill-health, she has retained her position as one of the topmost Cabinet ministers in the Modi government. Though she has not travelled over the last year, barring a few occasions, her inputs are considered key to Modi’s foreign policy.
Power Punch
Although recovering from a kidney transplant, she has been alert and active on Twitter. Responds to requests from Indians in distress overseas.
What Next
Her comeback to active official duty in the coming months.
By the way
She is an ardent Krishna devotee, whose images can be seen all over her house.
17. Shivraj Singh Chouhan, 58
Chief Minister, Madhya Pradesh
(Rank 2016: 23)
Why
Has spent more time in the chief minister’s office than any politician in the history of the state, which was once a Congress stronghold. The BJP has won two assembly elections projecting him as the CM. Has even busted the myth that the CM on whose watch the Simhastha Kumbh is held always loses the seat.
Power Punch
Having ridden the Vyapam scam, there appears to be no challenger to the chief minister as of now.
What Next
With the assembly elections more than a year away in Madhya Pradesh, there are rumours about his elevation to Delhi as a Union minister.
By the way
Whenever possible, Chouhan loves to take a dip in the Narmada.
18. Devendra Gangadhar Fadnavis, 46
Chief Minister, Maharashtra
(Rank 2016: 25)
Why
From policy decisions in Maharashtra to drawing up the BJP’s political strategy, Fadnavis remains the go-to man. Has mastered the art of dealing with ally Shiv Sena, which often plays the role of an aggressive Opposition, as well as rival parties, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party.
Power Punch
Under him, the BJP won 10 municipal corporation elections, 25 zila parishad and 284 panchayat seats.
What Next
To tackle the Shiv Sena, which is more aggressive after the BJP’s success in the civic polls. His aim to carry out socio-economic reforms in the state will also be tested.
By the way
He likes gola bhat and phodnichi poli.
19. Nitin Gadkari, 59
Union Minister, Road Transport and Highways
(Rank 2016: 20)
Why
He continues to be one of the top performers in the council of ministers with the reputation of being a doer. Modi is said to openly praise him in ministerial and secretary-level meetings. Some in the party say Modi uses Gadkari’s proximity to the RSS leadership to bring Nagpur on board on certain issues. Given the government’s infrastructure push, he is in charge of a key ministry.
Power Punch
With the BJP eight short of the magic figure of 21 seats in the 40-member Goa Assembly, it was Gadkari who worked the phones overtime and got MLAs to side with the party, completely outsmarting the Congress.
What Next
After the success in Goa, his stock in the party has gone up.
By the way
Enjoys spicy food and his favourite dish is Pataudi, a popular preparation from Nagpur.
20. Amarinder Singh, 75
Chief Minister, Punjab
(New entry)
Why
A scion of the Patiala royal family, Amarinder led the Congress to its only decisive victory in the Assembly elections held this year. Is still one of the mass leaders in the Congress even as his party loses ground across the country.
Power Punch
Got his way in the party after threatening to leave and form his own outfit. It led to the ousting of Partap Singh Bajwa, a Rahul appointee, from the PCC chief post.
What Next
From tackling the drug menace to the farm crisis, the new chief minister has several challenges in his second stint at the helm in the border state.
By the way:
Apart from being an author of several books on military history, Amarinder loves gardening.
21. Venkaiah Naidu, 67
Union Minister, I&B, Urban Development
(Rank 2016: 37)
Why
Among the most vocal in Narendra Modi’s cabinet, Naidu handles the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and the Ministry of Urban Development, which is overseeing the PM’s ambitious Smart Cities project. Naidu continues to have the faith of the party and the Prime Minister, whom he promotes at every opportunity, defining Modi as ‘Making Of Developed India’.
Power Punch
After the BJP’s resounding victory in Uttar Pradesh, Naidu was chosen as the observer from Delhi in the panel to elect the chief minister. As rumours abound that Yogi Adityanath threatened to walk out with a large number of MLAs if not elected the CM, Naidu is one of the few who knows what really happened.
What Next
With Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar back in Goa and the Presidential election coming up, Naidu may be in the fray for a promotion, one way or the other.
By the way
Throughout his career, Naidu has had narrow escapes in nine aircraft mishaps, involving helicopters and aircrafts.
22. Krishna Gopal, 61
Joint Secretary (Sahsarkaryavah), RSS
(Rank 2016: 69)
Why
As the RSS in-charge of the BJP, he is the official liason between the two. The UP native also helped galvanise swayamsevaks for the recent assembly elections. As mentor of Samkalp, a Delhi-based RSS coaching institute for the civil services exam, he is the driving force behind the Sangh’s efforts to get those aligned to its ideology into the bureaucracy.
Power Punch
Is privy to most major political decisions at the Centre.
What Next
Has been looking to have more hold over the politics of UP but faces a challenge from fellow sahsarkaryavah Dattatreya Hosabale, who is senior to him and whose base is in Lucknow these days. Was also kept in the dark on the decision to appoint Yogi Adityanath as UP CM.
By the way
Prefers gur (jaggery) as dessert.
23. Vasundhara Raje, 64
Chief Minister, Rajasthan
(Rank 2016: 22)
Why
Continues to remain the BJP’s most powerful and popular face in Rajasthan. With the Lalit Modi controversy and the mining scam case firmly behind her, Raje has managed to hold her ground in the state despite frequent demands for quota by the Gurjars and a fractious relationship with the RSS and its affiliates.
Power Punch
Raje has managed to quell the rebellion within the party — five-time BJP MLA Ghanshyam Tiwari had publicly urged the central leadership to remove her — and emerge on top.
What Next
With polls to the state Assembly due next year, all eyes will be on whether she manages to repeat her 2013 feat in the face of anti-incumbency.
By the way
Raje has been presenting the state budget on March 8 for a couple of years now. Besides being International Women’s Day, it is also her birthday.
24. Nripendra Misra, 72
Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister
(Rank 2016: 39)
Why
Eyebrows were raised in May 2014 when Modi promulgated an ordinance to appoint the retired UP cadre IAS officer as his principal secretary. However, Misra has proved his worth and remains one of the two most powerful people in the current administration. In all policy matters and cabinet decisions, Misra’s inputs play a key role, be it the Jan Dhan scheme, subsidies or the Ujjawala scheme.
Power Punch
The PM’s pet project on rural housing saw Misra oversee the rural development ministry successfully complete the target of 33 lakh houses for this financial year.
What Next
With polls done, he will push for deliveries on key reforms, including disinvestment.
By the way
Misra likes to take a walk at 5.30 am and listen to his favourite singer, Geeta Dutt, before sleeping.
25. Subramanian Swamy, 77
BJP leader
(Rank 2016: 90)
Why
There is no telling who the pugnacious BJP leader will choose as the target of his swipes — the Gandhi family, P Chidambaram, Raghuram Rajan, or even party colleague Arun Jaitley. After his nomination to the Rajya Sabha, Swamy served a notice for a discussion in the House on the AgustaWestland helicopter deal.
Power Punch
His Twitter tirade against Jaitley left the party squirming, but he came out unscathed.
What Next
With BJP in power in UP, he is actively pursuing the Ram temple matter in the Supreme Court.
By the way
His wife Roxna has just written a biography of her husband, which every publisher approached has been too timid to publish. As a result, she has decided to publish it herself.
26. P K Mishra, 67
Additional Principal Secretary to PM
(Rank 2016:32)
Why
If Nripendra Misra is Modi’s policy person, PK Mishra, nicknamed ‘PK’, is the man for governance. Unlike the flamboyant Misra, PK is a behind-the-scenes operator. Considered more powerful than even Union ministers, he was principal secretary to Modi in Gujarat till 2004. Known to come down hard on officers who do not meet the PM’s expectations.
Power Punch
Be it the powerful cabinet committee on appointments or appointing heads to PSUs, Mishra has the last word.
What Next
Mishra’s understanding of grassroots conditions and the agriculture sector are assets at a time when the Modi government is reaching out to farmers and the poorer sections.
By the way
Mishra is often seen in half-sleeved shirts, even in high-profile meetings.
27. Ravi Shankar Prasad, 63
Union minister, Law and Justice
(New entry)
Why
Because he made a comeback into the top echelons of the government in the July 2016 reshuffle, getting back the prestigious Law and Justice portfolio. He is also the BJP’s go-to man for hard-selling the government’s or the party’s point of view.
Power Punch
Getting the Supreme Court collegium to agree to yield to most of the contentious clauses in the draft memorandum of procedure (MoP), over which the previous CJI, TS Thakur, and the government had disagreed.
What Next
Working with the higher judiciary to fill the large number of vacancies in the high courts.
By the way
Prasad likes to return home from wherever he is travelling in India, and clears pending files late in the night.
28. Prakash Javadekar, 66
Human Resource Development minister
(New entry)
Why
Under him, the HRD Ministry has managed to keep away from controversies. In the last six months, he has resolved all differences between his ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office and expedited decisions regarding the IIM Bill. That apart, Javadekar has worked on clearing the backlog of appointments and pushed UGC to approve regulations on setting up world-class institutions,
which is the Prime Minister’s pet education project.
Power Punch
Among the BJP’s biggest gains in the recently concluded Assembly elections was in Manipur, where Javadekar was the party in-charge.
What Next
As HRD Minister, Javadekar’s next big assignment is to revamp the University Grants Commission.
By the way
Loves listening to music. Often plays songs on his tablet while working.
29. S Jaishankar, 62
Foreign Secretary
(Rank 2016: 33)
Why
Handled MEA in the absence of the minister; is the brains trust for foreign affairs in PMO.
Power Punch
Reached out to key members of the Trump administration.
What Next
Cracking the ice with Pakistan and warming up to Washington.
By the way
Met Ajit Doval only once before he became foreign secretary.
30. Dharmendra Pradhan, 47
Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas
(New entry)
Why
Seen as an alternative to Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik. His ministry handed out LPG connections in UP. He also shares credit for the BJP’s sweep in state assembly elections. The prime minister has praised him for pushing his development agenda.
Power Punch
Despite BJD’s grip over Odisha, Pradhan led state BJP to a victory in February’s zila parishad polls.
What Next
Seen as the best bet in Odisha, Pradhan aims to take on the BJD in next year’s polls.
By the way
While travelling, Pradhan packs his own luggage.
31. General Bipin Rawat, 59
Army Chief
(New entry)
Why
General Rawat speaks his mind — he justified the sahayak system, warned soldiers against taking to social media to air grievances, and re-invoked the Cold Start doctrine.
Power Punch
He doesn’t hold back on any subject — he declared public supporters of Kashmir militants be treated as enemies, for example.
What Next
He will have to resolve the turf war between the army and the government over the implementation of the pay commission recommendations.
By the way
Carries a basic Nokia model phone and answers calls himself.
32. Virat Kohli, 28
Captain, Indian cricket team
(Rank 2016: 42)
Why
The only batsman to average over 50 in all three forms of the game, the Bradman-esque Kohli is now also the captain in all three cricketing formats.
Power Punch
Became the first batsman after Bradman to score double centuries in four successive series. Became the first Indian sportsperson to sign a Rs 100 crore endorsement deal with a single brand – Puma.
What Next
Kohli’s all-conquering Indian team now heads to foreign shores with a quest to set their away record straight. Plus, the team will have to defend the Champions Trophy.
By the way
Has a pet beagle called Bruno.
33. Arvind Kejriwal, 48
Delhi Chief Minister
(Rank 2016: 8)
Why
Drops 25 places after less-than-expected gains in Punjab, a failure in Goa. But his brand of urban politics, stressing on schools and hospitals for the poor, is setting the trend for other states.
Power Punch
Doesn’t shy away from speaking his mind, even if it means taking on the PM. Was the first one, with Mamata, to slam demonetisation.
What Next
Municipal elections in Delhi and Assembly elections in Gujarat, where he wants AAP to enter the House.
By the way
Since his last nature treatment in Bangalore, he has given up instant noodles for home-cooked food.
34. Raman Singh, 64
Chief Minister, Chhattisgarh
(Rank 2016: 45)
Why
He’s been CM for 14 years —and counting.
Power Punch
Shunted out SRP Kalluri and met activist Bela Bhatia after she was threatened. Announced 45 lakh smartphones to the poor.
What Next
2018 Assembly elections.
By the way
Begins the day with a glass of mattha.
35. Ghulam Nabi Azad, 67
Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha
(Rank 2016: 28)
Why
The Gandhi family’s go-to man, Azad has a soft demeanour and political skills, which have come in handy to forge Opposition unity in the Rajya Sabha.
Power Punch
He was the instinctive choice of the Gandhis when poll strategist Prashant Kishor reportedly wanted Madhusudan Mistry removed as Uttar Pradesh polls in-charge.
What Next
Has the tricky task of keeping the Opposition united in the Rajya Sabha.
By the way
He likes to play golf. The lawn at his official residence turns into a mini golf course once in a while.
36. Mehbooba Mufti, 57
Chief Minister, Jammu & Kashmir
(Rank 2016: 14)
Why
As CM of Jammu and Kashmir and with her party, the PDP, in a coalition with the BJP, she has, as her predecessor Omar Abdullah said recently, “the most difficult job in India to handle”.
Power Punch
Over the last six months, she has tightened her grip on the party by elevating several members of the Mufti clan to the top posts.
What Next
She has to walk a tightrope between her basic political instincts and the demands of her coalition partner. Summer in the restive Valley is her challenge.
By the way
A fitness enthusiast, she has a gym at her Srinagar residence.
37. Himanta Biswa Sarma, 48
Cabinet Minister, Assam Convenor NEDA
(New entry)
Why
One of the key figures behind BJP’s stunning victory in the 2016 Assam elections. He was also appointed convenor of the North-East Democratic Alliance (NEDA).
Power Punch
His NEDA engineered the first BJP government in Arunachal Pradesh by getting the entire Congress to defect to the party.
What Next
Building on the BJP’s growing footprint in the Northeast.
By the way
Sarma is also a writer. His two books, Samagata Samay (2014) and Anya ek Dristikon (2016), have run into several editions.
38. Siddaramaiah, 68
Chief Minister, Karnataka
(Rank 2016: 54)
Why
The CM — having joined the party just over a decade ago — has been able to shrug off allegations of corruption and remains the unchallenged leader of the Congress party in the state.
Power Punch
Following the SC orders in 2016 to release Cauvery waters to Tamil Nadu, he defused tensions by co-opting Opposition parties in the crisis resolution process.
What Next
Assembly elections in 2018 — the polls will be a test of his governance.
By the way
Siddaramaiah did not go to school until he was 10 years old, but was the first person from his village to get a bachelor’s degree.
39. Arvind Subramanian, 57
Chief Economic Adviser
(Rank 2016: 38)
Why
Proposed the Public Sector Asset Rehabilitation Agency to tackle banks’ non-performing assets. Was also behind the Universal Basic Income proposal in the Economic Survey this year.
Power Punch
With Standard & Poor’s ruling out an upgrade in the country’s rating, citing India’s low per capita GDP, he slammed rating agencies for their “inconsistent” and “poor” standards.
What Next
His idea of Universal Basic Income was supported by Arun Jaitley, who hopes to introduce it next year.
By the way
He is fond of American literature.
40. Ram Madhav, 52
General Secretary, BJP
(Rank 2016: 70)
Why
After turning the tide for the BJP in Assam and J&K, Madhav has now delivered Manipur for the party, despite not getting a majority in the state. He is considered to be among the few to have direct access to both the PM and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat.
Power Punch
His Manipur strategy pushed the party’s tally from a mere two to 21 seats in the state Assembly.
What next
Madhav’s next stop is Meghalaya. Known as the general secretary with the Midas touch, he is seen by many as a successor to Amit Shah, if the latter moves to Gujarat.
By the Way
An avid reader, he has over 4,000 books in his personal library.
41. Urjit Patel, 53
Governor, Reserve Bank of India
(New entry)
Why
As the RBI governor, he steers banking and monetary policies which influence the country’s economy. The RBI’s decision to approve demonetisation, however, came under criticism, with Patel, a low-profile and media-shy governor, also facing flak for not communicating its policies to the public.
Power Punch
The RBI board cleared the demonetisation proposal within two months of Patel’s elevation as governor in September 2016.
What Next
Will have to tackle inflation and boost growth at the same time, while bringing down bad loans. Details on demonetisation are yet to be announced |
see the situation Bloomberg Businessweek reported Wednesday.
"There was so much pressure," Lakia Williams, who previously worked as an assistant manager at a McDonald's location in Charleston, S.C. told Bloomberg Businessweek. "It's not only the franchisees group and the general managers, it is corporate. It's something internal, it's something deeper, and it's something that has been going on for years."
Every McDonald's employee is entitled to receive the pay they agreed to when starting work at the company according to a company spokeswoman Bloomberg Businessweek reported.
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"McDonald's and our independent owner-operators share a concern and commitment to the well-being and fair treatment of all people who work in McDonald's restaurants," Heather Oldani, a spokeswoman for McDonald's told Bloomberg Businessweek in an e-mail. "Whether employed by McDonald's or by our independent owner-operators, employees should be paid correctly."
"McDonald's and our owner-operators employ separately but in total over 750,000 workers in the United States, and we caution against drawing broad conclusions based on a small, random informal sampling," Oldani told Bloomberg Businessweek.
Lawyers feel the company and its franchisees should be one entity, and conjoin on legal responsibility, while McDonald's says it does not work with franchises, and believes it is not responsible for the actions of franchise owners actions since they operate by themselves The New York Times reported.
Cases in Michigan involved employees coming to work at the request of their bosses before being instructed to be on a one to two hour standby without receiving compensation until more people came to their restaurant location. The time was reportedly spent in parking lots of McDonald's locations.
McDonald's also had workers fund their uniforms, which decreased their $7.25 wage rate.
Three instances in California involve employees complaints that McDonald's did not compensate them for every hour on the job, slimmed down some hours off of workers compensation information, and did not allow time to eat and breaks they were entitled to The Times reported.
Cases in New York claim McDonald's did not pay back employees for cleansing uniforms.Nadal and Federer at the Australian Open final.
Every possible end to this year’s Australian Open would’ve made a story for the ages. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and pick one. Venus Williams at thirty-six, winning her first major in nine years. Serena Williams at thirty-five, returning to top form, winning her record twenty-third major title and reclaiming the number-one ranking. Roger Federer at thirty-five, winning an improbable eighteenth major title after a sixth-month hiatus, and against his one true rival. Rafa Nadal, at thirty—having seemed, in recent seasons, gnawed on by Father Time, with all the guilty, wide-eyed ravenousness of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son—unexpectedly capturing his fifteenth major title and making his strongest claim yet to being the greatest player the men’s tour has ever seen.
Every possible outcome would’ve hit some sweet spot. The Australian Open was a chance to cheer the younger, all-conquering versions of Venus, Roger, Serena, and Rafa—an opportunity to remember how quickly these moments we have to define ourselves can pass us by, and how thin the margins can be. Watching tennis like this appeals to that part of you that flutters and pinwheels: the nostalgia of the cynic, the romance buried in the hard-hearted. It felt like Pluto was the ninth planet again, singing sweeter in the music of the spheres than ever before.
Tennis is a game of undulating rhythms that exist in four concentric circles—the rhythm of a point, the rhythm of a service game, the rhythm of a return game, the rhythm of a set. They’re interrelated, but they don’t necessarily touch. Like an idea of order.
For example, serving with advantage in the fifth set, Nadal looked poised to pestle Federer in this, their thirty-fourth match. (He’d already won twenty-three of the others.) True, no player has won as often as Federer, but no player has made him suffer like Nadal has. The two first played in 2004, when, in Miami, a seventeen-year-old Nadal sent ripples through the tennis world by defeating the top-ranked Federer, then twenty-three, in straight sets. Since then, they have faced each other on hard courts and clay courts, quick courts and slow courts, half-clay and half-grass courts, Dubai courts and Cincinnati courts—for better and for worse, in sickness and in health.
Nadal’s advantages have been largely physiological. His thumping, left-handed, topspin forehand has spent the better part of a decade grinding down Federer’s backhand—a backhand that is, crucially, one-handed. The deep, high-bouncing ball is this backhand’s structural flaw, like that blind spot in a car’s rearview mirror. It’s extremely difficult to generate pace with such a backhand, especially while Nadal, like Navratilova and McEnroe before him, has made an art of his left-handedness. His game is a mosaic of stroke patterns designed to advantage what in Latin, and still in Spanish, would be known as his sinister side. If Federer’s elegant, artisanal backhand has been the cobra of the ATP Tour, Nadal’s forehand has been the mongoose.
But Federer brought a surprise with him to this final: he’d altered his backhand. Suddenly, he was hitting it flatter. Much flatter. You could see the difference in the shot off the racquet, and in his follow-through. It was curt—the high curlicue finish of the racquet with the twist of the wrist was gone. Now he swung the backhand more like someone opening a stuck door.
Ironically, Federer’s attempts to save himself in a point by using the topspin and slice often led to his demise in these matchups. Nadal knew it. Federer knew it, too, but he seemed unable to adjust. The strength of his one-handed backhand is in its flexibility. It’s an easier stroke through which to master and disguise variations of spin. And unless you’re Nicolás Almagro, Richard Gasquet, or Stan Wawrinka, there’s not much you can do off the backhand wing with a one-handed when you’re pushed to the back of the court but slice the ball back. So Federer, possibly taking cues from Grigor Dimitrov’s electric semifinal performance against Nadal, decided almost without fail to swing hard and swing flat, without fear of Rafa’s forehand. It bore fruit for Federer in the first and third sets, but the second and fourth were near mirror images of each other, with Federer’s own forehand—widely considered the greatest shot in the history of tennis—letting him down repeatedly.
And so there they were, the one secret between the two of them now out in the open. Nadal had had four sets to learn Federer’s backhand adjustment, and the match seemed to have stabilized. Nadal was one point from 4–2, with a vise grip on the match—he leaned forward at the baseline, fidgeted with one shoulder and then the other, touched one side of his nose and then the other, and then the other again; pushed aside his hair, picked at his shorts from the back, all prologue to the motion of his serve.
The point total at this moment of the match: Federer, 131; Nadal, 131.
As Nadal, mid serve, stared up at the ball hanging tamely in the air above him, he was never closer to winning the match. Then he tried to surprise Federer with a body serve, and Federer, on reflex, blocked the ball, and it tumbled crosscourt, deep into the corner it came from. Federer, completely on the defensive now, repositioned himself at the center of the baseline. All he could do now was wait. Nadal went for the wide shot he’d passed up on the serve. Soon a lane for a short crosscourt winner opened up, a shot tailor-made for Nadal’s lefty topspin forehand. Nadal went for it and it clipped the tape on the top of the net. But the topspin didn’t allow the unforced error to die a quick death, no—it popped and remaindered down to a spot on the court, falling, in the end, far enough to be out without question, even at first glance.
The next point was a rapid-fire five-shot slugfest that Federer ended emphatically with a flat backhand crosscourt winner. The break comes shortly after, Nadal spraying an inside-out forehand from the deuce side wide at the end of another hard exchange of ground strokes. Nadal is broken: three-all in the fifth now. Nadal never won another game in the match; he claimed only eight more points. Sure, there was the quality and emphatic drama of the twenty-six-shot rally two games later with Federer surging at 4–3. But it was Nadal’s unforced error—when everything was balanced seemingly on the width of an atom—that changed everything. They say baseball is a game of inches, but a debate that could have lasted a lifetime—who’s the greatest male tennis player you’ve ever seen?—was ended by a quarter-centimeter of braided net cord as the world turned.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of The Ground and Heaven. He is currently writing a book about tennis, The Circuit, which will be published in 2018.Rick Santorum's comments about gay marriage in a 2003 interview with the Associated Press have been getting a lot of mileage lately, but they are often misreported. In a January 4 profile of Santorum, for example, New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg describes the notorious quote this way:
He once offhandedly invoked bestiality in arguing that states should have the right to regulate homosexual acts. "That is not to pick on homosexuality," he said. "It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog."
That makes it sound as if Santorum was saying homosexuality is not as bad as pedophilia or bestiality, which is the interpretation he embraced in a January 4 interview with CNN's John King:
King: How do you connect homosexuality to bestiality? And you went on in that interview to talk about bigamy. Connect those dots. Santorum: Hold on a second, John. Read the quote. I said it's not, it is not; I didn't say it is. It says it's not. I'm trying to understand what you're trying to make the point. I said it's not those things. I didn't connect them; I specifically excluded them.
Nice try, but the relevant passage (which King read) does not support that gloss:
Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that's what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.
In context, the it clearly refers to marriage, not to homosexuality. Santorum is saying marriage traditionally has excluded certain relationships, including those between people of the same sex, between adults and children, and between people and animals. He is not necessarily saying these relationships are morally equivalent, although that seems to be the implication. In any event, Santorum makes it pretty clear in the same interview that he thinks sex between two men is bad enough that it should be a crime:
If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution; this right that was created, it was created in Griswold — Griswold was the contraceptive case — and abortion. And now we're just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more you — this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, well, it's my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.... The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire.
Here Santorum is not just objecting, on constitutional grounds, to the Supreme Court's interference with a state's decision to criminalize homosexual sex; he is defending such laws, saying sodomy "destroys the basic unit of our society." Evidently he does not think that position will help him win the Republican nomination. As with his bizarre denial that the federal government imprisons nonviolent drug offenders (with families!), Santorum is not defending his principles; he is trying to weasel out of their implications.Few families have been as devastated by pancreatic cancer as that of former President Jimmy Carter.
“We started out a long time ago with my father dying of pancreatic cancer,” Mr. Carter said in a telephone interview. “One by one, both my sisters and brother died of pancreatic cancer.”
His mother had it as well.
Mr. Carter said that he and other relatives had given blood for studies aimed at finding genetic abnormalities that might cause the disease and help doctors diagnose it.
For a time, Mr. Carter said, he had CT scans twice a year to look for lesions on his pancreas. His doctors switched to M.R.I. scans, fearing that repeated CT scans involved too much X-ray exposure.
“I don’t get any more M.R.I.’s or CT scans regularly,” he said. “I do have extensive blood work. I get a thorough physical exam once a year, and a fairly good physical exam twice a year. They do ultrasound on my body, too. But I don’t get too involved in cross-examining the doctor. They’re so thorough at Emory University.”
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Mr. Carter said doctors had offered various theories about what had caused so much disease in his family. “Nobody knew,” he said. “They thought my family might have imbibed some kind of poison, a pesticide. Back in the olden days, the federal government didn’t care what kind of poison you used.”
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His family lived near cotton fields, where malathion was used, he said. But some researchers think pesticides are a long shot — many people spend their lives near cotton fields — and say genetics is a more likely cause of pancreatic cancer.
The big question is, why was Mr. Carter spared when others in his family were struck down?
“The only difference between me and my father and my siblings was that I never smoked a cigarette,” Mr. Carter said. “My daddy smoked regularly. All of them smoked.”
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Studies have shown that smoking doubles or triples a person’s risk of pancreatic cancer.
Mr. Carter said he did not worry much about his own risk anymore. “I’m deeply religious, I’m a fatalist, I’m 82 years old and I’ve had a good life,” he said. And as far as he knows, he said, he has no signs of the disease.Frank Seravalli TSN Senior Hockey Reporter Follow|Archive
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Mike Sullivan remembers the clutching and grabbing.
He played through the hooking and holding in the 1990s. He coached against it from behind the bench of the Boston Bruins in 2003-04 - the last season before the NHL lockout changed the game beyond recognition.
But Sullivan didn’t hesitate for a second Monday night when he said that it is harder to score now than it ever was back then.
“This is the hardest hockey that I’ve witnessed in all the years I’ve been associated with this league, just as far as how hard both teams have to work for their ice out there,” Sullivan said after Game 4. “You’ve got to work for every inch of ice.”
The Dead Puck Era is long gone; the game is faster and cleaner now. If anything, you could argue that the one thing this Stanley Cup final is lacking - aside from competitive balance - is a nasty edge.
Yet, league-wide scoring dipped this season to its lowest rate (5.42 goals per game) since Sullivan’s 2003-04 campaign with the Bruins (5.14). Goal totals are even lower when accounting for the severe uptick in empty-net goals compared to 12 years ago.
Perhaps, with all due respect to Patrick Kane and maybe Connor McDavid, it is fair to wonder whether the NHL is entering the Post-Superstar Forward Era. At the very least it's time to temper the expectations we place on stars’ offensive production.
How else to explain that the Pittsburgh Penguins are closing in on their fourth Stanley Cup in franchise history without otherworldly performances from Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin?
Malkin scored his second goal in 16 games on Monday. Crosby was the best player on the ice in the first two games of the final, but he has yet to score a goal. Pittsburgh swatted Washington, the team that lapped the NHL in the regular season, with a combined one goal and three assists from Crosby and Malkin in six games.
The Penguins are on the brink because of the sum of their parts. It has been about a different contributor every night - from Bryan Rust to Conor Sheary to Nick Bonino to Phil Kessel to Ian Cole. Nice players, all, but none of them are stars.
That wasn’t how it worked in 2009, when Malkin lifted the Conn Smythe and Crosby netted 31 points in 24 games.
“The game has a little changed,” Malkin said Sunday. “We have a different team. We had a different coach and we not play two lines, we play four lines. I like what we do. We have a great team. I’m not seeing a big problem for me and for my linemates. It’s a little bit different.”
This seems to be more than just unlikely heroes emerging during playoff moments. Remember, the NHL’s scoring champion failed to top 90 points last season for the first time since 1967-68. This year, Kane was the only one to break 90, topping out at 106.
Those trends have continued in the playoffs.
Take the Sharks, for instance. Look at their goal scorers in this Cup final: Justin Braun has two, while Melker Karlsson, Tomas Hertl, Joonas Donskoi, Joel Ward and Patrick Marleau all have one.
Joe Pavelski paces the postseason with 13 goals, but he doesn’t have a point in this series. Logan Couture, Brent Burns and Joe Thornton have all been limited to two assists apiece.
It certainly isn't for a lack of effort.
“Guys are trying,” Couture said. “Pavs has scored 13 goals in these playoffs - that’s a pretty ridiculous streak that he [was] on. He’s had a great playoffs. It’s not an easy game. It’s pretty tough out there to score goals.”
So, why is that the case?
Ageless wonder Jaromir Jagr said at January’s All-Star Game that he felt he is a better player now, at 44, than he was during his Hart Trophy years in the late 90s.
“The difference is everyone else caught up to me,” Jagr said. “The league is way better now. There are no bad players.”
The coaching is also significantly better, too. Advantages are rarely exploited for long in this copycat league. Coaches can teach players how to defend, but they can’t teach them how to score.
“As talented as both of these teams are offensively, this is something we've said to our team all year long: ‘It doesn't matter how many goals we score, we have to learn how to defend,’” Sullivan said. “I know this team can score. When we start making a commitment to playing away from the puck, keeping the puck out of our net, now we become a team that’s, in our opinion, a contender.
“Teams don’t get this far if they don’t have the ability to defend. I think the top players get the most attention from probably the better defenders. It doesn’t surprise me that goals are hard to come by because both teams are making such a sincere commitment to playing away from the puck. That’s just the type of hockey it’s become. It’s not an easy environment. It’s hard hockey.”
The NHL is going the opposite way of the professional sports landscape. The NBA, MLB and NFL - particularly with regard to quarterbacks - are more reliant on stars now than ever.
This setup fits the traditional ‘team-first’ hockey mantra. But it won’t put butts in the seats.
It just puts salary cap crunchers on notice.
Contact Frank Seravalli on Twitter: @frank_seravalliCharles Bradley, a soul singer who blossomed late in life, releasing his first album at the age of 62, died Saturday after a battle with cancer. He was 68.
Like his late label mate Sharon Jones – who died last year after a protracted battle with cancer – Florida-born, Brooklyn-reared Bradley was an old-school journeyman R&B performer who was launched to fame via a series of independent releases on Brooklyn’s Daptone Records. Active from the ‘90s under the moniker “Black Velvet” as a James Brown impersonator, Bradley drew the attention of Daptone co-founder, bandleader and producer Gabriel Roth (aka Bosco Mann), who began releasing singles by the singer in 2002. Beginning with “No Time For Dreaming” in 2011 and continuing with “Soul of America” in 2012 and “Changes” in 2016, Bradley’s Daptone recordings flexed a high-voltage style that harkened back to the ‘60s work of such deep-soul stars as Brown and Otis Redding. Bradley’s career and life, which included a period of homelessness, was considered in Poull Brien’s 2012 documentary “Soul of America.”
He was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2016 and underwent treatment, receiving a clean bill of health and releasing his third album, “Changes,” later that year. He went out on tour earlier this year and performed on several television shows — including “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” “Conan” and “CBS This Morning: Saturday” — a performance that led to an Emmy nomination for Outstanding On-Camera Musical Performance in a Daytime Program.
However, the cancer recently returned, spreading to his liver, and he cancelled tour dates earlier this month. “I love all of you out there that made my dreams come true,” he said when announcing the cancellations. “When I come back, I’ll come back strong, with God’s love. With God’s will, I’ll be back soon.”
Bradley was born Nov. 5, 1948 in Gainesville, FL, and moved to Brooklyn at the age of 8. He lived all over the country before before returning to New York 20 years ago. According to a press release, Bradley passed away in Brooklyn Saturday, surrounded by family and friends including members of the bands he worked closely with: Menahan Street Band, His Extraordinaires, Budos Band and the Jimmy HillAllstarz, his band from his time performing as Black Velvet.
In lieu of flowers, his rep said donations may be made to the following organizations: All-Stars Project and Music Unites.
The press release announcing his passing concludes: “Thank you for your prayers during this difficult time. Mr. Bradley was truly grateful for all the love he’s received from his fans and we hope his message of love is remembered and carried on.”The Black Dahlia Murder’s “Fool ‘Em All” now available digitally
- June 20th, 2014 –
“Fool ‘Em All,” the second DVD release from Detroit, Michigan’s The Black Dahlia Murder was released on DVD on May 27, 2014. The DVD was incredibly well received by fans and landed at #3 on the Billboard Top Music Video Sales chart after its first week of release. Now finally, one month later, the video will be available through your favorite digital video retailers! The full HD video is up for pre-order now on iTunes, and will be officially released on Tuesday, June 24th via Amazon instant video, iTunes, and other digital retailers. Pre-order the video on iTunes now HERE.
On the day “Fool ‘Em All” was released, vocalist Trevor Strnad and guitarist Brian Eschbach spent an evening with fans and played the DVD at the world famous Grill ‘Em All in Alhambra, CA. The night was a massive success and was the biggest event in the history of the restaurant. There was a line out the door for several hours and a few fans walked away with cool prizes, and just about every fan in attendance had a chance to snap a photo with and say hi to the band. Metal Blade had cameras rolling that night and a video recap is up on youtube now HERE.
THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER
08/15 Richmond, VA The Broadberry GWAR-B-Q Pre-event
European Tour
06/17 Madrid, ES Boite Live!
06/18 Barcelona, ES Razzmatazz3
06/20 Kauhajoki, FI Nummirock Festival
06/22 Clisson, FI Hellfest
06/23 Geneva, CH L’Undertown
06/24 Lucerne, CH KonzerthausSchüür
06/25 Colmar, FR Le Grillen
06/27 Montabaur, DE Mair1 Festival
06/28 Hamburg, DE Logo
06/29 Dessel, BE Graspop Metal Meeting
07/01 Köln, DE MTC
07/02 Augsburg, DE Kantine
07/03 Prague, CZ 007 Strahov
07/04 Rojtzschjora, DE With Full Force Festival
07/05 Münster, DE Vainstream Rock Fest
07/06 Roskilde, DK Roskilde Festival
11/09 Drammen, NO Union Scene
11/11 Stavanger, NO Checkpoint Charlie
11/12 Bergen, NO Garage
11/13 Hamar, NO Gregers
11/14 Trondheim, NO Byscenen
http://twitter.com/bdmmetal
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Buy iTunes Artist Page Artist NewsIn the near-week since a shooting rampage left nine African-American parishioners dead at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, all eyes have turned to the Confederate Battle flag flying above the state capitol grounds. It’s the same flag featured prominently on a website purportedly linked to the shooter, Dylann Storm Roof, along with a bevy of white supremacist writings.
But what about the semiautomatic handgun Roof confessed to using in last week’s shooting attack? While more than half a million people, lawmakers, and presidential candidates have called for the removal of the Confederate flag from government places, virtually no one has advocated for stronger gun control laws in the wake of the Charleston massacre.
RELATED: Charleston church massacre: Dylann Roof’s gun bought at local store
Leading the charge now against the Confederate flag is South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who on Monday called for its removal from the capitol in Columbia. Though the flag represents “traditions that are noble” for many in the state, Haley, surrounded by a number of fellow Republican leaders, said in a press conference that it’s also “a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past” for others.
Shortly after her remarks, Mississippi’s Republican speaker of the state House expressed a similar sentiment, saying that the Confederate battle emblem should be removed from his state’s flag — the only one still incorporating the image in full. “As a Christian,” Speaker Philip Gunn said, “I believe our state’s flag has become a point of offense that needs to be removed.” Even some of the most vocal champions of gun reform have opted instead to focus on the Confederate flag issue following last week’s shooting.
Nearly every major GOP presidential contender has voiced support for Haley’s decision. But none — including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, and Donald Trump — responded to msnbc’s request for comment on whether the shooting indicated a need for stronger gun restrictions. Some have revealed their hands, however, in more unguarded moments.
“Laws can’t change this,” New Jersey Gov. Christie — who’s expected to formally announce a White House bid next month — told attendees at last Friday’s Faith and Freedom Conference in Washington, D.C. That same day, another White House hopeful, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, similarly stuck to his old script on gun control.
“You know the great thing about the state of Iowa is,” Cruz joked at a town hall meeting in Red Oak, “I’m pretty sure you all define gun control the same way we do in Texas — hitting what you aim at.”
Even some of the most vocal champions of gun reform have opted instead to focus on the Confederate flag issue following last week’s shooting. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat who tried and failed to push through a package of gun-control measures earlier this year, announced on Tuesday that he would remove the Confederate emblem from state-issued license plates. At no point in McAuliffe’s announcement did he address gun control, though his communication director, Brian Coy, told msnbc later in the day that the governor would “continue the fight” to keep guns “out of dangerous hands.”
RELATED: Charleston attack drags GOP 2016 field into uncomfortable places
It remains to be seen whether South Carolina’s General Assembly has the two-thirds super majority necessary to remove the Confederate flag from its perch. But what seems all but certain is that any conversation about stricter gun control laws in the wake of the Charleston shooting has been cast aside or lost entirely.
“Removing the Confederate flag is a necessary but totally insufficient response to Charleston,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, in a statement to msnbc. “It’s easier to take down a flag than seriously confront America’s gun violence epidemic, but just because it’s not easy doesn’t mean we should continue to ignore the increasing carnage across America.”
“It’s easier to take down a flag than seriously confront America’s gun violence epidemic, but just because it’s not easy doesn’t mean we should continue to ignore the increasing carnage across America.” Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy tweeted that Walmart should stop selling certain types of guns in addition to Confederate flag merchandise, added: “I’m gravely concerned that people are focused only on the flag instead of attempting to take on America’s gun violence epidemic simply because an offensive flag is easy to fix.”
On one hand, the relative silence on gun control comes as quite a shock. Yes, Roof seems to have an affinity for Confederate memorabilia based off photographs of the 21-year-old clutching a flag and straddling a license plate bearing the familiar blue “X,” white stars, and red backdrop. And perhaps it’s reasonable to assume that Roof drew inspiration from the Confederacy, which fought to keep slavery legal during the Civil War, for his racial hatred. But shouldn’t the firearm he actually used to kill nine black people at least be part of the conversation on how to move forward? Law enforcement officials say the 21-year-old bought the 45-caliber Glock on April 11, less than two months after he was arrested in late February and indicted on a state drug charge, a misdemeanor under South Carolina law. The sale of the gun to Roof was legal, NBC’s Pete Williams and Mark Potter reported. On the other hand, however, this fixation on the flag over the gun comes as no surprise. The country has seen mass shootings before — including one that left 20 elementary school kids dead in Newtown, Connecticut — and that still hasn’t made it any more difficult to get a gun. It’s understandable, then, that the staunchest gun control advocates may feel like giving up. On the other hand, however, this fixation on the flag over the gun comes as no surprise. The country has seen mass shootings before — including one that left 20 elementary school kids dead in Newtown, Connecticut — and that still hasn’t made it any more difficult to get a gun. It’s understandable, then, that the staunchest gun control advocates may feel like giving up.
President Obama registered this fatigue when he first responded to the Charleston shooting on Thursday, just more than two years after a bipartisan gun control package failed to clear the Senate, which was then under Democratic control. It was the 14th time Obama has had to address a gun-related tragedy.
“I’ve had to make statements like this too many times,” Obama said in a televised address at the White House. “We do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.”
Haley, who has an “A+” rating from the National Rifle Association, did not return msnbc’s request for comment on whether she felt there needed to be another conversation on gun control in addition to the one unfolding over the Confederate flag. But in an interview on NBC’s “TODAY” show last week, Haley suggested that guns were often wrongfully scapegoated in events like this.
“Anytime there’s a traumatic situation, people want something to blame, they always want something to go after,” Haley said in response to a question on gun control. “There is one person to blame here. A person filled with hate, a person that does not define South Carolina. And we are going to focus on that one person.”In 15 years of political activism, and about eight as a journalist, I cannot remember a time when people around me were so afraid to speak their minds. Not Jews, anyway, and definitely not in Tel Aviv.
Palestinians in the occupied territories always knew that stepping up against the occupation, even with the most nonviolent of tools, could end with their detention for prolonged periods of time. Palestinian citizens, too, are under constant supervision by the Shin Bet, and any university student or public servant taking part in a demonstration knows that he or she is likely to get a threatening phone call from authorities.
But Jews were usually the ones to enjoy more of a feeling of democracy. Sure, one could get arrested while demonstrating, maybe beaten up by police, especially in times of severe escalation of violence in the territories, but it was always generally the feeling that if you wanted to, you could go to a demonstration in Tel Aviv (or elsewhere within the 1948 borders) and get back home unharmed.
That all changed recently, on the evening of July 12, when a group of several dozen extreme-right activists, some of them wearing T-shirts with neo-Nazi designs, attacked a peaceful demonstration against the carnage in Gaza and the targeting of civilians on both sides — and for a cease-fire and peace. The right-wingers announced in advance that they would be coming to physically assault us in the protest. However, police paid no heed to the warnings, nor to the threats made on the scene when the protest began, nor to our requests that the very few police officers present would call for backup and try to physically separate the two demonstrations.
When the air raid sirens wailed in Tel Aviv that evening, we knew one thing for sure: The thugs in front of us were more dangerous than the rapidly approaching Hamas-fired rockets. While the Iron Dome intercepted the rockets, by the evening’s end one leftist activist was injured and hospitalized, an independent journalist had his video camera stolen and dozens of others were hit, pushed, thrown to the ground or had eggs thrown at them. Two local coffee shops were vandalized as the right-wingers suspected that demonstrators were hiding inside.
Now, I’ve been shot at, beaten, arrested and spent two years in prison for conscientious objection, but this brutal attack by dozens of bullies chanting, “Death to Arabs” and “Burn the leftists” — just two weeks after a young Palestinian boy was torched to death — was one of the most frightening experiences I’ve ever encountered.
One of the organizers of the mob, a local rapper dubbed “The Shadow,” later took to social media to express his pride in having given peace activists a lesson that nowhere can they protest in safety, not even in Tel Aviv, and mentioned how police on the scene showed their support for his actions. Not a single attacker was arrested, by the way, despite the fact that the attacks took place right in front of trained riot policemen. An official police representative later explained this by saying that “no one pressed charges.” Violent threats toward leftists by “The Shadow” and others continued on social networks and in the comment sections of media outlets in the days to come, creating a very real and physical fear among many activists.
But to understand that Saturday night attack, one must look at the ongoing process of delegitimization of Palestinian citizens and of the Jewish left by prominent politicians over the past few years. The first extreme wave of anti-democratic legislation came upon us in 2009, following Operation Cast Lead, when the public discourse started framing anti-war protesters and human rights NGOs as “traitors in our midst.”
Since the three kidnapped Jewish boys were found dead, the incitement by our leaders has grown considerably worse. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and almost everyone around him called for revenge on Palestinians. Knesset member Yariv Levin, the coalition whip, silenced Physicians for Human Rights director Ran Cohen on a live news broadcast as Cohen was citing reports on the situations in Gaza. Levin also accused the news team of allowing “anti-Israeli lies and propaganda“ on the air. Miri Regev, head of the Knesset’s Committee for Internal Affairs and a former spokeswoman for the Israel Defense |
the circumstance. But it’s not. The Standing Rock Sioux Nation’s tribal sovereignty, which essentially precedes colonization, is permanent, and it’s recognized (as opposed to granted) by the federal government.
The nation is concerned that its waters would be contaminated and that its sacred sites will be desecrated by this pipeline project. On the surface, that claim can easily look like a specific racial group got together to lodge an environmental complaint, but there’s a lot more than that: It’s actually a tribal sovereign nation that’s making an important claim about self-determination and its ability to survive and exist in the future.
But this isn’t just lost on journalists. It extends to the highest office in the federal government. During his trip to Laos this week, President Obama was asked about the pipeline. He issued, at best, a lackluster answer. Obama gave great lip service to his culturally appropriate communication with indigenous peoples, but he added that he couldn’t even provide an answer "on this particular case."
Aside from asserting ignorance on a topic I can’t help but think he’s already been briefed on, Obama also missed an opportunity to publicly recognize the Standing Rock Sioux Nation’s tribal sovereignty. That’s a real shame, as is his decision to skirt the environmental and climate hazards the pipeline presents.
VM: When we talk about environmentalism, we hear a lot about climate change, politicians, and CO2 emissions. These are all a part of the story, but as the #NoDAPL protests are showing, they’re not the full story. Race is also a critical part of the issue. How have you seen race erased from the environmentalism story as a journalist, and how does #NoDAPL demonstrate the importance of foregrounding race in the conversation?
AB: Environmental racism is woven into our society’s fabric. The very founding of this country was an environmental disaster, made possible through settler colonialism, and vice versa. The historical emissions produced by white colonists have greatly contributed to climate change, leaving indigenous peoples and people of color — that is, the very people who didn’t contribute to global warming much at all — most vulnerable. I see a lot of stories that reference climate change without much of an understanding about who’s responsible for creating it. It didn’t appear out of nowhere; it was part of a larger violent process of theft and genocide, and it’s stunning to me that most environmental journalists don’t really seem to get that.
But it wasn’t only in colonizing the land. It’s also about the way cities were constructed. Racial housing covenants often segregated people of color into areas that had the most factories, oil refineries, heavy industry, and so forth. Although explicit racial segregation for housing is illegal today, the legacies of those neighborhoods, and who’s affected by contamination and pollution, haven’t changed much.
If you live in a city, look up your closest landfill. Chances are that landfill, and all the health and environmental concerns that stem from it, is in a neighborhood of color. These neighborhoods and sacrificial zones were literally designed to be that way, and not much has changed.
You’re right that a lot of environmental and climate stories focus on science and policy — and too often, that casts people aside. As an environmental journalist, I understand and keep up with the science: We can nerd out on greenhouse gases, lead, and particulate matter for days. But I also pay attention to how much science matches up to experience.
The people I focus my stories on don’t worry about the number of parts per million of carbon dioxide allowed in the Paris climate deal; they worry about the number of asthma inhalers they can afford to buy in order to survive.
#NoDAPL has made clear that climate change isn’t up for debate for most indigenous peoples. It’s a real phenomenon that can mean the difference between life and death.
VM: What questions do you find journalists aren’t asking when it comes to covering the #NoDAPL protests?
AB: You asked a great question about tribal sovereignty — but few journalists even understand what that means. There are several Indian law scholars who’d like nothing better than to have a journalist call and ask them to explain what tribal sovereignty is. That attorney might not be quoted in a story, but that journalist will be armed with a crucial understanding moving forward with which to explain what’s happening in Standing Rock and elsewhere.
I’m also surprised that reporters aren’t pressing the two leading presidential candidates on the pipeline. I can image what Trump’s answer might be, but what about Clinton? She’s claimed she supports environmental justice — her claim could be buffered by issuing a simple statement, although it seems rather late for that now. Since she’s failed to say anything about the pipeline, reporters might want to press her campaign on it.
Aside from what’s not being asked, I also wonder who’s being asked. I think it’s great that more white folks are getting involved, and even heading to North Dakota, but I worry about the way that white voices are validating what indigenous peoples, and people of color who are in solidarity, can say for themselves. So I think it’s incumbent upon reporters to get out of their comfort zones and talk to more than just white sources for this story.
VM: The Toronto chapter of Black Lives Matter just recently traveled down to stand with #NoDAPL protesters. Why are these kinds of alliances important for understanding the complexity of the problem?
AB: The enslavement of black people in the Americas complicates the settler colonial matter I talked about earlier. One legacy of enslavement is that black skin continues to be an indicator that marks one’s place in a racial hierarchy. Black Lives Matter has built a worldwide movement and has also taken the time to work thoughtfully with indigenous peoples. There’s probably an amazing story waiting to be told about the meetings, especially among women and gender nonconforming people, that have taken place behind the scenes before and after BLM arrived at Standing Rock.
BLM knows it has the media’s attention, so it made a strategic decision to head to Standing Rock in order to get journalists to pay attention. It’s also brought much-needed supplies there. And it’s created some visibility for black indigenous folks to also be recognized. Every step of the fight against the pipeline has seemed historic to me. But this allegiance is toward the top of that list, and deserves more coverage.
VM: What can coverage (or lack thereof) of the #NoDAPL protests teach us about how indigenous communities stories are told?
AB: For the most part, stories about indigenous communities aren’t being told. We have a way of relegating indigenous peoples to the past, so stories that are taking place today rarely resonate with mainstream journalists. There are, of course, indigenous reporters and reporters of color that write about this — but the system that keeps journalism so white tends to keep the publishing gate closed in terms of what we can cover and when.
Then again, I do think that #NoDAPL has revitalized the argument [that] it’s important for journalists to pay attention to the fact that already marginalized communities are the ones on the front lines, fighting against environmental injustices. There’s a great opportunity here created by indigenous peoples. I hope we don’t miss it.When we think of animators, we might picture men and women in a dimly-lit, overcrowded studio, squinting at a light board, hunched over an LCD screen, or fingering a drawing tablet, doggedly honing their craft surrounded by their peers. But Bahi JD's path into the anime business is a little different-- he established himself first with homemade animated GIFS (one of his most famous creations, SHITHEAD ACTION, can be seen here) before making his mark as a professional animator on Reverge Labs' popular Skullgirls fighting game. Not long after, he had his first job as an anime animator-- a telecommuting animator, who worked from his home in Austria-- on Kids on the Slope. (That part in episode 7, where the students are signaling each other and dashing through the school to see Kaoru and Sentaro jam at the festival? Yeah, that was Bahi's bit.) You can see Bahi's artwork on his tumblr, and keep up with him on Twitter at @bahijd!
Now, Bahi's working on Space Dandy. We asked the young animator some broad questions, and here he responds with ruminations on his career path, the importance of filmic techniques in animation, and some of his favorite things about Space Dandy.
ANN: What I'd like you to do is walk me through your typical working day - since you live in Vienna and the studio's in Tokyo, how you communicate with your line producer, how you receive storyboards and return finished animation, that kind of stuff. What kind of working hours do you keep?
BAHI I do everything through the internet, I've been working this way since the beginning. It's just like any other freelance work, there are enough tools to get things done efficiently such as Google Drive, FTP servers, Skype, Dropbox and so on. Before I start with the work, we have an online meeting where we discuss everything in detail. My work hours vary since I'm freelance, so it always depends on the work I'm doing. Sometimes I keep working the whole day through because it's too exciting. Working at home requires a lot of self-discipline, I usually turn on the music because it keeps me focused on my work; when I'm listening to music and drawing, I'm fully immersed in it.
There were rumors that you finally went to Japan recently. Did you get to work at the studio? Was there any difference between working at home in Austria?
I went to Tokyo in February for the first time to visit friends and studios. I also worked for a few days at Studio Bones on my animation cuts, it was a great experience. It was my first time working at an animation studio, and I was very happy to meet all the other artists that worked on the show. Also, I would meet new people every day, because there are lots of freelancers working on Space Dandy-- it was always exciting. Friends and great animators that I knew from Twitter and Facebook sometimes came to my desk to say hello, and it was a great pleasure to meet everyone.
Also, I was able to improve my technical skills when I was there for that short period of time. I've learned almost everything animation-related from the internet, but there were things I learned at the studio that couldn't be found on the web. Working at Bones was as relaxing as working at home. But that might also have been because Bones’ studio environment is nice. It's a friendly and chill place, everyone is social, and no one is put under pressure. Everyone has his/her own creative space, it's not like an office where you come in and they order you around. I was working just as comfortably as I do at home, and I had had the same amount of creative freedom. It was a refreshing experience for me, and helped me to progress. I'm back to Austria again but I will definitely return to Tokyo soon.
What tools do you use, in terms of both software and tablet? Do you ever use paper and scan it in, or is that a little too old -fashioned?
I don't view it as old fashioned, but I don't use it for my work because circumstances made me start digitally and I'm comfortable with that. I can animate using analog tools, but personally I'm more efficient digitally. I work on an Intuos5 currently, and have a small old Wacom Bamboo Fun that I use as a mobile thing. Most of my animations are actually made on the Bamboo tablet, it's my first tablet and it still works perfectly.
The software I use to draw the animation is Flash, you can use it just like a piece of paper and animate by hand. I don't use special digital options in Flash because I want to keep it just like the paper; the onion skin is the only option that I use, it's the digital version of a light table. Many people complain about the Pencil and Brush tool in Flash, and I agree that it's tough. But it's only tough in the sense that it's not friendly at the beginning. If you practice hard enough you can fully control the lines and draw everything you want on it. So maybe the brush is the reason why many prefer to use Photoshop or other software for animating, but in the anime industry, digital animators mostly use Flash. For some examples, Gosei Oda, Norifumi Kugai, Shingo Yamashita and many other animators work in Flash. Sometimes when I want to add a special brush stroke for some frames of my animation, I'll use Photoshop. But usually my animation line is totally completed in Flash, from rough to final lines.
But there are also animators that print out their digital animation work and do the fine tuning on paper. Flash is basically only for line animating, I would not recommend doing the rest in Flash. Photoshop or Retas tools can be used for the digital coloring & tracing, and After Effects for compositing. Digital tracing is done to make lines more solid, so they trace over the key animator's lines digitally, and generally you can't judge it because there are both great examples and weak examples of digital tracing. Back in the day, this type of tracing work was done by hand, but now digital animation software has developed a lot, so you can recreate beautiful lines and keep the animator's signature line art in the final work. My lines in Space Dandy episode 1 were traced over again throughout the process, and I compared it with my original lines and it was exactly the same—the rest of the team did a fantastic job of preserving my original lines. It must've been very difficult work for the person who traced them, because I drew lot of dynamic lines. I'm really glad that my original work can be seen in the final version, from both from the line work but also the animation.
Who do you talk to during your process? Just the line producer, or do you also communicate with the director and the animators working alongside you?
I mostly communicate with the line producer and the episode director about my work. When I was at Bones, I was talking to everyone, but not about my own work, I was talking about stuff in general. It was nice to have regular conversations with other animators. My Japanese is very weak, but some people at the studio can speak and understand English. Chikashi Kubota, who was sitting at the desk behind me, was helping me to communicate with others at the studio. He is a very friendly person and a great animator.
Shinichiro Watanabe, Space Dandy’s general director, is known for giving his animators a lot of freedom to create. Do you find this to be true? You did get a little focused on your own style in Kids on the Slope and had to make some corrections, according to the Anipages interview. Has that happened in Space Dandy, or are you more settled in with what the director expects?
That's true, but I think credit should also be given to our director Shingo Natsume. They both give the animators a lot of freedom. But I think it also depends on which project, episode and scene the animator works on. My animation part allowed me to completely express myself and come up with new ideas. I could see the freedom of the scene when I saw the storyboard so I choose to work on it in episode 1. The directors Watanabe and Natsume allowed me to try different ideas that were not even storyboarded in that scene. It was a lot of fun, so I'm very thankful to the directors for giving me all the space I wanted to create my own distinctive animation scene in Space Dandy.
But of course, you have to be very careful when you want to introduce these new ideas; doing so can disrupt the flow. Even if I improvised a lot, I introduced the new ideas to the directors first and tried to keep it consistent with the rest of the episode. Improvisation can go wrong if you don't know how to balance it, so I tried to build it into the scene in a way that it worked naturally with the rest of the episode. Yutaka Nakamura also put a lot of new ideas into his animation scene. There are also animators that sometimes change the storyboard of their scene during key-animation process. That's a big step to take, so you have to be very careful with that and pitch the idea to the staff before you start animating.
On Space Dandy, do you communicate a lot with Mr Watanabe, or is that Mr Natsume's job?
For episode 1, Natsume-san was the director, but everything I discussed with him was also forwarded to Watanabe-san, and I received both of their responses. You have to imagine, there are so many individual creators on board Space Dandy-- I think Natsume and Watanabe are doing a great job on maintaining a balance here. A bad director would impose limits on us and make us into animation robots in order to preserve the show's consistency. But Watanabe and Natsume let us go wild and free, and yet that balance still remains.
You went pro more or less immediately after high school with Skullgirls, right? That's very impressive. Do you think your career path is a good idea for young animators looking to break in?
That's a very difficult question to answer. My career path progressed through the internet, but I had no other options, so I just went for it. Plus, I haven't tried another path, so I have no idea if my path is the good or bad one, When there is nothing to compare it with, it's hard to recommend something. I could recommend people some good food, a nice film, or an interesting game. But recommending a career path is very difficult, because my career is my whole lifestyle.
I think everyone has to find their way on their own. We are discussing animators in general, but all animators are all very different from each other. If it's really your dream to do this, and if you can really go through it all without getting distracted, it's possible. But it's not easy! You can get through it if you really enjoy what you are doing every moment. I just love working with these great people on these cool projects, and one of the main reasons I'm working in the anime industry is because there is lot of creative freedom here, you can truly express yourself.
In the Anipages interview, you discussed having to work very quickly, because you're creating both doga and genga. Is this still the case with Space Dandy?
For Space Dandy, everything was genga / key-animation. I'd like to explain this a bit more, because it can be misunderstood. Basically, every frame was an important drawing, a “KEY” drawing, and these are always drawn by the key animator. Since every drawing played an important role in the scene, I drew them all. Doga—inbetweens-- are used when the inbetween artist can easily copy the key animation drawing. I would only let the inbetween artist do doga for my animation if it has slow-motion, or if it's an extremely slow movement with very small spacing. Animation that has a big gap left for inbetweeners to work in doesn't look nice unless it's a very slow movement. Most inbetweeners do it almost like a “copy+paste” machine, so you usually can't expect them to animate for you. If you do so anyway, don't expect to see interesting animation on screen. The key-animator is the animator.
There are certainly some good inbetweeners around, but it's hard to know who is going to do the inbetweens for your work. When you see bad animation, in most cases it's not because the inbetweener did a bad job, it's because the key animator didn't do a good enough job. Sometimes inbetweeners can save bad or weak key animation.
But to get back to my case, the technique that I refer to when I work is called full limited, a phrase that became popular because of its association with the animator Mitsuo Iso. It's about animating everything by yourself without using too many drawings or being dependent to the inbetweener. This is possible by knowing how to use a balanced number of drawings combined with carefully balanced timing and spacing. Getting even more technical, you have to make good use of timing in 1s,2s,3s and even 4s. 1s are full frame, 2s means that the same drawing is used for two frames in a 24fps film, and so on. Simply imagine it like that: 1s are used for super fast motion with huge spacing, 2s are medium fast, 2s&3s in combination is still useful for fast movement, 3s are usually for slower movements/ small spacing unless you are someone like Yutaka Nakamura or Mitsuo Iso, and 4s are for very slow motion. By combining these timings, you can create all types of interesting motion with a small number of drawings for both slow and fast movements. These are just the basics, and it gets more complex. You can check out the work of Mitsuo Iso in End of Evangelion‘s Asuka battle scene (Iso's scene begins at 4:16 and ends at 5:18) to see an example of nice timing combination.
But full limited animation in Iso's Evangelion scene wasn't used simply because it's an animation-related technique. Many animators in the anime industry approach animation just like live-action. If you know about filmmaking and photography you know the effects that altering the aperture and shutter speed can introduce. For example, the shutter speed can make movement look stuttering if you set it on 1/2000 s. This technique is used for certain action scenes in films, and makes the scene more intense. If the animator knows about shutter speed, the same thing happens with animation that is combined in 2s and 3s, with huge spacing. Iso's work is a great example. Iso went very deep into that approach to make that scene from End of Evangelion with Asuka look as believable as possible, and he did so by emulating a real camera with a long focal length lens, using framing and composition that felt like a documentary. If you pay attention to it, his Evangelion scene also has no motion blur, and once again that's because of the shutter speed.
The camera had pans in some shots too, and if the shutter speed was not fast enough that whole scene would be totally blurry in a real-life film and we wouldn't see anything. Iso used a long focal length for the shots with the Eva unit because he was “filming” two giant creatures fighting each other, and doing it so destructively that no one would get close to them with a camera. You can feel that it was filmed from distance in all shots (of course the cockpit is not filmed like that), but when things smash on the ground and stones fly into the camera, they never come close to the viewer and look flattened. That's what a long focal length does. Iso could've done impossible video game-ish camera movement in that scene because animation has no limits regarding that approach, but instead he chose to handle the scene as if he was really there and as if the battle was happening in a real space of its own. And all of these thoughts and techniques that were put into that scene made it look incredibly intense and believable. He is a real cinematographer!
This is why I came to this industry, because as a key animator you can have a lot of control over your scene. Animators should discover the world of filmmaking and expand their knowledge; we are not just drawing pictures, we are filmmakers. Even a painter is not merely painting, you have to put more into your experience into your work and understand what you are doing. Otherwise, it will feel empty.
Sorry, I think I went too deep into animation techniques! But I think it's a shame that these advanced timing techniques aren't written in any popular English-language animation books. Young people who enter the animation world think that traditional animation always has to be in 1s. I don't know why some people set such strict animation rules, maybe they just do it so we can break them. I'm glad we have the internet these days. Let's get back to Space Dandy.
What's your favorite cut or part of Space Dandy so far, in episodes 1-12, by one of your colleagues? Anything come to mind?
I have a lot of favorite parts in each episode. From episode 1, Gosei Oda animated the scene where Dandy is chasing Meow across the Boobies restaurant. I liked Dandy's movement a lot when he shoots with his gun in that scene. Yutaka Nakamura's colorful part that starts right after my part with the stone sliding blew my mind. That part was not in the original storyboard; Nakamura added that in, and it flows very well into the original storyboard. You can check out the key animation of that scene on YouTube, it's officially uploaded. In episode 1, I also liked the part with QT and the big one-eyed monster and the whole last scene. That was Norifumi Kugai's work, he is a very young and talented animator with an interesting approach to timing and solid animations, his work has a lot of weight to it.
In episode 2, there is a great and crazy scene where Dandy and Meow turn into fluid form and get sucked out back into the ramen shop-- that was done by Gosei Oda. The fighting scene at the ramen restaurant was also fun to watch, very dynamic camera work with nice fighting choreography. That scene was made by a great animator named Takashi Mukouda. Episode 3 had a refreshing piece of mecha animation by Takahiro Shikama, it had a Yoshinori Kanada feel to it, but also mixed with Mukouda's own fluid style. I also like the episode that was supervised by Hiroyuki Aoyama, his episodes have some of the best character acting scenes and the episode overall has a very solid quality of animation. Aoyama brought many animators who had worked for Hayao Miyazaki and Mamoru Hosoda aboard Space Dandy. Aoyama himself was animation supervisor for Hosoda's Summer Wars and more recently worked on Miyazaki's The Wind Rises. Episode 11, with Hisashi Mori's mecha work and his book scene at the end was amazing. I was fascinated by the climactic scene with the book, it's amazing how Mori can create an exciting action sequence with a book. It made me think of the big contrast between a small book and giant transforming robots. The robots are usually used for “action” but here we had a book instead, and it worked thanks to Mori.
Chikashi Kubota supervised episode 12, which was also overall full of nice character animations with charming acting scenes, especially at the end. Aside from animation cuts, Eun Young Choi's episode 9 had a wonderful sense of design. Kevin Aymeric worked on the backgrounds and Kiyotaka Oshima supervised the character drawings, Dandy looked so weird in that episode, but in a good way.
And of course, have you been working on cuts for Space Dandy past episode 1? When can we expect to see your work next?
It'll be in the first episode of Space Dandy season two, which comes in the summer.
How about the future? Will we see an animated film directed by Bahi JD someday soon, for example?
I still have to study a lot but I would like to direct someday.
Do you still watch a lot of animation, or is working as an animator keeping you distracted? What kind of animation inspires you?
I don't ignore the works of others, they still interest me a lot, so even if I'm very busy I try to get a little glimpse into other projects that have been made. I don't think it's good to isolate myself, keeping track of everything is very helpful. I don't have time to watch an entire TV show lately, but sometimes I take a look at them when there is something interesting. But mostly I watch animated feature films, short films and student works. I like to see innovative and original animation, different stuff that we haven't seen many times.
Thomas has urged artists outside of Japan to consider going to Japan for animation work. Have you thought about moving to Japan permanently? If telecommuting from Vienna is what you prefer, do you think other many young animators from outside Japan could also do it?
I think you can do it if you really want. As mentioned, telecommuting from Vienna was my only way to get into the industry, so I don't know how things would have turned out if I had immediately gone to Japan, without knowing anyone. I got into this industry by building a web portfolio and showing my stuff to the industry people. They liked it, and that's how I got here. I went straight into key animation and skipped inbetweening. If someone wants to take the same path as me, I think they also need to go into key animation right at the beginning. That can be a little difficult, so they have to prepare a lot first. You need to start off with strong artistic skills, and impress them with your work. I was rejected many times at the beginning because my work was not strong enough. That was when I was 17-- the first time I showed my work to someone from the industry. I was 20 when I started my first professional job. I just kept pushing and trying to improve until I was kind of ready. But when I did my first anime work on Apollon, I still wasn't fully prepared, heh. So I learned most of the technical stuff while I was working in the industry; it was like studying and working at the same time, but that also made me a lot slower than the other animators. Animators in Japan are extremely fast, even the ones that animate amazing shots, and you have to keep up with that.
Since then I've been working through the net. There is still a lot to learn and explore as an animator, so I never get bored. As mentioned earlier, I went to Japan in February of this year to get a handle on how it would be to work there, and it was pretty nice.
Working in Japan as animator can be a tough lifestyle at the beginning because the payment can be low at the start, but it's a very fun and exciting place to work. Even if the budget of project is sometimes small, it is amazing how people like Mamoru Oshii or Satoshi Kon and all these other directors and producers have been able to produce amazing films with such limited budgets. Creativity and vision can break those limits; it's a full commitment to animation that makes these things possible.
I think it would be fresh for anime content to have people from other places with different visions in this industry. So I think if you truly love to create animations and work hard, you can make yourself comfortable here and enjoy the work. A few years ago I was just a kid watching midnight broadcasts of Samurai Champloo at my home, admiring the work of these great people and now I get to work with them. It is a part of my dream that has come true. We are here to create dreams and tell stories, that's what film making is about. It is all possible, in my opinion-- if you really go for it.How big is 15TB? It’s big enough for me to briefly entertain the idea that it might be a portion of the entire internet sizeable enough to remark on in the headline. It probably isn’t big enough for that, but crikey it’ll do the job in your average desktop PC. Samsung’s catchily named PM1633a SSD is the biggest 2.5-inch storage drive around, let alone in SSD terms.
You know what’s bigger than 15TB. Space. All of it. For the best ways to explore it in the virtual realm, check out our best PC space games.
Samsung’s own bespoke V-NAND technology facilitates this behemoth, by stacking 48 layers on top of each other to make a tasty storage sandwich. It’s a remarkable feat in that it’s actually more capacious than even the biggest hard disk drive – capacity was the one thing those poor guys still had going for them. Poor suckers.
Read and write speeds aren’t the outright quickest in SSD land, as you might expect from such a huge device. It’s by no means a slouch though: Samsung state the read and write speeds are around 1,200MB/s, and read/write operations per second are at 200,000 reads and 32,000 writes. So, y’know – enough.
The number Samsung have yet to specify thus far though is price. According to Ars Technicathe last generation of enterprise (at which this drive is also aimed)PM1633products cost around $1000 per terabyte – even with the assumption of that being brought down some you should expect to pay in the region of $8000. So it’s that or a 5-way Titan X setup (4 connected, 1 just laying at the bottom of the case in a show of opulence).Image copyright Central News Image caption PC Andrew Ott knocked a student's tooth out with his riot shield while kettling protesters in Parliament Square
A Met Police officer has been convicted of assaulting a student whose tooth was knocked out during a protest.
PC Andrew Ott struck William Horner with his riot shield at a tuition fees protest in London in 2010.
He and two officers were also accused of concocting a reason to falsely arrest the student.
Ott, 36, was found guilty of causing actual bodily harm at Southwark Crown Court. All three were cleared of perverting the course of justice.
Image caption Students staged protests across the UK in December 2010
Mr Horner, then aged 20, was trying to break free from a kettled area during the protest in Parliament Square, Westminster on 9 December when he was struck.
The Royal Holloway student was then arrested on suspicion of threatening to commit criminal damage.
Ott, from Rochester in Kent, PC Calvin Lindsay, 31, from east London, and PC Thomas Barnes, 31, from Kent, were accused of making up a reason to arrest Mr Horner after he was injured.
The protests saw riot police pelted with missiles including rocks and concrete blocks, and the statues in Parliament Square being daubed with graffiti, the court heard.
No further action was taken against Mr Horner.
PC Lindsay, from Leytonstone, and PC Barnes, from Greenhithe, and Ott have been on restricted duties during court proceedings.
Ott will be sentenced on Wednesday.In a close game between the top nations Switzerland and Finland, the Finns came out on top 6-4 after a goal in empty net with 3 seconds left. Even though winning is important, there are plenty of things that need to be improved, according to Kohonen:
You’ve just defeated Switzerland in a really close game, are you satisfied with the team’s performance?
We won the game which is the important part, but we have quite a lot to improve with our game. But we won the match, so I’m happy.
What do you need to work with before the next game?
The whole package. Switzerland is a good team but I don’t think we came up to our level today.
Many say that the Swiss have improved their game lately. Is that something that you’ve noticed?
Every country is improving, and so are we. So that’s not surprising.
Next game you face Estonia. How will you prepare for that game?
We’re going to discuss this game and close it up. Then tomorrow morning we’re going to watch some clips on how Estonia play.
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Join the Floorball Worldwide Facebook GroupPresident Trump apparently has a new name for North Korean President Kim Jung Un as the rouge leader pursues a nuclear-missile program -- “rocket man.”
“I spoke with President Moon of South Korea last night,” Trump tweeted early Sunday morning. “Asked him how Rocket Man is doing. Long gas lines forming in North Korea. Too bad!”
Kim has apparently conducted six nuclear bomb tests and numerous inter-continental missile launches in his attempt to affix a nuclear warhead on a rocket that could reach foreign soil.
Trump has threatened Kim about his pursuit of a nuclear arsenal in violation of international rule, with the United Nations Security Council earlier this month imposing more economic sanctions, including cutting off petroleum supplies.
Meanwhile, Trump has tried to get South Korean President Moon Jae-in and other allies in the region to pressure Kim into ending his pursuit of a nuclear weapon.
“Rocket Man” is a 1972 song sung by Elton John.The Walking Dead: The Complete Fifth Season DVD and Blu-ray sets are just around the corner, set to be released on Aug. 25. In addition to all 16 episodes, there are over 3 hours of extras including an insane amount of featurettes. Also included are a plethora of deleted scenes and commentary tracks, and we scoured those for the most interesting tidbits. Here are just some of the secrets from last season revealed through the extra scenes and commentaries.
DELETED SCENES
We already brought you an entire deleted scene of constables Rick and Michonne walking the wall and discussing what to do about their missing guns, but there are some other goodies as well, including:
• We get more insight into those at Grady Memorial Hospital, including a ride between police officers Bob Lamson and Amanda Shepherd as well as a scene in which Dawn has to decide what to do with an elderly patient at the hospital who refuses to be treated for a broken hip. Beth finally persuades Dawn to help the man instead of cutting him off … or worse.
• In a cut montage from the “Remember” episode, we see the new Alexandria arrivals heading out for their first day at work: Abraham going to work on the wall, Rosita arriving to assist Pete the creepy doctor, Maggie meeting with Deanna, and Eugene starting at the solar panels. Kind of a shame this got cut — it would have been nice to see right off the bat where all these people ended up.
• In one deleted scene from “Spend,” Abraham has trouble getting out of bed for work. “I’m having a real hard time pulling it together,” he tells Rosita. “I don’t know what the hell that’s about. All I know is I can’t picture stepping out behind those walls without my stomach dropping down and my nuts shooting up.” Rosita then gives him a pep talk about all the lives he saved: “This place needs you, and you need this place. And the fight’s outside.” It seems to do the job, although Abraham somehow manages to coax Rosita back to bed for sex, exclaiming that, “Work is a greedy whore and it can wait its turn.” (Does that count as a pep talk too?)
• Also in “Spend,” there’s a nice scene between Glenn and Eugene in the van after the former punched out Nicholas for being left in the revolving-door |
solidarity”: I use the word “sabotage.” As I detail in my book, the AFL-CIO has helped overthrow democratically-elected governments, such as in Guatemala in 1954; Brazil in 1964; and in Chile in 1973. They also supported dictators in countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, South Africa (a white dictatorship)—as well as dictators after the coups mentioned above–and supported challenges to progressive governments in the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Nicaragua, Venezuela. Tell me how these activities help labor organizations in those countries? In the Philippines, during the late 1980s, the largest affiliate of their ally in that country, worked with a death squad—I do not exaggerate; this is closely documented through my personal field research—against the progressive affiliate of the Kilusang Mayo Uno Labor Center.
Now, the AFL-CIO has gotten a lot better, and has even been helpful in a few limited cases since 1995. But they are still an affiliate of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a reactionary, US government-creased and financed organization that operates globally. Plus, over 90% of the AFL-CIO’s international work is funded by the US Government, and it was true under Obama as well as Bush.
And they never—in over 100 years—given an honest account of their overseas operations to their affiliated union members. So, these operations are done behind the backs, and without the knowledge of most trade unionists in the US; hell, they’re done without the knowledge of most union leaders, as well. Yet they act in the name of US workers. And the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center operates in over 60 countries around the world: why 60, why THESE 60, and for what purpose? They’ve never said.
The thing about labor imperialism is that it, obviously, hurts the workers that are being controlled; but it also hurts those in the country who are doing the controlling. If we’re going to change the world, we need workers globally to create, join together, and act on this larger vision; but if workers in the imperialist country don’t adopt those in the developing countries as “allies,” as “sisters and brothers,” and if they don’t work together, respectfully and equally, then they can’t get the boot off their own necks.
You are an eminent sociologist. In addition to your academic activities at the university, you are a member of several organizations such as Labor and Labor Movements, Collective Behavior and Social Movements, Global and Transnational Sociology Sections of the American Sociology Association, and an elected member of the Research Committee 44 from 2006 to 2010. Can you tell us about RC44’s missions?
I don’t know if I’m “eminent,” although I am prolific. Besides three books—you haven’t mentioned my first, which is titled “KMU: Building Genuine Trade Unionism in the Philippines, 1980-1994” (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1996)—I’ve published something like 11 peer-reviewed articles, plus over 200 articles for specialty journals, the general public and union and union-focused outlets, such as certain web sites. If anyone is interested, you can see my list of publications—with links to most articles—here.
RC 44 (Research Committee 44) of the International Sociological Association is comprised of sociologists who study labor from around the world. It doesn’t really have a “mission” or “missions,” but we are a network of researchers who share our writings and thinking among the RC, and we meet every two and four years at international gatherings. We try to support each other to advance the quality of our research, and to encourage the study of labor organizations around the globe. We think working people and their organizations are important.
Do not you think that in the face of the ultra-liberal offensive, the fighting of the labor union organizations around the world is diminishing or even disappearing? How do you explain it?
If you’re talking about the established labor unions fighting, especially in the Global North, I don’t see much of it. There might be a bit here, and a bit there, but it seems to be specifically located, in particular circumstances, in places where activists can mobilize members to demand their unions fight. It is not systematic, it is not determined. Many are afraid to fight, and are willing to collaborate to try to survive. The problem is that what’s the need for a union that won’t fight; hell, many members feel like “I can collaborate myself and not have to pay union dues!”
You can see more of this fighting in the Global South, but conditions are so much worse. The KMU of the Philippines has been fighting for 37 years—but what other option, other than surrender, do they have? There are unions fighting in countries such as Brazil and South Africa and in India, and workers fighting in China, in Vietnam, to build genuine unions. It’s actually broader than this: working people want to have power to control their lives. And working people around the world are trying to build unions that will help them live the lives they seek. Their situations are difficult, no doubt. But people keep trying—people want better lives, and often take huge risks to build organizations that will advance their interests.
We need unions—they are important. But they need to develop a vision that addresses the real issues of real working people around the world. And that vision, I argue, must be built on the principles of equality and solidarity. And that means we cannot limit ourselves to capitalism, cause capitalism cannot provide a good existence, much less jobs, for most people. Capitalism is literally killing life on the planet. It cannot be reformed; it must be superseded. But to do this, we have to not be afraid to look, to think, to discuss, to organize outside of the confines of capitalism; if we limit ourselves to the possibilities under capitalism, we are screwed. (I’m being polite: I need a word with the necessary understanding of the violence that is and will continue to be done to and against working people.)
But this also means we’ve got to reject the consumerism being shoved down our throats by capitalism—it’s more than just relations of production. I just spent a couple of months this summer teaching at a university in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. And there’s a lot of new construction being done, especially of apartment buildings—all over the city. But when you look at the visual representations that accompany many of them, its of Lexuses, BMWs, the finest liquors, the most expensive perfumes, it’s this global capitalist shit that gets shoved down our throats whenever we fly internationally.
The reality is, first, most Americans don’t live at this level of consumption, and yet the world cannot support everyone living at the level of even the standard that many Americans live at—we’d need 5 more planet Earth’s—and, of course, most people cannot live at this “elite” standard of consumption. We’ve got to reject this!
We’ve got to figure out how to live at a level where every person on the planet can have a good life. That cannot include chasing after the bourgeois.
In your opinion, if capitalism lives in the rhythm of crises and that this is in its very nature, do not labor union movements around the world also experience a crisis like capitalism?
The reality is that capitalism dominates much of the world. People need to pay attention, learn what’s really going on, and figure out with friends, workmates, associates, lovers, everyone that can get together, what they want to do to make a world for all of us, and then extending their connections across their country, their region, their continent, their globe and fight for this better world.
A big challenge: of course! But if we don’t do it, who’s going to do it for us? I’ll say one thing for certain: the “big boys and girls,” the elites and their lackies, are not going to do it for us. Our future is in our hands: do we act on it, or do we just roll over and go back to sleep?
But I will tell you one other thing: I’m focusing more and more on global climate change and the environment, and one thing that is becoming clear: if we don’t make major changes—and I’m talking MAJOR changes—by 2030, according to the best science today, then we will see the beginning of the extermination of humans, animals and most plants by the turn of the century (this means the year 2100). Whether that actually happens cannot yet be determined, but if current trends continue, it looks almost certain at this point in time.
In your work and research, you make concrete proposals, often based on a thorough study of labor union movements. In your opinion, what is the major lesson to be learned from the long struggle of the workers’ movement against the capitalist night?
I think the major lesson to be learned is that working people are not saints; there are wonderful people among us, and they are some, shall we say, not so wonderful. But when good people get together; get good, accurate information; and then decide to act on it, they can move mountains.
I’ll give you a personal example: I was in the Philippines in January and very early February, 1986. Marcos was the dictator, and he called a “snap” election to get the US off his back; word on the street was that he was going to reinstate martial law upon his re-election. I had traveled over much of the country, and I was visiting workers and labor leaders literally on the front line of the anti-Marcos resistance. We had many talks over my time there. None of these people that I talked with, no one, had any real hope of getting rid of Marcos in the foreseeable future; their goal was to mobilize as much resistance as possible, to slow him down, to build over future years to get rid of him. I left on February 5th, happy to get out of this boiling cauldron. People voted, election workers went to reporters and detailed the fraud and deceit they know of, the leaders of the Catholic Church—many who had previously supported Marcos—called their people out into the streets, the people responded, the military split, the people supported the “renegades,” and the US told Marcos he had to leave and offered him a place in Hawaii—Ferdinand Marcos left the Philippines on February 25, 1986–20 days after I had left. No one I talked with had even dreamed this could happen, much less that it would.
Now, let’s understand, this didn’t get pulled out of the air, like many people claimed. It built on years and years of political organizing by the left. Organizing in the slums, the schools, the unions, among Church organizations, etc. It didn’t “just happen.”
This potential gives me hope; the question is, can we mobilize it?
Is not the specificity of the struggle in every country in the world a handicap to the construction of a world labor front?
We have to build out of the conditions we face. It’s that simple. But we can travel, we can meet, we can talk about our values, what we’d like to see. There are many paths to take us to where we want to be. If we are determined to reach our destination, one that really “works” for people, we will get there. But we’ve got to start the journey now.
What is your look at the last US presidential election? How do you analyze the sociology of these elections with the duality between rural America that voted for Trump whom slogan is “American first” and urban America that voted for Hillary Clinton?
Personally, I’m pretty sick of talking about this last election. Hillary Clinton can be fairly called a war criminal. She’s a supporter of Wall Street. She was a terrible candidate, following Obama, who had done little or nothing for most people, and she said we’d keep doing what Obama did. She didn’t inspire people—she had nothing to offer. She also had no idea of what many Americans are going through: according to some research I’ve done and that I’m getting ready to submit for publication, those economically in the bottom 20% of our population have only seen their incomes decline in absolute terms since 1973;those in the 21st-40th percentiles have seen their incomes grow by less than 10% over a 40 year period (1973-2013);and those in the 41st-60th have seen their incomes grow by little over 28% over 40 years: in other words, the bottom 60% of our population has either lost income or seen their incomes grow by less than 1% a year over this period. She did not address this.
Bernie Sanders did address the situation of people, and he earned tremendous support. However, Clinton’s people in the Democratic National Committee rigged the game so he couldn’t win, and he didn’t.
That leaves Trump. I think everything bad that you’ve heard about Trump is true. But the thing he did successfully do is recognize the suffering that has been going on over the last 40 years—and he claimed he would “solve” that problem. He cannot—it’s a structural problem, not a cyclical one that can be fixed. But he convinced people that were hurting, and hurting seriously, that he was on their side, that he had solutions, that he would solve their problems. (I think the Easter Bunny would have been a better choice.) But within our limited and undemocratic electoral system in the US, enough people thought he could solve their problems, and they voted for him. And Americans and everyone else in the world is going to have to deal with this terribly inadequate man for the next four years, and eight if we’re not careful.
But where was the AFL-CIO? No plan, no vision, just elect another corporate Democrat. I’ve seen polls that suggest the majority of union voters didn’t buy this. Clearly, we need a new type of labor movement in the USA.
Your course as an activist against the racism came during your incorporation in the US Marines. Does the racism that you have fought as a military still exist in the US army?
I have no doubt that racism still exists throughout the US military, but I don’t have any direct experience. I know from Iraq and Afghanistan veterans of the extreme racism projected on people of those societies. In some ways, the military has dealt with intra-organization racism better than other parts of US society. Remember this, however: their mission is not social change or making life better for people: it’s to kill and destroy the “enemy,” as defined by governmental leaders and the mainstream media. They don’t want racism to get in the way of accomplishing their mission.
Interview realized by Mohsen Abdelmoumen
Who is Dr. Kim Scipes?
Dr. Kim Scipes is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Purdue University Northwest, a regional campus of Purdue University, in Westville, Indiana. He is a member of the American Sociological Association, with memberships in the Labor and Labor Movements, Collective Behavior and Social Movements, and Global and Transnational Sociology sections. Further, Dr. Scipes is a long-time member of RC 44, the Research Committee on Labor, of the International Sociological Association, and was elected and served on the Board of RC 44 from 2006-10. He is a member of the National Writers Union, and a long-time activist in the US labor movement.
Dr. Scipes has been writing on Labor-related issues primarily since 1984, although He has written on a number of connected issues as well. His 200+ articles have been published in the United States, and in 14 other countries–in hard copy, in hard copy and the Internet, and just on the Internet. His writing has included everything from theoretical writings to description/analysis to opinion pieces in local newspapers.
He has traveled around the world, and have done research in the Philippines, Venezuela, and South Africa. He has traveled extensively around Western Europe, particularly in England, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Germany.
Dr. Scipes has a Master’s Degree in Development Studies from The Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, The Netherlands (1991), and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2003).
He has published three books: KMU: Building Genuine Trade Unionism in the Philippines, 1980-1994 (New Day Publishers, 1996) ; AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage? (Lexington Books, 2010) ; Building Global Labor Solidarity in a Time of Accelerating Globalization (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).UX designs, if done right, provide competitive advantages that help you boost your ROI. However, the term is overused and often leave designers overwhelmed. You should therefore understand the concept clearly, instead of following the UX best practices blindly and determine when you need to adhere to them and when to close your eyes.
User experience or UX is perhaps one of the most sought-after and at the same time daunting term for web designers. The advantages of UX design are numerous and too lucrative to overlook, the likes of which range from improved website performance and credibility to reduced development cost and increased exposure. But at the same time, the term is daunting for many designers.
For one thing, the term is overused. Besides, designers usually feel overwhelmed with the idea that their user experience fail to deliver what was promised. Worst still, some people makes the whole concept confusing especially when it comes to UX best practice. But what are these best practices? Is it a set of web design techniques that are supposed to make your website more effective? Or maybe they are the techniques used by “someone” who have been successful with their web design experiment? But if it is so, aren’t you just following someone blindly without even understanding the whole UX design concept and principles?
Therefore, it is sometime best to close your eyes and ignore whatever they tell you about UX best practices. That said, you need to adhere to them at times as well.
Do You Really Need to Follow UX Best Practice?
More often than not you will find many brands breaking the web design conventions related to user experience and still getting the desired results. For example, in one of their studies the Nielsen Norman Group shows how Bucknell University broke the UX best practice with its unconventional responsive redesign and yet caught users’ attention effectively, creating a positive impression about the university’s academic quality.
bucknell university ux best practice
This is not a standalone example. There are many other instances where brands mercilessly break best practices without even affecting their bottom lines.
Another example is from eCommerce websites. The UX best practices for online stores is to display 12 to 20 products per page. However, leading eCommerce brands like Amazon and Etsy.com are extending that number to something between 16 and 45 products per page. In terms of UX best practice, they are perhaps not doing it right, but when it comes to sales and revenues you can hardly question these brands.
Moreover, if best practices are a set of established techniques that are meant to make your business website more effective then all these popular online stores should have been replicas of each other. But that, as we all know, isn’t the case. While some brands showcase product reviews and ratings others don’t. Again, some sites are opting for infinity scrolling and others still follow above the fold. So what’s going on here? And what should you do?
Ignorance is the best policy, well sometimes…
The general belief is that UX designers should adhere to best practices. But there is more to it. First thing first, you need to understand if the best practice is of any value to your users instead of following it blindly. Certain things that works in one industry may not work for another. In addition, there are many other reasons why best practices don’t always work.
You Can’t Always Predict What Users Will Do
One major issue with UX is that users at times say something and do something else. For examples, studies indicate that users now have a multi-tab mania i.e. opening items in new tabs especially when performing comparison shopping. This is one of the reasons behind the best practice of opening external links in new tabs. But then not all users are in favor of it. According to an A/B test conducted by Etsy, 70 percent more people left the website when product page opened in a new tab.
These UX best practices are usually established by asking people what they would like to see in a website. But then you cannot always depend on such research. Remember the legendary New Coke failure, a market research mistake due to which Coca-Cola lost millions of dollars? Walmart too lost $1.85 billion in sales by listening to what their customers say.
As one of the most trusted Utah web design service providers, we often tell our clients not to blindly believe a survey when it comes to best practices. Users often make false predictions, albeit confident regarding their future behavior. This is more commonplace when the design is new and unfamiliar as the difference between imagining something and using it in real is typically huge. Worst still, human preferences are mostly unstable.
That said, we are not asking you to discard what your customers are saying, but it is important to know how to interpret what they are saying.
When to Adhere to UX Best Practices
Despite what we have said so far, there is no denying that UX best practices deliver a repeatable process with which customers are already familiar with. This allows businesses to find a faster, better, flexible, and cheaper solution to cater to their user needs. Incorporate good UX best practices therefore necessary especially when it comes to building a website. People love to see elements that they are familiar and comfortable to interact with.
But sometimes you also need to know how to break the rules and when to break the rules, especially when building a product. Why? Because as we have mentioned, users cannot always imagine exactly how they will use a product until and unless they start using it in real life. One example would that be of the now popular Aeron office chairs. While they received really poor ratings during their early tests when the product wasn’t completely ready, they became the bestselling and iconic chairs in the world of office furniture.
Look Beyond Design Trends
the atlantic hamburger menu ux best practice
A design trend is just a trend. It’s not a best practice and it is more likely to be replaced by something else tomorrow. The hamburger menu, for example is a popular design trend for 2015-16. More and more designers are hiding and simplifying their navigation under a hamburger menu to provide a better user experience on mobile devices. However, industry experts like the Nielsen Norman Group, TechCrunch, and The Atlantic etc. have voted against it, stating that it is UX-antipattern.
Therefore you cannot call a hamburger menu a best practice. In contrast, having the word “Menu” in your website is at times a better option. This study indicates that the word “Menu” generates 20 percent more clicks by unique visitors compared to hamburger menus.
Similarly, parallax scrolling is another major design trend gaining much momentum in the recent years. But again, you cannot call it a best practice as it often effects users negatively as people complained of usability issues and experiencing motion sickness with parallax websites. Mobile users too complained of higher loading time caused by the heavy use of JavaScript.
Conclusion
The goal is to be responsible when implementing UX best practices. Be updated about the current trends and what’s driving them, but also remember that they could be a passing fad. Will your users really find it valuable? Will the change enhance their experience and interaction with your brand? Think from user engagement point of view and still if you think it is worth your time and effort, just go ahead.Image caption Manuel Castells studies the links between the internet and protest movements
Prof Manuel Castells is regarded as one of the most-cited sociologists in the world. When most of us were still struggling to connect our modems in the 1990s, the Spanish academic was documenting the rise of the network society and studying the interaction between internet use, counter-culture, urban protest movements and personal identity.
Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason interviewed Prof Castells in front of an audience at The London School of Economics for BBC Radio 4's Analysis about his latest book Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis.
Prof Castells suggests we may be about to see the emergence of a new kind of capitalism, with businesses growing out of the counter-cultures of the last 20 years. Here are some extracts from their conversation.
The rise of new economic cultures
People are reversing the notion: what is important in their life cannot be bought, in most cases Prof Manuel Castells
"When I mention this alternative economic culture, it's a combination of two things.
"A number of people have been doing this for quite a while already because they don't agree with the meaninglessness of their lives. Now there is something else - it's the legion of consumers who cannot consume.
"And, therefore, since they do not consume - they don't have the money, they don't have the credit, they don't have anything - then they try at least to make sense of their lives doing something different.
"So, it's because of needs and because of values - the two things together - that's why it's expanding."
Paul Mason: You write that economies are cultural - can you expand on that?
"If we want to work to make money, to consume, it's because we believe that by buying a new car or by buying a new television or a bigger flat, we are going to be happier. This is a particular form of culture.
"On the contrary... people are reversing the notion: what is important in their life cannot be bought, in most cases. But they don't have the choice anymore because they are already trapped in a machine.
"What happens when the machine is not working anymore? People say, 'well I am really stupid. I am running all the time for nonsense'."
Paul Mason: How big is this culture change?
"It is fundamental because it triggers a crisis of trust in the two big powers of our world: the political system and the financial system.
Image caption Occupy protests have made a mark in cities all over the world
People don't trust where they put their money and they don't trust those who they delegate in terms of their vote.
"It's a dramatic crisis of trust and if there is no trust, there is no society.
"What we are not going to see is the economic collapse per se because societies cannot work in a social vacuum. If the economic institutions don't work, if the financial institutions don't work, the power relations that exist in society change the financial system in ways favoured to the financial system and it doesn't collapse. People collapse, not the financial system.
During the crisis one third of Barcelona families lent money, without interest, to people who are not in their family Prof Manuel Castells
"The notion is the banks are going to be alright, we are not going to be alright. So there is a cultural change. A big one. Total distrust in the institutions of finance and politics.
"Some people start already living differently as they can - some because they want alternative ways of life, others because they don't have any other choice.
"What I refer to is about the observation of one of my latest studies on people who have decided not to wait for the revolution - to start living differently - meaning the expansion of what I call in a technical term 'non-capitalist practices'.
"They are economic practices but they don't have a for-profit motivation - such as barter networks; such as social currencies; co-operatives; self-management; agricultural networks; helping each other simply in terms of wanting to be together; networks of providing services for free to others in the expectation that someone will also provide to you. All this exists and it's expanding throughout the world."
Paul Mason: 97% of people you surveyed [in Catalonia] have engaged in non-capitalist economic activity.
"Well, it's about 30-40,000 who are engaged quite fully in alternative forms of life. And I differentiate between people who consciously organise their lives around alternative values, with people who live normal lives but at the same time they look in many, many aspects to live differently.
"For instance, during the crisis, one third of Barcelona families lent money, without interest, to people who are not in their family."
What is the Network Society?
All the studies on the internet show that people who are more social on the internet are also more social face-to-face Prof Manuel Castells
"It's a society where the main activities in which people are engaged are organised fundamentally in networks, rather than in vertical organisations.
"The difference is very simple - network technologies. It's not the same thing to be constantly interactive at the speed of light than just simply have a network of friends and people.
"So all networks exist, but the connection between everything and everything - be it financial markets, politics, culture, media, communications, etc - that's new because of the new digital technologies."
Paul Mason: So we live in a network society. Could we reverse out of a network society?
"Can we reverse to a pre-electricity world? It's the same thing. No we can't.
"Although many people now are saying 'well why we don't start all over again?' It's a huge movement called the de-growth movement. Some people would try to go to different forms of communal organisation, etc.
Image caption Prof Castells says it is impossible to reverse the trend of the networked society
"However, the interesting thing is for the people to organise and debate and mobilise for de-growth and communalism, they have to use the internet.
"We live in a culture of not virtual reality, but real virtuality because our virtuality - meaning the internet networks - are a fundamental part of our reality.
"All the studies on the internet show that people who are more social on the internet are also more social face-to-face."
Paul Mason: You have these diverse groups, they protest against subject A today, and subject B tomorrow, and they play World of Warcraft at night - but they're not going to achieve what Castro and Guevara achieved, are they?
"The impact on the political institutions is almost negligible because the political institutions are impervious to change. But if you look at what's happening in terms of the consciousness... you have things like the huge debate of social inequality that didn't exist three years ago.
"In terms of demonstrating, the system is much stronger than the embryos of the movement... you reach the minds of the people through a process of communication, and this process of communication is today fundamentally through the internet and debating.
"It's a long process from the minds of the people to the institutions of society. Let's take an historical example: toward the end of the 19th Century in Europe, there were basically the Conservatives and the Liberals, right and left.
"But then something happened - industrialisation, working class movements, new ideologies and new movements started. All this was not in the political system. It took 20 to 30 years, then you have the socialists and then the split from the socialists... and the liberals disappear basically.
"It will change politics, but not through organised forms of politics in the same way. Why? Because networks are different and networks don't need hierarchical organisations."
Where will it end?
With this climate what happens is that more and more our societies will become ungovernable and, therefore, we can have all kinds of phenomenon - some of them very dangerous Prof Manuel Castells
"All this together is not going to be a great electoral coalition, is not going to be any new party, any new anything. It's simply society against the state and against the financial institutions - not against capitalism, by the way - against financial institutions, which is different.
"With this climate what happens is that more and more our societies will become ungovernable and, therefore, we can have all kinds of phenomenon - some of them very dangerous.
"Of course we'll see many expressions of alternative forms of politics which will escape the mainstream traditional political institutions, and some of them, of course, going back and trying to have a nationalistic, primitive community to attack everybody and to ultimately build a commune cut off from the world and oppress their own people.
"But what happens in any process of disorganised, chaotic social change, there are all these phenomena co-existing and the way they play out, one against the other, will depend ultimately if the political institutions open up enough channels of participation for the energy that exists in society for change that could overcome the resistance of the dark forces that exist in all societies."
Paul Mason interviewed Prof Manuel Castells for BBC Radio 4's Analysis. You can hear the full interview via the Radio 4 website or via the Analysis download.Great news! You might soon be able to purchase and drink beer that's brewed with (totally clean, totally safe) bacteria swabbed from a woman's vagina, because why bro out and drink normal beer when you could man up and drink beer that makes you stop and think, after each refreshing sip, about vaginal bacteria?
YouTube
In order to be as douchey as possible, the company behind the vagina beer refers to itself as the Order of Yoni ("yoni" is Sanskrit for "vagina or womb"). And so as not to taint the mouths of noble, beer-drinking men with vaginal bacteria from a regular old frumpy woman who probably wears khakis and farts or whatever, the Order of Yoni is strictly using vaginal bacteria from a super-hot Czech model, who apparently "possesses all of the instincts which [they] wanted to frame" in their vagina beer. From the detailed descriptions on the Order of Yoni's website, and from watching the promo video about six times, it's still unclear what exactly they mean by "instincts."
YouTube
But at least you'll know when, exactly, someone stuck a swab up this woman's vagina to grab some bacteria to be used in beer brewing, because each bottle will be dated with the date she was swabbed for that particular batch.
If you're like me, sitting there, staring at your screen wondering, Why? WHY? I'll try to explain using the Order of Yoni's words. Let's first set the scene:
Imagine woman of your dreams, your object of desire. Her charm, her sensuality, her passion… Try her taste, feel her smell, hear her voice… Imagine her massaging you passionately and whispering into your ear everything you want...
OK sweet. You imagining that? Let's move forward:
Now free your fantasies and imagine that with a magic wand you can close it in one bottle of beer.
Far fetched, I know, but try to stick with me here:
Imagine the beer which every sip is a randez-vous with this hot woman of your dreams… she hugs you and kiss you gently, looking straight into your eyes… How much would you give for that beer?
Wow! Super stuff. Why interact with a woman IRL when you could just drink beer that contains microscopic particles that were once inside of a woman you'll never meet? Truly a spectacular idea that does not at all make me want to throw my computer across the room.
If you're just itching to buy this product immediately, sorry! No dice. The Order of Yoni is currently seeking 150,000 euros of funding on Indiegogo in order to create and distribute their product. It costs money to swab all that bacteria, and then cleanse and harvest it in a lab before sending it off to a brewery. Also, someone's gotta pay that model for her time (and secretions). If you've got deep pockets for the vagina beer industry and are dying to see this product on the shelves, you could consider donating 10,000 euros (or $11,320.90) and claim the top fundraising reward — 60 bottles of vagina beer, made with YOUR GIRLFRIEND'S vaginal bacteria! But there is a small catch. If you claim this perk, you may have to swing by a gynecologist in Poland or Germany, you know, for the bacteria harvesting.
So far, in the six days their campaign has been up on Indiegogo, the Order of Yoni has raised 11 euros from two anonymous donors. The lack of enthusiasm toward funding this product could be caused by any number of things. Maybe people just don't really care to drink vagina beer? Maybe people are sure this is a total hoax or PR stunt (which, TBH, would not be surprising). Or maybe people have been brewing vagina beer at home with their home brewing kits and don't need to buy it from a distributor. Whatever the reason, things aren't looking great for the Order of Yoni. What a shame.
Follow Hannah on Twitter.OHE van derails near Dantewada, Naxal hand suspected
India
oi-Vikas
By Vikas
An Over Head Equipment (OHE) van has derailed near Bhansi in Chhatisgarh's Dantewada region. The Naxals are suspected to be behind the incident which took place on Monday.
No one was injured in the incident.
Some parts of the railway track were found to be uprooted between Kamaloor and Kuper which has led the police to a suspicion that this could be the handiwork of the Naxals. Dantewada is also a Naxal infested region.
Reports say that walky-talkies and mobile phones of the railway officials were also snatched by Naxals.
On Sunday, four wagons of a goods train derailed near Hardattpur railway station in Uttar Pradesh. No one was injured in the incident.
On last Tuesday (Aug 29), Mumbai bound Duronto Express derailed as the rains washed away parts of the tracks in Maharashtra's Titwala district. Former minister of railways Suresh Prabhu had on August 23 offered to resign following a number of train derailment incidents. There were two major derailments in August.
OneIndia NewsVictory lap? Why not? The time for talking officially expired at 11:30 ET, when the Senate finally took up the floor vote for the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. After Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley hailed Gorsuch as an independent-minded jurist, a “judge’s judge” who is “his own man,” he requested a quorum call for the floor vote. Dick Durbin offered to surrender the remainder of the Democratic time for debate, a rare gracious moment in this fight, as Mike Pence personally presided over the vote.
Remarkably, the vote started almost exactly on schedule, but that was the only mild surprise — although it took a rather long time to complete the vote. The confirmation vote hit the 51-vote mark at 11:43 with Rand Paul’s vote, making it at that moment 51-20. Joe Donnelly, Joe Manchin, and Heidi Heitkamp crossed over to support Gorsuch, as pledged. Colorado’s Michael Bennet voted against his state’s favored son — again, as pledged, although Bennet opposed the filibuster. The final vote was 54-45.
(Update, 12:39 – The Senate has not posted the roll call, but one Senator missed the vote. It’s likely Sen. Johnny Isakson, who’s been recovering from |
sure if that's been written off already though.I think the $100 million is the only capitalized debt however, so that might be the only extra part someone who buys them would have to pay.Well, I mean, Saints Row 3 was quite successful.They just don't have the money to try and turn themselves around anymore.The publishers who take up their brands and studios in the liquidation sale will probably be quite happy.There are three commonly-used techniques for collecting semen: use of an artificial vagina, digital manipulation, and electroejaculation. The technique used depends on the species being collected and the disposition of the individual male. The Artificial Vagina Artificial vaginas (AV's to the initiated) are used to collect semen from many species, most prominently cattle and horses, but also sheep, goats, rabbits and even cats. Prerequisites to use of an AV are that the male be conscious, not significantly frightened of people, and more interested in ejaculating than in killing humans. An AV uses thermal and mechanical stimulation to stimulate ejaculation. As shown in the image to the right, an AV is composed of a tube with an outer rubber lining that will hold water, into which is placed an inner liner that is lubricated just prior to use. The outer liner is filled and pressurized somewhat with water at 42-48 degrees Celsius. Shown below are AVs designed for use with bulls (bottom) and rabbits (top). The apparatus in the middle is a type of AV, usually called a director cone, which is used to collect semen from dogs. To collect semen, the male is allowed to mount and the penis is diverted into the AV where he ejaculates. It is best to allow the male to thrust into the AV rather than trying to slide the AV onto the male's penis. What the male mounts depends on his species and temperment. Females can be used, but unless they are in estrus, they rarely enjoy participating in the process, which can easily lead to injury of any and all of those involved. Another problem with using a female as a teaser is that if you miss with the AV, the female could be bred or possibly transmit venereal disease to the male. For collecting semen from bulls, a trained steer is usually used. In the case of stallions, a phantom ("dummy") is a popular choice for a mount. Digital Manipulation Many males can be induced to ejaculate by applying pressure and massage to the penis. After the male becomes aroused, a director cone of some type, attached to a collection tube, is slipped over the penis to facilitate harvesting the semen. This technique is commonly used for collecting semen from pigs and dogs. An initial training period can be helpful, and having a female in estrus to arouse the male often is useful, particularly when the male is shy. Another type of message used occasionally with bulls is to stroke the ampullae (terminal vas deferens), seminal vesicles and prostate gland through the wall of the rectum; in almost all cases, the bull must be restrained standing in a chute and sedated to allow relaxation and extrusion of the penis. In conjunction with a urethral catether, one can obtain a sterile ejaculate using this technique. Semen is collected routinely from chickens and turkeys using a form of digital manipulation. Electroejaculation Electroejaculation involves applying a series of short, low-voltage pulses of current to the pelvic nerves which are involved in the ejaculatory response. It sounds like an extremely unpleasant experience, but doesn't seem to cause much distress in bulls (although they do need to be securely restrained), and is conducted under anesthesia in many species. Electroejaculation can be used with almost any mammal. With few exceptions, electroejaculation is the only technique useful for collecting semen from wild animals, in which case the male is anesthetized prior to the procedure. Another advantage of electroejaculation is that it does not require a mount animal, and can be applied in the field using a battery-powered unit. Finally, electroejaculation can be used to obtain semen from animals that are physically incabable of mounting due to musculoskeletal disease or injury. It is used for collecting semen from quadrapelegic or parapelegic men who desire a child but cannot ejaculate due to spinal cord injury. With bulls, where there is abundant experience collecting semen by both artificial vagina and electroejaculation, the samples collected using an electroejaculator usually have a larger volume (due to excessive accessory gland secretion) and a lower number of sperm. Three pieces of equipment are required for electroejaculation. The electroejaculator itself is a power supply with rheostats to control the amplitude of the delivered current and lots of circuitry to prevent accidental electrocution. Second, one needs a collection tube, usually attached to a latex rubber cone ("loving cup") in which to collect the semen. Finally, the pulses of current are applied through an electroejaculator probe. The probe is inserted into the rectum such that the electrodes lie within the pelvic cavity. Older probes had circular electrodes, which often caused undesirable muscle contractions; probes with parallel electrodes on one side minimize this problem. Three probes are shown below - the upper one is a commercial product for bulls and the lower probes were hand-made for use with small leopards (middle) and ferrets (bottom). Successful electroejaculation of an animal demands skill. It is not simply a matter of punching buttons and turning knobs, but requires finesse in determining the proper timing and amplitude of pulses to apply to a given male.I used to think that my ideal job (after owning that little dive shop on the beach in Sipidan) would be to work in an animal sanctuary. Maybe orang-utans, or baby tigers or something cute and endangered and essentially a job where I’d be “doing good”. Now I’m not so sure I could hack it. Case in point: Donut the Kitten.
I arrived at Lumba Lumba dive centre, on Monday, fresh from the Banda Aceh ferry, and ready to dive. The centre is perched on a beach on the most northern tip of Indonesia, on a tiny island called Pulau Weh. The beach is also home to a handful of families, each with their own “cafe” serving what tourists and backpackers there are with home-made curries and Nasi Goreng. And with small settlements like this come semi-stray dogs and cats. If you don’t feed them, we’re told, they’ll not pester you. Some are skinny, some look like they get the pickings of the rubbish each evening. I managed to resist the urge to fatten up the dogs. mainly because the food was so bloody good I didn’t want to share any.
Tuesday
On Tuesday afternoon, after returning from a dive we were sitting at the front of the dive centre, drying off in the sun, munching on donuts from the local supplier (Mama Donut is a local entrepreneur who bakes the most amazing donuts, fritters, steamed cakes and fried tempe, and sells them to hungry divers on the beach, all of the princely sum of about 20p each; they’re worth 10 times more, believe me).
While we were blissing out in the sugarfest, a tiny little black bundle crawls up to our feet and makes a strange noise. It’s a kitten. A very scrawny, scruffy, feral kitten. She’s a bag of bones, and looks like she needs to grow into her ears. And put on about five times her own body weight. She has a tiny squeal like a cheetah cub calling it’s mother, but about as loud as a mosquito. She must be less than three months old, and she’s done amazingly well to get to that age. She’s the size of my flip flop, and she’s at my feet shouting at me, or at least trying to. She’s tiny, feisty and the cutest, skinniest, most vulnerable thing I’ve seen. I give her a stroke behind the ears, and she closes her eyes. I’m smitten.
Now, she looks far too young to be without a mother, and probably should still be suckling. Worryingly, she doesn’t seem to have been taught how to hunt either; she doesn’t pounce on flies like other beach cats we’ve seen. Her strategy seems to be: hang around these tourists and they’ll feed me.
That strategy seems to work, at least partly when we move from our seats, and she follows us, hanging around my feet, crying that miniscule and irresistible mew. She even rubs her head against our ankles, like my own cats at home when I come in from work, and they tell me they’re pleased to see me (but please will you feed us now?).
She’s all alone. No mother, no skills, just those big ears, little voice and cuteness.
Wednesday
She must have hung around the dive centre that night, as the following morning at breakfast, she decided to show up and mew at everyone’s feet. Amazed she survived the night, we sneakily poured some Carnation milk into an upturned shell, and she lapped it up eagerly. Once that was gone, and she’d licked the shell dry, she then got out her tiny needle claws, and proceeded to climb up a human leg, and curl up on a nice warm lap, as if she’d been invited. Two minutes later she was zoned-out, on an evaporated milk-high, and happily fell asleep.
That afternoon she was back again after a dive, hanging around us as we purchased Mama Donut’s latest batch. With that little ultra-persuasive cry, and her sheer cuteness and skinny vulnerability, she had me. I fed her a donut; she almost took my finger off. She scoffed a five massive kitten-mouthfuls, then happily crawled into my lap, and zoned out again on the sugar.
We named her Donut.
She followed us everywhere around the dive centre, although mainly, I admit, for the chance of food. She almost broke my heart when I went back to my bungalow, and she followed me, around the back of the centre, across the bridge, and when I walked up the steep path, she stood at the bottom, unable to follow, and shouted after me. I would have picked her up and taken her with me if I could.
Donut likes a warm lap; not too fussy whose. She likes being stroked on the top of her head, and behind her ears. You can feel her skull through her fur. She fits in the palm of my hand – but you can feel her ribcage when she’s there.
Thursday
She was back Thursday morning, and got some more Carnation out of an upturned sea shell, before settling on a lap again, quite happily, as if she’d been there all along. She came back again in the afternoon after our dive, shouting as usual, and rubbing against ankles, but we didn’t have anything to feed her. I told her when Mama Donut came, I’d get her a special one.
In the afternoon, the guys from the dive centre were trying to scuttle an old fishing boat out in the bay, which involved a lot of physical effort, some logs, and acquired help from locals. Donut came to watch. She was getting around people’s feet, so I picked her up, and we sat down on a bench facing the sea. She curled up on my lap and fell asleep, with help from some behind-the-ear strokes. I was very content. I think she was too.
After a while, just as the boat was about to slide in to the water, Donut and I got up and wandered over to see the fruit of the labour. The local men who’d come to help started to move away, and probably thinking they would give her food, Donut bounded after them, in that enthusiastic kitten way, up the road in between their feet, looking up at them innocently, expectantly, waiting for something.
She disappeared around the corner and I didn’t see her again.
After dinner I came back with some noodles for her in a napkin, but she wasn’t around. She’d left the dive centre, and our accommodating laps, for the promise of food with some other people. And I tried to resist the urge to look for her whenever I was down at the dive centre, looked around under the benches where she would hide, but she’d vanished.
So why am I a big softie?
Now, my two cats at home are house cats. I’m very attached to them. They’ve travelled the Atlantic with me and I’m very protective of them. They’re house cats because I got them when I lived on the 27th floor in Manhattan, but if I’m honest, if they were allowed out, I’d be a nervous wreck (there are arguments both for and against house cats).
I used to cry at the end of each episode of the Littlest Hobo, so I’m not really any good with keeping my emotions in check when it comes to animals. It goes back to my childhood when my Gran had to put down her dog, though to having my own Spaniel put to sleep when I was eighteen. I was more traumatised by that than I was when my old aunt died a week later. I sobbed when Two Socks got shot in Dances with Wolves. I cried when my favourite fish died (I was 24).
I have an attachment disorder, quite obviously. I’d love to work in that animal sanctuary, but I know I just wouldn’t be able to release them into the wild afterwards – I get far too attached. It helps if they’re cute, innocent and vulnerable, and show affection towards me. Even if it is just for food. I can’t switch from “this is emotionally beneficial to me right now” to “this is in their best interests in the long run”. I need to work on that.
Friday
So, when Donut didn’t turn up for breakfast on Friday morning I tried to put her put of my mind. Despite having no mother, being a bag of bones, and having no cat skills at all, she’ll be fine, I told myself. She’s only been gone overnight, for god’s sake. And anyway, how many millions of cats are in the same situation? Survival of the fittest, I told myself. It’s Nature’s way.
Due to local law, we didn’t dive Friday morning, so the group decided to walk to the nearest village – Iboih – for some cultural experience and coffee. We walked the 1km, fairly busy road, in hot mid-morning sun (it’s true what they say about mad dogs, then), past the hospital, police station, and what we presumed was the post office, passing homes in various states of disrepair and grandeur. We stopped for photos, and enjoyed the walk – jalang jalang as it’s expressed in Bahasa.
As we entered the village of about 10 huts, each serving various types of refreshment, petrol, or groceries, a small black bundle crossed the road ahead of us.
It was Donut.
She came over to us and mewed at our feet in that familiar way, and all of us were amazed to see her, still skinny, still feisty, and a kilometre away from the dive centre, along a main road, in 37 degrees of sun. How she’d managed to get here we still don’t know, but it was her alright. She rubbed up against ankles and she got lots of strokes from us, and as we walked on she followed us for a while, shouting as usual, but then latched on to a nearby group of people instead, looking for scraps, seeing what she can scavenge. We went for a coffee and she disappeared.
So I might not be one who can bear the thought of my own two cats going out into the deepest city and fending off foxes, or finding their way home, but I’m pretty sure that Donut’s going to be fine. She’s got some fight for a wee thing.Patricia F. Fitzpatrick Dimond Ph.D. Technical Editor of Clinical OMICs President of BioInsight Communications
New crop of companies are adding to the political debate and also providing clinical evidence.
In one of the only U.S. clinical trials testing the medicinal properties of inhaled Cannabis sativa, results confirmed that pot was effective in reducing muscle spasms associated with multiple sclerosis and pain caused by certain neurological injuries or illnesses. The trial, sponsored by the California-funded Center for Medical Cannabis Research at the University of California, San Diego, enrolled participants suffering from multiple sclerosis, AIDS, or diabetes along with healthy volunteers injected with a chili pepper substance to induce pain. They were randomly assigned to receive cigarettes filled with marijuana.
The results were comparable to the percentage of people who experience relief after taking other pain medications. “This is the first step in approaching the [FDA], which has invested absolutely nothing in providing scientific data to resolve the debate,” said state Senator Mark Leno (D. San Francisco).
The U.S. Government spent heavily on the first approved cannabis-based drug, Marinol®, back in 1985. The drug was developed by Unimed, now a subsidiary of Solvay Pharmaceuticals. FDA also approved Valeant Pharmaceuticals’ Cesamet the same year. Both drugs, however, are synthetic versions of one active marijuana constituent, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (ΔTHC.)
The FDA sanctioned Marinol to treat nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy in patients who do not respond adequately to conventional medications as well as appetite loss associated with weight loss in AIDS patients. Cesamet, developed as an antiemetic and an adjunct analgesic for neuropathic pain, was not marketed in the U.S. until 2006. It is also approved for use in treatment of anorexia and weight loss in patients with AIDS.
The distinction between inhaled Cannabis sativa and an approved pharmaceutical hinged, at the time of the drugs’ approval, on separating the psychoactive properties of some of marijuana’s constituents and the medicinal properties of others. A 1999 report commissioned by the The White House Office of National Drug Control stated that “marijuana is not a completely benign substance. It is a powerful drug with a variety of effects.
“However, the harmful effects to individuals from the perspective of possible medical use of marijuana are not necessarily the same as the harmful physical effects of drug abuse. Although marijuana smoke delivers THC and other cannabinoids to the body, it also delivers harmful substances, including most of those found in tobacco smoke. In addition, plants contain a variable mixture of biologically active compounds and cannot be expected to provide a precisely defined drug effect.”
The report went on to conclude that “the future of cannabinoid drugs lies not in smoked marijuana but in chemically defined drugs that act on the cannabinoid systems that are a natural component of human physiology.” The White House commissioned the 267-page report shortly after voters in California passed the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, which legalized the medical use of cannabis under state law.
And on March 18 of this year, GW Pharmaceuticals said that Sativex, its oral mucosal cannabinoid spray, should be approved in the U.K. and Spain soon. Both countries concluded that there are no major quality, safety, or efficacy issues remaining to be resolved. Details about final wording on the patient information leaflet is reportedly all that is left to be ironed out.
A few days later, the company announced Phase IIb results of Sativex in patients with advanced cancer who experience inadequate analgesia during optimized chronic opioid therapy. The trial recruited a total of 360 patients in 14 countries in North America, Europe, Latin America, and South Africa and evaluated three dose ranges. Sativex produced statistically significant differences from placebo in pain scores, supporting advancement into Phase III, according to the company.
Beyond Pharmaceuticalization
The emergence of public companies pursuing the development of legalized cannabis products may provide a new crop of useful drugs. On March 24, 2009, Medical Marijuana became the first public corporation solely based on medical marijuana. Bruce Perlowin, the company’s CEO, established the firm as a step toward legitimizing the industry after decades of advocating the benefits of legalizing medical marijuana.
Richard Cowan, Cannabis Science’s CFO, noted that the segment got another boost on May 24 of this year when 15 members of Congress led by U.S. Representative Barney Frank (D. MA) urged the Treasury Department to set rules that encourage banks to provide financial services to medical marijuana clinics, which they consider lawful businesses. “This is just one more important step toward a realistic federal policy on medical marijuana,” Cowan noted.
A policy that would assure banks that they won’t be targeted for doing business with companies that distribute medical marijuana, would definitely benefit Cannabis Sciences as it buys up experienced growers. On May 24, the company acquired RockBrook, a fully licensed dispensary providing patients in Colorado with medical marijuana as well an experienced grower of medical cannabis in accordance with state laws.
Cannabis Science used to be Gulf Onshore and changed its name after acquiring Cannex Therapeutics. The company is developing products both with and without psychoactive properties to treat disease and the symptoms of disease as well as for general health maintenance. It is looking to partner IND filing and clinical development.
Cannabis Science plans to develop a whole cannabis extract lozenge as its first pharmaceutical product. Initial findings from informal human trials using the whole-cannabis extract demonstrated that it has the capacity to enhance rapid onset pain relief through oral mucosal absorption. The lozenge is a part of the assets and know-how acquired through Cannex.
On June 1, the company said that it was working toward picking up a private company that owned complementary patented intellectual property for specific clinical-stage cannabinoid products and uses.
“It seems inevitable that at least for some period of time there will co-exist two distribution pathways for this medicine,” noted Lester Grinspoon, M.D., emeritus professor of psychiatry at Harvard and long-time advocate for the legalization of marijuana, “first, the conventional model of modern allopathic medicine through pharmacy-filled prescriptions for FDA-approved medicines, and second, a model closer to the distribution of alternative and herbal medicines, where there is little if any quality or quantity control. Either way, growing numbers of people will become familiar with cannabis and its derivative products.”
As individual U.S. states move toward either legalization of marijuana or approval of its medical use, the new corporate voices are adding to the pro-pot choir. These companies can potentially help advance the political debate by providing the long-needed clinical trials to validate specific medical applications of Cannabis sativa and its constituent compounds.
Separating psychoactive from medicinal properties through “pharmaceuticalization” of marijuana may be unrealistic. According to NIH, Cesamet “has complex effects on the central nervous system. Its effects on the mental state (i.e., “inner mental life”) are similar to those of cannabis. Subjects given Cesamet may experience changes in mood (euphoria, detachment, depression, anxiety, panic, paranoia), decrements in cognitive performance and memory, a decreased ability to control drives and impulses, and alterations in the experience of reality (e.g., distortions in the perception of objects and the sense of time and hallucinations.”
At least 66 other cannabinoids are also present in cannabis, including cannabidiol, cannabinol, and tetrahydrocannabivarin, which are believed to result in different effects than those of THC alone. Apart from significant difficulties associated with titrating appropriate effective doses, inhaling smoke—which can be avoided through marijuana vaporization—and psychoactive effects, the whole weed may remain the real deal.
Patricia F. Dimond, Ph.D., is a principal at BioInsight Consulting. Email: drpdimond@genengnews.com.Story highlights Peggy Drexler: Trump strategy: Take down Clinton on basis of her gender. In security forum, interviewer Lauer helped with this
She says Lauer grilling of Clinton, soft treatment of Trump a teachable moment of what awaits women who seek power
Drexler: Trump's tweet that military rape result of letting women serve, Priebus tweet that Clinton didn't smile speak volumes
Peggy Drexler is the author of "Our Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Fathers, and the Changing American Family" and "Raising Boys Without Men." She is an assistant professor of psychology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University and a former gender scholar at Stanford University. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
(CNN) Throughout the campaign, it has been a core strategy for Donald Trump and his surrogates to play on and heighten existing American sexism and racism. Everything about his platform has been about taking down Hillary Clinton for her gender. Is she too soft or is she too angry? Is she fit for the job or does she not smile enough?
But on Wednesday night, Trump got some help. Clinton and Donald Trump were making dueling appearances in New York in a live forum hosted by NBC's Matt Lauer to address subjects including national security, veterans' welfare, and sexual assault in the military. Here, Clinton was called upon once again to defend her emails, her hawkish foreign policy record — and ultimately answer for her femininity.
In the aftermath Lauer has been widely called out for what many saw as an unfair, sexist approach to moderating.
JUST WATCHED Trump praises Putin during forum Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Trump praises Putin during forum 02:53
For one thing, he devoted about a third of his time with Clinton to questions about her emails, while rushing her through other, weightier topics. He interrupted her, while allowing Trump to talk over him in his usual way, and he left unchallenged Trump's contradictory statement about not supporting the war in Iraq (he did), among other things. The outrage across social media was immediate. "How in the hell does Lauer not fact check Trump lying about Iraq? This is embarrassingly bad," a sked former Obama aide Tommy Vieto r, echoing many.
It was a fresh teachable moment for women everywhere about what happens when a woman dares to seek power.Indian Super League (ISL) franchise, Delhi Dynamos FC, could soon ink a tie-up with Spanish La Liga giants, Real Madrid. The partnership could be the country’s biggest in football, surpassing even Atletico de Kolkata’s tie up with Atletico Madrid.“Our goal is to make Delhi a football club from just a franchise,” said Delhi’s newly-appointed president Prashant Agarwal on Thursday. Agarwal, however, admitted that the partnership is not yet final. “They have expressed interest and have said that they want to explore ideas. There could also be another big Spanish club, perhaps Villareal or Valencia, involved in the partnership. This tieup will put something big in place. Everything is likely to change this time around.” Delhi finished fifth in the table in the inaugural edition and did not qualify for the semifinals.The partnership will be on the lines of the one Atletico de Kolkata has with Atletico Madrid. Squad members will get the opportunity to train and use facilities available at the Santiago Bernabeu, Real’s home ground. In addition, there could also be an exchange of players and coaching staff.If the deal goes through, it is understood that Delhi will terminate its existing partnership with Dutch club, Feyenoord Rotterdam. That partnership has been hit with a feud between the team’s marquee player Alessandro del Piero and coach Harm van Veldhoven.The Juventus legend, who was ISL’s biggest purchase at Rs 10.8 crore, was barely deployed by Veldhoven. Unhappy with the way he was treated by the coach, Del Piero also had a verbal argument with the team manager. There were reports of Del Piero pushing the manager away during a team practice session.Del Piero hinted that he may not return to India: “I will remember India and have made a lot of memories here.” But a new president taking over the club could mean that they will have a fresh start going into the second edition of the league. A partnership with Real Madrid would be the best way forward for them.Body and Soul is a 1947 Film Noir that portrays a boxer struggling to deal with the complications and temptations that come with great success and moreover the money that comes with fame. The film was written by Abraham Polonsky who would later go on to begin a directing career with 1948’s Forces of Evil only to have his career derailed by Hollywood Blacklisting. The film’s director, Robert Rossen is most known for co-writing, producing and directing the Paul Newman film, The Hustler, and also for naming names to the HUAC (House Unamerican Activities Committee).
Rossen, Polonsky, star John Garfield and several others involved with the film all had run-ins with the HUAC. Rossen gave in. Polonsky did not, nor did Garfield which led to their blacklisting. In particular it was said to have an impact on Garfield’s already chronic health, leading to his death in May of 1952 at only 39 years of age.
The Body & Soul Story
In Body and Soul, John Garfield stars as the young boxer Charley and Lilli Palmer plays his love interest Peg Born. Our story begins on a lone heavy bag in an outdoor ring. The sun is low and the shadows stretch dramatically away from the the deserted boxing stage. The camera slowly pans towards our main character, troubled by dreams, calling the name “Ben”. In moments he is up, tearing away from the scene. A perfect setup to tell the story of our tormented lead.
The main portion of the film is told through the Film Noir standby of the flashback. Here, the flashback is one long cut bridging our opening moment, telling the story that leads up to it, and then finishing on the same night. Charley has made a name for himself as an amateur boxing champion. At a celebration dinner, he meets and dances with Peg and falls for her right away.
Peg (a painter) and Charley’s parents are pushing for him to go to college and get an education. Charley’s constant companion, Shorty, wants to be his manager and get him to go pro in the fight game. The problem comes in the form of Quinn, the local bookmaker, who is the “in” into the ring. Charley’s mother is particularly insistent that he stay away from fighting and the shady characters like Quinn. When his father is tragically killed and his mother has to resort to borrowing from charities, Charley breaks and enters the professional circuit.
The Fight Game
Our Charley Davis is really good and he raises through the ranks quickly. It’s not long before he meets up with the king of sleaze known as, Roberts. Picture Roberts as this films Don King. The part reminded me of Darrin McGavin in The Natural, slimy to the core. Roberts is Charley’s ticket to the title, through a fight with the already ailing (and Roberts knows this) champ, Ben Chaplin. By this point Charley is all about money. As his need for cash increases his morals decrease. He gets involved with the gold-digging Alice at the expense of his relationship with Peg.
Things continue to spiral until Charley is actually agreeing to take a dive. Former champion, Ben, who is now a training partner of Charley takes this news badly. Under threat and stress, and the effects of brain trauma, Ben dies, bringing us back to the start of the film. What does Charley do now? Does he take the money and the fall, or does he stand up and fight? I’m not going to spoil this one for you, this film is well worth watching.
The Art of Film Noir
The opening scene is classic piece of Noir cinematography work from James Wong Howe, a Chinese American who had 120+ films under his belt and was a
pioneer and early adopter of deep-focus techniques (all planes remain in focus). This opening plays heavy on the light and shadows with an feeling of unease and foreboding. The setup is off kilter and unsure, just as our main character is feeling.
The other key here is the quality editing from Francis D. Lyon and Robert Parrish, who received Academy Award nominations for their work on this film. The fight scenes throughout the film were lauded for the realism (though the techniques are dated now) and choreography. The editing is superb; it’s easy to see why this film had such a big influence on Raging Bull.
Body & Soul Review
Body and Soul is classic Film Noir with brilliant cinematography, editing and great performances all around. Garfield is especially strong here, it’s a shame his career was cut so short. I would definitely recommend this film. Its a Noir, a boxing film, and moreover a morality tale on the dangers lurking behind fame and fortune. I’ll leave you with Charley’s last words in the film, “Everybody dies.”U.S. Open Cup by Jonah Fontela on Aug 6, 2017
The Earthquakes have an Open Cup plan. Keep the ball, score goals and have fun. No one said it was complicated, and it’s working. Jahmir Hyka and Danny Hoesen, recent European transplants, are two of the plan’s architects and crucial to San Jose’s hot run to the Semifinals. They both smile the same wide way when talk turns to possession and chances, and neither can hide their deep contempt for the dreaded long ball.
“It’s a pretty simple game,” said Hyka, who’s been dubbed the ‘Albanian Messi’ back home in Tirana. He’s short and stocky and he has feet like a veteran magician’s hands. One second the ball’s there to be taken and the next it’s gone – vanished into the thin air with Hyka racing behind it toward goal. “When you keep the ball and make chances, eventually you’re going to score goals. This is not complicated.”
Hyka takes up a position out wide on the left for San Jose and has been a nightmare for opposing defenders since his arrival in Major League Soccer earlier this year. Just ask LA Galaxy’s Jelle Van Damme and Ashley Cole, who must still be seeing the back of Hyka’s boots in their sleep after a long Quarterfinal night. “Our job as a team is to keep the ball, and we have good players for it,” added the 29-year-old who bounced around the European game – Germany, Norway, Greece and Switzerland, before finding a home in the Bay Area. “There’s not a lot of teams in MLS who can say this, who can be as comfortable on the ball as we are. A lot of them hit the ball long and hope for the best. That’s not for us."
One man benefiting from all this possession is on-loan Dutchman Hoesen. He had three strong seasons with Ajax and is now enjoying his time in San Jose in a team suited to his style and skills. “Hyka’s awesome, man,” said Hoesen, laughing a little, knowing the value of a teammate who makes space and allows attackers like himself to gamble going forward. “He’s so much fun to play with. I always love a guy who can beat his man easily – and believe me Jahmir does it with ease. He opens up spaces where I can do my thing.”
Space & Time
In all fairness, Hoesen doesn’t need much space. The straight-talking Dutchman, trying to rehabilitate his career after a few tricky seasons in the Lowlands, loves a crowded penalty area. In the Round of 16 game against Seattle Sounders, he wriggled past three defenders in a postage stamp-sized corner of the box before scoring the winner in a 2-1 victory. “I had to improvise the whole thing,” he admitted, chuckling, with two goals under his belt in this Open Cup campaign. “I wanted to shoot early, but I knew it would get blocked, so I just started moving and cutting to see if I could go around them all. In the end, it worked.”
A good coach could carve out a respectable Cup run on the strengths of Hyka and Hoesen alone. But San Jose have a mix, and a vast array of attacking weapons, that’s beginning to look a bit like sorcery. Or Alchemy. In Jackson Yueill (20) and Tommy Thompson (21) they have eager young guns looking to make names. Up front there’s Chris Wondolowski – an MLS legend who makes up for what he lacks in speed with wisdom and guile and straight-up soccer smarts. The predator known as Wondo, the team’s all-time top-scorer, grabbed two in the last round and the free-flowing Quakes have seven goals from their three Open Cup games so far.
“We have the right mix,” said Hoesen who, along with Hyka, brings the Quakes a technical nous refined and smoothed on European fields. “Some have been around forever and they know all the tricks and others are just starting out and full of enthusiasm. You can’t say enough about Wondolowski, but guys like Thompson and Yeuill, I’ve been really impressed with the way they handle the stress in these big-time situations.”
All Fun and Games
“We’re having a lot of fun playing the game,” said Hyka, something you don’t hear very often from professional players. Maybe it’s just a given and something that goes without saying. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s not always this much fun. “It’s not all the time you can say that in this game. But I can tell you this, we’re having a good time out on the pitch and it has everything to do with how we’re playing the game.”
Hyka was crucial in San Jose’s win over California rivals LA Galaxy in the Quarterfinal. And he’s not much interested in hiding his glee at getting one over on the enemy from down south. “That was particularly fun,” he said about the game where the Quakes went down early, being caught “still sleeping” according to Hyka before roaring back to win a 3-2 barnburner. “We kept the ball and made a lot of one-twos and moved them around a lot. Keep the other team moving and you make your job a lot easier.”
No wonder that it’s all smiles, high-fives and good-times in the Quakes camp. They’re stuck in the middle of the MLS Western Conference (only seven points out of first-place) but they’ve hit the kind of rhythm in the Open Cup that’s precious and rare. The mix is right, and often in Cup play it’s not the team designed and primed for long-haul title runs that gets to lift the trophy. You can’t speculate or play for draws and it’s all on the line every night. The team with the right mix and the most weapons can go all the way. Right now, that might be San Jose.
The theory will be put to the test on Wednesday in the Semifinal. The Earthquakes take on Sporting Kansas City who are considered by many to be the best team in MLS. They won the |
He is intellectual and rugged, refined and raw, bearded and clean shaven in equally hot measures. (Not to mention, he definitely seems like the type of guy who knows his way around a good spanking.) And let’s talk about the evolution of his hotness.
From Pretty Young Thing:
To nearly-60-year-old beauty:
No one does aging quite like this piece of Hot German Sausage (I’m sorry, grandma).
7. The hot barista who doesn’t realize he’s the hot barista, it’s just a job he happens to have.
While few things can be worse than the “hot barista” who is too into the whole thing, and is the slightly less cool version of the “hot bartender,” a guy who just happens to be hot and a barista is incredibly cute. He’s not in it to hit on random women, he just likes the job. Of course, this ironically ends up making him a hundred times more attractive, particularly when he’s making you a perfect cappuccino and genuinely asking how your day went. He is Chill Hot Barista, and we need more of him.
8. The really articulate guy who tries to hide his accent, but lapses back into it while drunk/with family.
Now I admit that I am biased because my boyfriend (shout out!) has a strong regional accent that he does his best to hide in day-to-day life, but which inevitably slips out from time to time. And there is something so charming about wanting to prosper in life through perfect articulation, but not being able to fully conceal your (sometimes podunk) roots.
9. The reformed asshole whose asshole tendencies you hear about and feel a little smug over.
The thing is that you have acquired him when he has transformed into a full-on man, and has left his asshole ways in the past, and this makes you the envy of every girl who had him during his Asshole Era and thought that their love could reform him. There is something so satisfying about knowing that your guy is capable of being kind of a dick, but has moved past that, and is now a good boy in the context of your relationship. It’s somewhat sadistic, yeah, but so is life.
10. The guy who isn’t even attractive, but is so cocky/hilarious that you’re obsessed with him.
You can’t get over how not-attracted you should be to him, but there it is. He talks to you, and suddenly you can’t even function, and keep making sad attempts at being funny to keep up with him. He just has this “I don’t give a shit what you think of me, I love me, you’re either along for the ride or you’re not” attitude that is truly intoxicating.
11. The guy with a great head of hair who intentionally shaves it because he owns his buzzcut.
Nothing quite as sexy as the Intentional Baldy, the guy who chooses to rock the shaved-head look because he has the head to support it and doesn’t have anything to prove. I present exhibit Smith Jerrod:
12. The otherwise normal-ish guy you are sitting across from on public transport, and who is made super hot by the mystery and proximity.
Am I the only person who falls in love on a regular basis on public transportation? There is just something about being trapped across from someone for a few minutes that takes you through the whole arc of a relationship in 15 metro stops. You meet cute, you are filled with infatuation, you question whether or not he feels the same, you imagine what your children would look like, you are angry at him for not randomly asking for your number, then you morn the loss when he gets off a few stops before you. And he doesn’t even have to be that conventionally hot, he just has to be 70 percent your type, and sitting across from you reading a cool book.
13. The guy who looks exactly like your ex, and whom you want to date specifically so you can re-enact your failed relationship.
The most unhealthy, and yet most brutally real, of all Very Specific Crushes. Just don’t tell anyone, because they would judge for being a bad person (even though I totally get you).
Like this? Read more in our bestselling ebook.Tim Powers is one of the foremost practitioners of the secret history genre, in which real historical events are revealed to have surprising fictional explanations. And Powers—who was good friends with the ultimate master of paranoid sci-fi, Philip K. Dick—has developed a reliable system for spinning out elaborate new conspiracy theories. It starts with reading a lot of history and looking for unexplained facts that seem to be connected.
“If I run into two or three such snags in a nonfiction book, I start to think maybe you could cook up a supernatural backstory in which those enigmatic or apparently irrational actions actually make sense,” Powers says in Episode 186 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.
He’ll collect several dozen such oddities, then find some way to tie them all together into one story. This process has led to popular novels such as Last Call, On Stranger Tides, and Declare, which suggest that Bugsy Siegel was the Fisher King, that Blackbeard practiced voodoo, and that superspy Kim Philby was involved with Noah’s Ark.
“My governing principle with research is that none of this is a coincidence,” says Powers. “If Einstein did something in Germany on the same day that Charlie Chaplin broke his toe in Hollywood, I think, ‘Aha! Not a coincidence.'”
His new novel, Medusa’s Web, imagines that magical sketches called “spiders” allowed silent film stars like Rudolph Valentino and Alla Nazimova to project their minds through time. As the theory took shape, he began to notice apparent confirmations for it in everything from Greek mythology to the films of Ingmar Bergman.
“If it’s very late at night,” he says, “I find sometimes when I open some new research book, it’ll appear to confirm my fictional theory, and I’ll think, ‘Oh my god, Powers, you’re not making this up! You’ve stumbled on the actual story here.”
But he’s careful not to get too wrapped up in his theories. Writing novels has taught him that you can find confirmation for anything if you look hard enough.
“I’d be nuts if I took this into everyday life,” he says.
Listen to our complete interview with Tim Powers in Episode 186 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.
Tim Powers on the supernatural:
“It may be relevant that I’m Catholic, and so supernatural events are not entirely ruled out. One time I was going to write a book which was sort of ‘The Exorcist in San Bernardino.’ … I got a book by Malachi Martin which was actual transcripts of exorcisms—dialogues between priests and devils—and I thought, ‘Cool! Wow, boy, I’ve got all my research right here. This is great.’ And I opened the book, and on the first page it says, ‘The author and publisher advise that anyone reading this book say the following prayer before and after each chapter.’ And I slammed it shut and thought, ‘Well, I don’t need that. Uh-uh. I ain’t doing that.'”
Tim Powers on Philip K. Dick:
“He was always very mercurial in his convictions, which leads to a lot of inaccuracies about him—people will say he was Episcopalian, he was an Orthodox Jew, he was Gnostic, and I think, ‘Yeah, for a day.’ Check with him the next day and he’d be something else. … It’s weird to see the sort of consensus caricature of him that emerges—this kind of crazed, drug-addled hermit writing these crazy books all alone. And I think, ‘That wasn’t the guy I knew.’ The guy I knew was really sociable and funny, well-read, skeptical. It must be the same with people who knew Byron or Hemingway or any other writer who becomes a legend, you start to notice that the legend doesn’t resemble the actual model much.”
Tim Powers on William Ashbless:
“The college paper printed poetry, and it was close enough to the ’60s that the poetry was all just horrible free verse about children and flowers and rainbows. So we figured we could write poetry that would sound very portentous but be, in fact, meaningless. … We needed a name for our poet and [came up with] ‘Ashbless.’ The paper published them, so we wrote another lot that was dumber, and they published that. … We said [Ashbless] was hideously deformed and couldn’t attend any readings or meetings, but he had given us these poems to read in his stead. … Blaylock and I would often break out laughing in the middle of reading them, which people thought was very insensitive of us, to be laughing at the poetical efforts of our deformed friend.”
Tim Powers on breaking the fourth wall:
“I hate ‘tongue-in-cheek,’ ‘irony,’ ‘self-referential,’ anything where the writer says—in effect—to the reader, ‘Well, we both know this is just made-up stuff, huh?’ … I remember a George MacDonald Fraser book called The Pyrates, and they’re reading a magazine called ‘Playrogue’ or something—which was a parallel for Playboy—and in a sword fight one of them says, ‘You can’t kill me on page four!’ … I don’t like that sort of tone in fiction. I feel very cheated. … I don’t like it in Terminator movies if Schwartzenegger says, ‘I’ll be back,’ for the second time. That’s just winking at us. The first time it was great, but now you’re just nudging us in the ribs and saying, ‘Hehe. Remember, remember?’ Which is taking me out of this immediate story at hand.”Europe’s in trouble as it lacks the sort of powerful “vision,” that’s behind Brexit and Donald Trump’s election win, the Italian finance minister told delegates at the 2017 Davos forum. He also focused on extraordinary rise of populist sentiments across Europe and the US.
“The problem in Europe is Europe,” Pier Carlo Padoan said at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, AFP reported.
“The challenge the Brexit and Trump is posing is that there is a vision. You may agree or disagree with that vision, but there is a challenge that Brexit is posing and Trump is posing. We don’t have a vision in Europe, not a vision that is comparable in terms of powerfulness,” he said.
Read more
“Europe used to be the solution to many of the problems of the laggards of European integration. Now this is being turned around completely,” Padoan said during the debates.
Britain’s decision to leave the EU in June and Italy’s rejection of constitutional reforms, is a “sign of crisis,” the Italian Finance Minister said.
In the current circumstances, European policymakers are obliged to listen to their voters and take populist sentiments seriously.
“Europeans have a duty when they set out their policies to deal with issues such as populism because [citizens] are raising the right issues,” he said.
According to Padoan, the middle class was “disillusioned about the future, disappointed about the job prospects for their kids and disappointed about the security that they can get out of a welfare system that may become unsustainable.”
“Not all those who vote for populist ideas are the bad guys. In most cases they are good guys, they are fellow citizens and they have real concerns about the future of their children, jobs opportunity, concerns about security,” he added.
Padoan’s comments come as many Davos delegates voiced concerns of the “uncertainty” hanging over Europe caused by an unexpected global shift to anti-establishment populist views. These, among others, include Britain’s decision to leave the EU and the election of Donald Trump as US president.
Read more
Addressing the same forum, International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde said, “There have been signs of a lack of trust, lack of hope and disenchantment.”
Europe has “good ingredients” in hand “for a crisis of the middle classes in advanced economies” and it’s time for lawmakers to take steps to help “the disgruntled middle class,” Lagarde added.
The populist sentiments around Europe are also being stoked by concerns over immigration, the refugee intake by EU countries and the global threat of terror – last year’s key WEF agenda points that are still on this year’s list.
“Populism scares me. I want to be loud and clear – populism scares me. It is the extremes,” said Ray Dalio, the founder and co-chief investment officer of Bridgewater Associates, at Bloomberg’s panel on Wednesday.
The 47th World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos opened on Tuesday, January 17. Each year, leading business executives, political leaders, prominent thinkers, and journalists gather to discuss the most pressing economic and political problems around the globe.My Secret Santa obviously did some Santa Sleuthing, because they got me 1) books (which I love); 2) books I don't already have (tough, because I've got literally thousands of them); and 3) USED books, which means that we're recycling, saving dead trees and everything, and warming my cheapskate Scotsman heart!
(Our family gives each other used books regularly - it's like Santa came along on one of our 'hey let's investigate this used bookstore' trips!)
They also wrote me a very nice note (with amazing handwriting - very pretty). Here's the text:
"Dear fellow redditor, I hope you find your presents and you well. I sent you some books that helped me in hard times about religion and a travel book for Ireland along with a photo album and this notebook with a pencil to get you started with your future. The travel book and photo album are meant to be together to shove you in the direction of your dream trip along with the coast book to try and get ideas for traveling. This notebook is for you to try writing anything for your books and cross it off your bucket list. I'm sorry it's not much, but I'm hoping it could give you that shove to follow your dreams since life is too short to only dream. I wish you and your family and cats all good wishes and have a wonderful Christmas! May God bless you! Sincerely, Your Secret Santa"
Thanks Santa! Can't wait to get started on my holiday reading!Senator Ron Johnson -- soon to be FORMER Senator Ron Johnson -- has a strange idea of the definition of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as fundamental American rights.
ThinkProgress' Scott Keyes asked Johnson whether he agreed that employers should not be under legal obligation to provide health insurance to employees who had been diagnosed or treated for cancer.
RoJo was blunt.
"Listen, our rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And when we start expanding beyond that realm, when you create a right for somebody, you create an obligation for somebody else, and then you’re taking away that person’s right," he answered.
So, what part of "life" doesn't he understand?
Alan Grayson was right when he said Republicans want everyone to die, and die quickly. Here's a shining example of it for all to see.In regards to Quantum Break, it looks like a game where people may say you were playing it "wrong". That you were hiding behind cover when the game "wants" you to blink around a firefight and learn to string your abilities together. Is the game bad if the easiest way to play it is to (in QB's case) sit behind cover and shoot instead of engaging in its mechanics like some people are criticizing you for not doing with QB? If the tools were there and you didn't see them, is the game fully to blame?
People may say whatever they like. I finished the game and got almost all of the achievements that you’d get from successfully using your abilities, so…?
I don’t know why people keep trying to dig some weird “reason” out of all this. I don’t think that game is very good. I explained that in the review, again on the podcast, and yet again in the Quick Look. The idea that some people are so attached to this thing that they can’t accept that simple concept is ridiculous. I especially like the occasional Twitter message I see about it that calls me, like, an “Uncharted fanboy” or something. That’s pretty hilarious. So all that reaction seems like another typical outpouring of bullshit from fanboy commandos.
Last generation it was the PS3 nutcases who lashed out the most. This generation the Xbox One fanboys seem the most desperate. It is what it is. Somewhere there’s some Sega Saturn guy who’s still mad about something I said in 1997. The irrational bullshit over reviews never changes.The 45th President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump, continues to tackle the issues that were never addressed in the same vein under Barack Obama, such as the elimination of ISIS, human trafficking, arresting criminal gangs, deporting illegal gang members, cracking down on drug trafficking on the southern border, arresting pedophiles and eliminating pedophile rings. Not to mention creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, knowing that the grassroots of manufacturing plays a huge role in the sustenance of the nation’s economy, which is also having an effect on consumer confidence causing the stock market to hit record highs, thus meaning that market trading is very much booming at the moment. All great news if you live in the USA, but chances are you won’t hear that on CNN, the BBC, or on any of the biased left-wing “fake news” loving networks.
Next on the agenda for the Trump White House, amongst other things, is solving the Opioid Epidemic which has been getting out of control, with overdoses and deaths associated with the pharmaceutical drug tablets rising to dangerously high levels over the past fifteen years.
Donald J. Trump has declared a crackdown on the opioid epidemic which has ravaged communities in America. The White House is currently assessing the inner planning on how to solve the crisis and start improving the situation all across the country, and when President Donald Trump says he’s going to do something, you better believe it. Unlike other career politicians, Trump gets what he says done one way or another, that’s why so many people voted for him in the first place. Let’s take a look, at what he had to say on the matter.
Kim Jung Un said that they were looking at firing missiles or assembling a ground attack on USA’s West Pacific Island of Guam after the U.N had sanctioned a cut down on a third of their exports and thus damaging their economy, but Trump made himself very clear indeed that such actions would be met with a righteous fury. As we said, when the President says something, you better believe it.
Residents of Guam have expressed concern whilst others believe there is no threat, but should North Korea even attempt in trying to do something like that to an American Island, then expect North Korea to be met, in Donald Trump’s words: “with fire, fury and frankly power likes of which this world has never seen before”. That should reach the ear of Kim Jung Un nice and clearly in no time. Deputy Assistant to the President, Sebastian Gorka, appeared on Sean Hannity telling the North Korean dictator, “Do not test President Trump” and “this isn’t the Obama and Hillary administration”.
So there you have it. Tensions have risen last night, and anything that Kim Jung Un will do at this point would basically be suicide for him and his whole nation. He better accept that the U.N decided to cut their exports and must not to retaliate against any country, anywhere, or President Donald Trump will act with a swift and brutal hand which was pretty much made clear by his statement yesterday.
The U.N cut exports up to $1 billion from North Korea, (a third of their exports), with a vote of 15-0, so in retaliation, Kim Jung Un thought he could threaten Guam, but this was clearly a bad idea. Let’s hope that amicable decisions can be made and that peace can be maintained. Some people hope that China can talk some sense into the Dictator, and if that fails, then Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis will be busy getting nukes ready for launch. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
<Story by The Narrator>
Featured Photo Credit: NBC NewsThe House of Lords report on Britain's surveillance society is a devastating analysis of the systems that have been installed by the authoritarian Labour government and the controlling forces emerging in local government. There is no question now that Britain's free society is under threat, and it is time for the public and opposition parties to declare an end to this regime of intrusion.
Until today it has been the work of activists, journalists and a handful of academics like Clive Norris of Sheffield University to warn of the dangers to our freedom and privacy posed by the database state. Now it is official. There could be no more authoritative judgment than this measured report, Surveillance Citizens and the State, produced by the Lord's constitution committee. The report says that mass surveillance "risks undermining the fundamental relationship between the state and citizens, which is the cornerstone of democracy and good governance".
It paints a picture of a governing class that has become obsessed with the collection of personal data. The public is "often unaware of the vast amount of information about them that is kept and exchanged between organisations" This will be greatly increased if Jack Straw's coroners' and justice bill is allowed to pass through the Commons, with Labour manipulating the parliamentary schedule so that the data-sharing proposals contained in it go largely unscrutinised.
The report says that successive governments have constructed an advanced surveillance society on the pretext of dealing with the menace of crime and terror. It amounts "to one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the second world war". I would add that it is the greatest threat to our democracy since Britain faced Hitler's military machine.
Such remarks have in the past been dismissed by the government as paranoia. Government supporters in the media have talked about activists seeking a kind of victimhood when they raised the alarm. How many times have we heard that sinister and dishonest line, "if you've nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear?" Well, it is plain that we all have something to fear from the society that ministers like Straw, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, John Reid and Jacqui Smith have brought into being.
Not one of these Labour home secretaries has stood against the agenda that has been quietly implemented by the Home Office, Ministry of Justice and police forces. But of course it is not just central government that is responsible. One of the strengths of the Lords' report is its criticism of the local authorities which have used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act – terror laws known as RIPA – to mount secret spying operations on people suspected of littering, fly-tipping, fishing illegally and applying to a school outside their catchment area. Among 44 recommendations, the report asks the government to reconsider the use of RIPA laws by local councils.
The cross party committee is particularly good on the principle that privacy is essential to any healthy democracy. Lord Goodlad, a former Conservative chief whip, said:
The huge rise in surveillance and data collection by the state and other organisations risks undermining the long-standing traditions of privacy and individual freedom which are vital for democracy. If the public are to trust that information about them is not being improperly used there should be much more openness about what data is collected, by whom and how it is use.
The Lords suggest that all future plans to collect and share information should be exposed to a procedure which they describe as "privacy impact assessment" This is welcome because it underlines the point that personal information is precisely that and that any government must explain why it needs our data and what it proposes to do with it. Up until now the government has treated our information as if it were state property.
It is regrettable that the Lords did not comment on the proposals of the communications data bill which will allow the government to seize data from every phone call, text message, email and internet connection. But they have commented on the DNA database and recommended that the DNA of all innocent people should be removed. And they have commented on the spread of CCTV systems. They say that four million cameras are watching us, but that is an old statistic and I suspect that we are approaching the figure of five million – roughly one camera for every 12 people.
We have got used to the little black orbs attached to lampposts throughout our city centres and public spaces, but when foreigners see the evidence of such pervasive suspicion they are astounded and also amazed that the British have slept while sinister forces mount a silent coup. Last night I was talking to an Israeli who simply could not believe the number of cameras he came across every day.
The report calls for a profound change in the attitudes and behaviour of the government. But that is not going to happen. Labour is committed to its course of eroding the traditions, procedures and respect on which our free society is based. It will not rest until all its costly systems are in place and its legacy of control and disrespect is assured.
This report is a grave warning to us all, especially to an opposition that has been so feeble in defending our privacy and rights.
Many of us feel vindicated this morning, but the battle has yet to begin.Al-Qaeda operatives in Libya may have mounted last week’s attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi as revenge for the killing of Abu Yahya al-Libi in a drone attack in Pakistan in June.
The attack may have been encouraged by Abdul Wahab Al-Qaed al-Libi, the brother of the dead operative, according to a former U.S. intelligence officer who has contacts in the Libyan underground. Abdul Wahab was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a group linked to al-Qaeda that supposedly had entered politics after the toppling of Moammar Gaddafi last year.
U.S. intelligence agencies don’t have any evidence that Abdul Wahab personally helped plan the attack, according to an intelligence official. But the official said that the United States has received reports that the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi may have been a reprisal for the June attack. “The idea of this being revenge for Abu Yahya’s death, we see discussion of that,” the official said. The attack killed J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans.
For al-Qaeda, Abu Yahya al-Libi was something of a rising star. When he was killed in the tribal areas of Pakistan on June 4, he was seen as one of the most skilled operations planners still alive among the inner core of al-Qaeda. He was about 49 when he died.
The Benghazi attack may be following the playbook of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, who since 2007 has been urging what he has called a “global intifada,” in which al-Qaeda would embrace and infiltrate jihadist movements. According to the former U.S. intelligence official, the talk in the Libyan underground last week was about what’s described as an “al-Qaeda intifada.”
The U.S. intelligence official confirmed that the United States has picked up chatter about this “intifada” strategy. “It’s something we’re looking at,” he said, but he wouldn’t discuss details and wouldn’t comment on any possible links with Zawahiri.
When Zawahiri become the leader of al-Qaeda after the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, U.S. analysts initially regarded it as a plus, from the American standpoint. That’s because Zawahiri’s opportunistic approach of hit-and-run attacks seemed less threatening to the United States than the preference of bin Laden and his closest associates for terrorist spectaculars on the order of 9/11. In that view, attacks like the one in Benghazi are tragic and deplorable, but the cost to America is lower than al-Qaeda operations targeted at the U.S. homeland.
The reports from the Libyan underground also said that a brother of Zawahiri had been seen among the crowds outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo last week. The U.S. intelligence official said that analysts couldn’t confirm that report, though he said that one U.S. agency has heard the same information.
An opportunistic al-Qaeda strategy, like that described by the Libyan source, would mean continuing attacks across the Arab world as the uprising once known as the “Arab Spring” continues. The Syrian revolution is especially vulnerable to being hijacked in this way by al-Qaeda. But it was evident during last week’s violent protests against an anti-Islamic video that there is dry tinder across the Muslim world, into which al-Qaeda is eager to toss a match.No, it's not Photoshopped.
A "fire rainbow" lit up the skies over the Isle of Palms for almost an hour Sunday, delighting beachgoers in South Carolina, 14 News reports.
Fire rainbows, technically called circumhorizontal arcs, are rare occurrences in "high-level cirrus clouds made up of tiny ice crystals," meteorologist Justin Lock told 14 News. But the rainbow effect only happens when the sun is at an altitude of at least 58 degrees above the horizon, Lock adds.
Of course, the phenomenon also lit up social media — after all, it's a rarity when something needs no filter.
Without clarity. So beautiful A photo posted by Carole Rich Williams (@icrw70) on Aug 16, 2015 at 2:00pm PDT
Seen Off The NC Coast. #firerainbow #wow #saltlife #pineknollshoresnc #crystalcoast A photo posted by Roger Jennings (@3rdnlong) on Aug 17, 2015 at 3:11pm PDTBOSTON — In a scene reminiscent of Super Bowl XLVII and the 1988 Stanley Cup Final, several of the overhead lights at TD Garden went dark during the first period of Monday’s Beanpot championship game between Boston College and Boston University.
The apparent power outage occurred with 8:53 remaining in the opening frame and prompted officials to halt play as arena staff investigated the source of the issue.
The lights seem to have gone out. pic.twitter.com/rpCTiR2fsx — dafoomie (@dafoomie) February 9, 2016
Beanpot just turned into a party pic.twitter.com/WAY2XbsNFC — Feitelberg (@FeitsBarstool) February 9, 2016
So, the lights just went out. pic.twitter.com/RN7YrN9b1S — Zack Cox (@ZackCoxNESN) February 9, 2016
The game was played while Boston was in the midst of a winter storm, though it’s unclear if weather conditions were to blame for the blackout.
UPDATE (8:19 p.m. ET): Both teams have left the ice and retreated to their respective dressing rooms.
UPDATE (8:27 p.m.): The players have returned to the ice, the lights have come back on, and we are ready to resume play. The unofficial duration of the delay was 28 minutes.Lois Lerner, the former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official who cannot provide email records to congressional investigators because of a computer crash shortly after a congressional committee began its probe, warned other IRS employees to be "cautious about what we say in emails" that could be released to Congress.
That’s according to an email exchange between Lerner, the former IRS director of tax exempt organizations, and another IRS employee. The exchange, which occurred in April, 2013, a little less than two years after her own hard drive crashed, was made public by the House Oversight Committee as part of its ongoing investigation into conservative non-profit organizations.
The emails show that Lerner emailed a colleague to ask about the storage and retention of OCS conversations—messages sent using Microsoft’s Office Communications Server. In the exchange, Lerner expresses concern about possible congressional requests for IRS communications.
"I had a question today about OCS," Lerner wrote. "I was cautioning folks about email and how we have had several occasions where Congress has asked for emails and there has been an electronic search for responsive emails—so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails. Someone asked if OCS conversations were also searchable—I don’t know, but told them I would get back to them. Do you know?"
Hooke writes back that OCS messages are not "set to automatically save as the standard," but that the functionality to do so also exists. "My general recommendation is to treat the conversation as if it could/is being saved somewhere," Hooke writes.
"Perfect," Lerner writes in response.
It’s hard to look at Lerner’s query and not wonder why, exactly, she’s so concerned about what Congress might find in IRS emails or other types of electronic communications. She seems to be expressing a fairly clear desire to shield certain types of agency communications from possible congressional scrutiny, and she indicates that she has advised agency employees to take steps to ensure that what Congress sees is limited.
It’s possible, of course, that this is merely a product of general managerial caution. But in the context of Lerner’s own conveniently timed tech troubles—her hard drive containing her emails crashed just 10 days after the House Ways and Means Committee sent its first letter asking about IRS treatment of non-profits—it’s bound to raise some eyebrows. (Further, as The Wall Street Journal notes, the exchange happened just days after the IRS Inspector General delivered a report concluding that the IRS had targeted conservative groups, but before that report was made public.)
If Lerner was warning other agency employees to be careful about what they say in emails that could be made available to Congress, then it seems reasonable to suspect that IRS employees were in the habit of having discussions that they would not want Congress to know about.
See the full email exchange, as released by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, after the jump.
Lerner Email Use 2 by PeterSudermanHello world!
I’m just going to talk about my thoughts on all of the relegation matches for NA and how I think each of the matches will go. I’ll give each team a power ranking based on their players and their performance so far.
I’m not going to rank Evil Geniuses since I haven’t seen them play. Nothing is known about the teams ability to perform so far, only speculation. I Imagine they aren’t terrible but I’m not going to give them an edge.
Starting off with the Challenger teams I give the #5 rank to The Walking Zed. I think they’re all good players but have come up with disappointing results in the past. They performed well in the Spring Promotion tournament where it actually counted but I don’t think it’s enough to get past the likes of Coast.
The next rank at #4 is COGnitive Gaming. I believe they’re going to put up a fight against Curse and possibly pull it out. Zamphira is a extremely good mid player and is probably the core of the team. He has a huge champion pool to play with and will carry the world on his shoulders. As long as Nothinghere and Cris perform, I could see them pulling out a victory over Curse.
#3 is Determined Gaming. They have a strong roster that will most likely make it into the LCS. In group stage they beat out most of the other challenger teams going 4-1 with Arthelon being a roaming monster for most games. The only thing that can stop them is themselves not performing on the LAN setting.
The #2 slot goes to Team Curse. They had quite a few roster changes and a role swap to make basically a whole new roster which makes them stronger than what they were at Pax. The addition of Quas and Iwilldominate seems to have worked out well so far for them which leads me to believe they will be a serious threat for COG to make it into the LCS. They chose not to play in the recent tournament of NACL so that they wouldn’t reveal their strategies before they needed to, which also hides their strength pretty well.
The final spot goes to Team Coast since they have been destroying the entire Challenger scene since the Summer Split of LCS ended. I do not see them losing their match which is very unfortunate for The Walking Zed. The only way they could lose is if their new ADC WizFujiin chokes extremely hard in the LAN setting since it will be his first time performing at one, but that is unlikely.
Predictions for each matchup:
Crs VS COG 3:1
I think Curse will pull out ahead and stay in the LCS. COG is good and could pull out the match win, but it would be a huge upset. Voting for Curse is the obvious choice.
Coast VS TWZ 3:0
Coast will stomp this matchup. I hate to see TWZ go out like this, but at the same time know that Coast is really strong. If somehow TWZ manages to win the LCS without Coast would be a very different LCS. They’ve been around for a long time and aren’t falling off as players.
EG VS DTG 2:3
If the new EG team is competent they could take the series off of Determined Gaming. Since there’s no evidence of them going to perform extremely well I give the match to Determined. There’s a sense of mystery around the team though. Just like the new Lemondogs roster had. Even if they’re good players individually it doesn’t translate into competitive wins.Email
Global Tech
By Doug Young | April 24, 2014, 10:34 AM
I have to give my congratulations to new energy car maker Tesla for creating the kind of buzz and excitement this week that only names like Apple and smartphone sensation Xiaomi have typically been able to muster. In the last two days, the company and its charismatic founder Elon Musk were all over the Chinese headlines as Tesla delivered its first electric vehicles (EVs) in China on the sidelines of the nation’s biggest annual auto show happening this week in Beijing. Musk seems to have done interviews with nearly all of the major publications I regularly read, leading me to wonder if the man ever sleeps.
But all joking aside, Tesla really has done an incredible job of launching its first vehicle sales in China. I honestly haven’t seen this kind of media frenzy and hype surrounding a product launch for at least a year or two, back when Apple was still at the height of coolness in China. Tesla has also made all the right moves in terms of associations, getting its name connected with a number of big-name companies, projects, and people as Musk hinted his company could consider building a plant in China.
All this buzz comes after a rocky start in China for the company, following a tussle with a trademark squatter and some initially difficulties getting its first shop set up in Beijing. What’s more, the company is at a slight disadvantage to domestic rivals like BYD and Chery because its cars don’t quality for the generous subsidies being offered by Beijing to jump-start electric car sales. And yet despite all that, Tesla has managed to generate lots of buzz these last few months and has set an aggressive |
find the least confrontational time," said Sanders, who was the city's police chief in the 1990s. "And if at two in the morning people just woke up and they're told to leave and they don't leave, you have fewer confrontations than if you do it in the middle of the afternoon with everyone in the world watching and everyone wants to put on a show.
"This is about following the law. This is about allowing people to protest. Our officers have done an outstanding job. Cops have really gone out of their way to work with these folks."
Occupy San Diego is an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in New York in September and has spread across the country. The protesters have said they are demonstrating against corporate greed.
The San Diego group moved into the plaza Oct. 7 but were ordered to remove their tents, sleeping bags and personal belongings a week later. Earlier this week, the protesters and their tents began to return to the area.
The area may not be clear of tents for long. What is being called a “solidarity sleepover” involving the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council is planned for 8 p.m. Friday in the plaza.Story highlights The family of a 2-year-old girl from Flint files a federal lawsuit
Governor's spokesman said Snyder has to present budget to the legislature
Flint is in the midst of a crisis over lead in its water supply
(CNN) In the midst of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has declined an invitation to testify at a hearing Wednesday before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee about children affected by lead in the water.
Snyder said he couldn't testify because he has to deliver a budget presentation to the state legislature that day, according to his spokesman, Dave Murray.
That presentation is expected to detail "significant resources directed to long-term plans to help the people of Flint," Murray told CNN.
The committee that wanted Snyder to testify wrote to him saying that Congress "has not heard testimony from you on the Flint water crisis."
JUST WATCHED Michigan officials absent at Flint water crisis hearing Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Michigan officials absent at Flint water crisis hearing 02:25
"Unfortunately, a prior Congressional hearing this week did not include top state officials, including emergency financial managers appointed by you to run the city of Flint," the letter said.
Read MorePoultry News
Second Bird Flu Outbreak in Hobby Flock in Oregon
US - Highly pathogenic avian influenza has been detected in a backyard poultry flock of around 90 birds in Deschutes county, Oregon.
Oregon Department of Agriculture, in cooperation with the US Department of Agriculture, is responding to a detection of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in a flock of backyard birds near Tumalo in Deschutes County. ODA, working with the USDA’s Animal Health Inspection Service (APHIS), is in the process of setting up a quarantine zone around the property to restrict movement of domestic birds in and out of the area. Currently, the property is secured and there have been no additional detections of HPAI in the area.
The flock of about 90 mixed poultry and other domestic birds includes chickens, ducks and turkeys that have had access to a couple of ponds on the property that are also frequented by migratory wild waterfowl. Avian influenza naturally resides in wild birds and it is fairly common for waterfowl to carry various strains of the virus. HPAI has also been reported in backyard birds in Washington and Idaho, and in wild birds in all three Pacific Northwest states.
The Deschutes County detection is the second in Oregon. HPAI was detected in a flock of backyard birds in Douglas County in December.
Further Reading You can visit the Avian Flu page by clicking here.
ThePoultrySite News Desk2016 Nevada State Democratic Party Precinct Caucuses
Saturday February 20, 2016
11 a.m. PST
Where do I sign up to caucus?
Right here!
What are the Nevada Caucuses?
The Nevada Caucuses are gatherings of neighbors, organized by the Nevada State Democratic Party (NSDP), where Democrats join others in their precincts to begin the process of registering preferences for Democratic candidates running for President. With our First-in-the-West status, Nevadans will be the third state to share our recommendations on the Democratic Presidential nominee to the rest of the country. The Precinct Caucuses are also the organizational foundation of the NSDP.
Who can participate in the caucus?
Any person who is eligible to vote in the state of Nevada and will be at least 18 years old on Election Day, November 8, 2016, may participate. You must reside in the precinct in which they wish to participate, and must be registered as a Democrat — you may register or change party affiliation on caucus day.
Where are the caucuses held?
Generally your caucus site will be close to home, neighborhood meeting points such as schools, community centers, churches are used as caucus locations. The exact location for each precinct will be announced in the winter.
How do the Democratic Caucuses work?
Eligible caucus goers divide to form Presidential preference groups. If a preference group for a candidate does not have enough people to be considered “viable,” a threshold set at the beginning of the day, eligible attendees will have an opportunity to join another preference group or acquire people into their group to become viable. Delegates are then awarded to the preference groups based on their size. Caucus day will also feature the opportunity for anyone interested in being on the county central committee to sign up as well as the submission of resolutions for the county platform.
At the end of the day, who is determined as the “Winner” of the Nevada Caucuses?
On caucus day, Nevadans in each precinct elect delegates to their respective county conventions, but the winner of the caucuses will be the candidate who accrues the most delegates.
Any caucus participant may stand for election as a delegate to the county convention. Anyone who wants to be elected a national delegate must participate in the precinct caucuses, and each subsequent event –county convention on April 2, 2016, and the state convention on May 14 and 15, 2016.
How are results reported?
Results from each of the precincts will be reported to the Nevada State Democratic Party by precinct chairs.
Can press attend?
Yes—all caucus locations are open to the public and press.
Link to the Delegate Selection PlanYou guys are fiends for animals in sweaters. You like penguins in sweaters. You like ponies in sweaters. To satisfy your insane critter-in-knitwear lust, we’re being forced to put sweaters on increasingly far-afield animals, like snakes and, now, chickens. So, HERE. HERE IS YOUR BLOOD SWEATER CHICKEN, YOU MONSTERS.
This well-dressed hen resides at SASHA Farm Animal Sanctuary in Michigan, a refuge for abused and neglected farm animals. She was “baldish,” according to the farm, so knitter and farm fan Aletha Oberdier took it upon herself to make a nice snuggly jumper.
Even better, she provided a link to the chicken sweater pattern, designed by the U.K.’s Little Hen Rescue. So if you know a chicken with goosebumps, or you just want to provide a little warmth and comfort to rescued farm birds, get out your needles and let’s cover those chickens in sheep.Washington
It looks like former Obama Administration National Security Advisor Susan Rice will get a reprieve. With all the hullabaloo from last week’s military action by President Donald Trump in Syria — do we call it Syria’s civil war or a massacre? — it now appears Ms. Rice’s mishandling of surveillance is going to subside from the headlines temporarily. Well, her mishandling of surveillance on the Trump team can wait. What President Trump did last week in public was historic. He changed his mind.
How many presidents change their minds in public? Moreover, how many have changed their minds for the good? Up until last week, neocons were snickering at the president because of his irenic statements about using force in foreign policy. They called him an “isolationist.” Voices on the left heard his boasts about our unsurpassed military power and feared he was a hawk. What he showed late last week — when he ordered a cruise missile attack on the military facilities of the Syrian butcher, Bashar al-Assad — was a non-ideologue in action. When circumstances change, Trump will change. What he demonstrated last week is that he is not afraid to act.
Unlike former President Barack Obama, he does not draw lines in the sand and then forget about his lines when he has been caught up in his own bluster. Tyrants who make threats against the United States ought to remember the pictures of before and after the U.S. attack on Assad’s air force. Possibly, the smoking hulks lying in their gutted bunkers were the same attack jets that had dropped canisters of sarin gas on the defenseless citizens of Khan Sheikhoun just days before.
The language President Trump used to explain his change of mind was quite eloquent. “Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women, and children. It was a slow, brutal death for so many,” the president said to the nation. “No child of God should ever suffer such horror.” Yes, he said “no child of God.” The never Trumpians should think of these words the next time they start jibbering about our playboy president.
Yes, President Trump changed his mind. It should surprise no one who has been scrutinizing him the last couple or years. He is an American First, as they say. He likes beer and baseball and all kinds of competition. Check that first item. He does not drink. He has, however, competed in sports, business, and the entertainment industry. He likes to win but has had his share of losses. After a life of highly successful business deals, he entered politics a year or so ago and brought with him a fresh approach to the great game of politics. As to his political values, he has demonstrated them in the Cabinet he chose and the initiatives he has pushed in his first days in office. His choice of Neil Gorsuch, who now sits on the Supreme Court where the great Scalia once sat, demonstrates that the president is pretty much a conservative.
For almost 50 years, a counterculture has been growing and spreading across the country. One hears little about it from official Washington and Mainstream Media, but the conservative counterculture has been taking root across America. We see it in state government and in local school boards and local government. Now we are seeing manifestations of the counterculture in the Trump Administration. I saw one such manifestation, over the weekend, in a huge piece about one of presidential strategist Steve Bannon’s favorite writers. He is Neil Howe.
Howe has been writing for some 40 years. He began his career as an early managing editor of The American Spectator. In 1987, he wrote a featured piece in the Spectator’s Twentieth Anniversary issue. In it, he outlined thoughts that he would eventually refine for the book Bannon admires, The Fourth Turning, published in 1997. In Howe’s 1987 magazine piece, he wrote that, “Twenty years from now we may be so burdened by demographic and economic liabilities that visions of a better future will seem practically unattainable without onerous and long-term sacrifices in both our public and private lives.” In his 1997 book, Howe writes of generational cycles that America has experienced since the American Revolution. We now have entered a cycle of crisis, he writes, that will not end until 2025. Given how prescient Howe was when he laid down his 1987 thoughts, I think it would be wise to take him seriously now.
Bannon has, and I would think the president has, too. We have a population alert to the problems we face. It is the conservative counterculture around the country. Last week’s military action suggests conservatism can be effective without being ideological.Much of Georgia will be slammed with sleet, ice, snow and high winds Wednesday, and there could be power outages that will rival the days thousands went without electricity in 2000, according to a National Weather Service briefing given to agencies based at the Georgia Emergency Management Agency’s command center just before noon Tuesday.
“This could be even worse” than the storm of 2000, said meteorologist Dan Darbe.
Also Tuesday. President Obama declared an emergency in the State of Georgia and ordered federal aid to supplement state and local response efforts.
Initially, the weather service had warned of two storms coming through Georgia this week. But Darbe said, “it’s no longer two events. It’s one long winter event” that will have “crippling” ice that will build up on the roads and power lines.
Virtually the entire state will be hit but the worst areas will be Atlanta and east to Athens and Augusta.
The bad weather will start in the early morning hours Wednesday, between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. Northeast Georgia could get as much a seven to nine inches and metro Atlanta could see four to seven inches, Darbe said.
“The ice is the big story,” he said.
On Wednesday, high winds will make conditions even worse with gusts getting up to 25 mph. Even sustained winds are expected to be high on Thursday – 15-20 mph.
That “will increase the threat of ice on power lines,” Darbe said.
Earlier Tuesday, the winter storm warning posted for the far northern suburbs northward was expanded to include all of metro Atlanta and the region south to the Dublin area, while Gov. Nathan Deal extended the state of emergency declaration to include another 43 counties south of Atlanta.
The new winter storm warning, which was posted at 5:30 a.m. Tuesday, is in effect through 1 p.m. Thursday.
While roads were becoming treacherous across extreme North Georgia, there were no significant travel problems in the immediate Atlanta area late Tuesday morning and motorists had no issues getting around.
That wasn’t expected to be the case Tuesday night into Wednesday.
In an ominous-sounding statement issued Tuesday morning, the Weather Service warned, “this winter storm may be of historic proportions for portions of the area.
“We are looking at significant snowfall totals, especially northeast, and significant ice totals, especially along the I-20 corridor,” the Weather Service said. “The highest ice totals will be in a rough wedge generally from the metro Atlanta area and points east — south of I-85 and north of I-16.”
As expected, overnight rain that began around midnight began mixing with or changing into sleet across the northern suburbs around daybreak Tuesday.
Fortunately, the sleet mostly melted on the roads during the morning rush hour, when traffic was much lighter than normal.
“We don’t want people to have a false sense of security as we wake up this morning and the pavement is wet,” Channel 2 meteorologist David Chandley said. “It looks like Wednesday is going to be a tough day.”
At 7:30, sleet was being reported in Kennesaw, Alpharetta, Holly Springs, Lawrenceville and Dunwoody.
The precipitation should taper off later Tuesday, but redevelop early Wednesday, as metro temperatures hover around the freezing mark “and get colder as the precipitation goes on,” Chandley said.
Chandley put the chance of precipitation across metro Atlanta at 100 percent Tuesday and Wednesday, diminishing to 30 percent Thursday morning. Highs Tuesday will be in the upper 30s, while highs Wednesday will be in the low 30s after morning lows in the upper 30s.
“The duration of the precipitation tomorrow is going to be a whole lot longer than today, and we’re going to have a mixed bag of snow and ice,” he predicted. “We’re going to see a whole bunch of ice.”
Most metro school systems canceled classes Tuesday, and authorities urged motorists to stay off the roads if possible.
Click here for full list of school and business closings.
Most metro roadways were wet, but not icy, at 7:30 a.m., said Mark Arum in the AM750 and 95.5FM News/Talk Traffic Center. He said the morning rush hour volume was much lighter than normal.
Temperatures at 8 a.m. included 32 in Dallas, 33 in Alpharetta, 34 in Dunwoody and 38 at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
In northwest Georgia, Cartersville and Dalton both reported flurries at 8 a.m., with temperatures of 30 and 28 respectively. Ga. 20 was blocked by icy conditions west of Cartersville, according to the Georgia Department of Transportation.
Snow was also falling in Athens, Gainesville, Rome and Calhoun, and GDOT reported that all lanes of I-75 in Catoosa County were covered with snow and ice. About 9 a.m., the Georgia State Patrol shut down I-75 southbound in Catoosa after eight separate wrecks occurred near Mile Marker 348.
South of there in Gordon County, multiple wrecks — one involving a possible fatality — were reported by sheriff’s deputies on roads made treacherous by snow and ice.
In northeast Georgia, deputies closed I-985 northbound at exit 16 in Hall County because of icing.
While no ice-related power outages had been reported, Georgia Power crews were working to restore service to 88 customers in the Decatur area after a tree fell across utility lines.
After a soggy night, the rain turned to heavy snowfall before daybreak 85 miles northeast of Atlanta in Helen, which could see up to 7 inches of accumulation, forecasters said. The residents of Helen have buckled down, with city employees spending Monday night in local motels so they could report to work. Most everyone else was staying home, bracing for the ice that could keep Helen on lockdown through the weekend.
One person venturing out in Helen was Gary Allen, who was in a race against the clock, not to mention the thermometer.
The 47-year-old truck driver left a Helen motel Tuesday morning with a haul of fresh produce and three stops to make. He was accompanied by sand dollar-size snowflakes which, so far, weren’t sticking to asphalt, as the temperature hovered just above freezing.
“As long as I can beat the ice, I’ll be okay,” said Allen, who never had to worry about such things in his native Jamaica.
But he had been smack dab in the middle of the storm that hit metro Atlanta two weeks ago. Allen, who lives in Austell, was among those stranded on Atlanta’s interstates, spending one night and the much of the following morning in his 18-wheeler on I-20 east of Six Flags.
He planned to steer clear of the interstates Tuesday, but a treacherous drive to Dawsonville, which normally takes about an hour, awaited.
The good news: It appeared he would have little company on the curvy mountain roads. As the sun rose over the tourist-friendly Alpine village, the only other vehicles spotted were snow plows and sand trucks.
Check today’s full weather report and track changes.
Thursday will begin with wake-up temperatures around 27 degrees, but afternoon highs should reach the low 40s.
Staff writers Rhonda Cook, Christian Boone and Greg Bluestein contributed to this article.I currently sit writing this in the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport awaiting my flight to Denver Sunday morning. I watched the Lightning give up a two-goal and one-goal lead in Dallas, only to lose in overtime. I’ll head to Denver tonight and see what the Lightning can do against one of the worst teams in the league.
Even though the Lightning have gotten points in four straight games for a 2-0-2 record, it simply hasn’t been enough. The Lightning had dug themselves such a hole in the Eastern Conference that even going 4-0 leading up to the trade deadline on March 1st isn’t likely to get the Lightning into the conversation.
Last night, the Lightning gained a point in the standings only to have the cut line for the second wild card spot go up by a point. The fact is, the Lightning have to play two to three wins better than six different teams in the East for the rest of the season to get the wild card. That just doesn’t seem likely, even with the hopeful return of Steven Stamkos sometime in March.
I guarantee that Steve Yzerman didn’t take much time off during the bye week, and scouted players to prepare for the trade deadline. He likely was preparing strategies to buy just in case everyone else in the East came down with the mumps and had to put their AHL teams on the ice. But he certainly was preparing to sell off assets.
Contributing Factors
The expansion draft is going to complicate the trade deadline, especially for teams that might be looking to move a player with term left on their contract. Unless they are a bottom of the line up or depth player, if they’re worth being traded for, they’re probably worth protecting in the draft. The same applies for any player where the team wants to extend their contract as a part of making the trade, like with Kevin Shattenkirk.
The weakness and lack of depth in this year’s draft has lead to speculation that NHL GMs will be more willing than normal to trade away first round draft picks. Yzerman may be able to use that knowledge to get a first round pick on a player he might not otherwise have been able to, or get extra assets out of a deal that normally would have rated a first-round pick as compensation.
The salary cap is also going to be a big deal. Some teams that are buying won’t have much room to take on any salary. Unless the Lightning retain some salary, they may have trouble moving certain players they may otherwise want. However with an expiring contract, that’s not such a big deal for Yzerman to do and get a little extra out of the other team.
Next year’s salary cap and roster will be just as much of a factor. With the salary cap projected to be flat next year, there won’t be much room to factor in raises without offsetting that salary someplace else. The Lightning have a number of restricted free agents that are due raises in their next contract: Tyler Johnson, Ondrej Palat, Jonathan Drouin, and Andrej Sustr. On top of that are the raises already agreed upon for Victor Hedman and Andrei Vasilevskiy.
Needs
The Lightning need a top four defenseman for next season. Preferably someone young that doesn’t need to be protected in the expansion draft but that isn’t necessary. Term on their contract or on team control would be a nice positive.
The Lightning also need future salary cap flexibility. This means trying to move some salary already committed and possibly salary that will otherwise be committed next season.
The last thing needed is to continue to restock the pipeline. The Lightning need a continuous influx of young talent into the system to make this franchise a long term playoff contender. You need a core of players that you build around and then you use young players to fill in the holes for cheap. When the core players start to age, you look to replace them with young players that are becoming more expensive. Otherwise, you trade those players off for more assets. It doesn’t always work out perfectly, but sometimes it’s what you have to do to maintain long term success.
Assets
Unrestricted Free Agents
The Lightning only have two pending unrestricted free agents that are worth selling, Ben Bishop and Brian Boyle.
Bishop has picked up his game since the beginning of the month which should help to reassure other teams that he is ready to step in and be a starter for them. There’s only a couple of teams that make sense at this point.
While Dallas and then St. Louis were popular picks for landing spots for Bishop, Dallas is in a similar position to the Lightning, at 6 points out of the wild card. St. Louis seems happy with Jake Allen, and he’s settled into the starter’s role.
That could leave a team like Calgary that is barely hanging onto a playoff spot. They’ve struggled to find good, consistent goaltending this season and have been splitting time between Chad Johnson and Brian Elliott.
Bishop would likely bring back at least a first-round pick. If the Lightning needed to retain some of his salary for the rest of the season to help the other team with the cap, they could pick up even more, perhaps a middle-round pick or a prospect.
Rumors have been swirling about Boyle for awhile now. He’s one of the better bottom-six options available in the market. And he’s proven he can play up in the lineup, if given support by playmaking linemates who let him shoot the puck. He’s widely viewed by fans as “just a fourth-line grinder,” but he’s got a lot better shooting and goal production that you’d expect from a player with that role.
There’s been plenty of speculation that Edmonton is interested in Boyle, and for good reason. They could use an upgrade at third line center and a little more size. He’s also a great locker room presence who has been to the Stanley Cup Final twice. When I first researched a trade of Boyle, I thought that he’d probably only get a third-round pick, maybe a second at best. But as I’ve dug deeper, I’ve realize that most of the comparables I looked at were those “just a fourth-line grinder” types, and I was probably undervaluing him a bit. With the lower perceived value of first rounders this season, it’s quite possible that Yzerman could swing a first round pick out of an Edmonton for Boyle.
Veterans with Term
There are three players that come up in this section for me; Valtteri Filppula, Jason Garrison, and J.T. Brown.
The speculation around Filppula and Garrison has gone on for a while. With Namestnikov and Point, as well as Peca coming along nicely in the minors, the Lightning have center depth. Even if they were to get rid of Filppula and Tyler Johnson, they’d still have a solid center depth chart and one that would be pretty cheap next season past Stamkos.
Filppula has a partial no-trade clause that will keep some teams from being a buyer on him. He only has one year left on his contract with a $5 million cap hit. He’s had a bit of a resurgence this year after a down season in 2015-16. He’d provide a team with a veteran leader, a faceoff and penalty kill specialist, and a 2nd line center that can play against anyone in the league. A first-round pick would be likely, but with his NMC that forces him to be protected in the expansion draft, and his remaining salary, it may take the Lightning throwing something else in to get that first-round pick.
Garrison is a harder trade to make happen. He’s definitely taken a step back and carries a $4.6 million cap hit through next season. When the Lightning acquired him, it took only a second-round pick due to the money and term on his contract, and Vancouver’s desire to move on from him. To move him now, Yzerman may need to sweeten the deal for another team because of the salary commitment to next season. At this point, I’d accept getting a minimal return just for the salary cap relief next season.
J.T. Brown may be a bit of a surprise, and I do consider him a dark horse for actually being traded. He has a year remaining on his contract at $1.25 million. He is a fine fourth line player that can play up on the third line. He doesn’t get used a lot on the penalty kill in Tampa, but he’s definitely capable of doing so. The return would likely be a middle round pick for him, like a third or fourth rounder. He doesn’t have the same pedigree or offensive skills as Boyle to suggest he’d get more. He would also present a small amount of salary cap relief since he would likely be replaced by a player making about half of his salary.
Restricted Free Agents
The only RFA that I would consider likely to be traded is Tyler Johnson. He’s a restricted free agent in the offseason and due a decent raise from the $3.333 million he’s currently making. He’ll also have salary arbitration rights that will help him get what he wants in salary.
Johnson is a high-end second line center that does it all. His offensive production has suffered the past two seasons, though. I believe there are two primary contributing factors. The first was his broken wrist that didn’t fully heal until somewhere halfway through last season. The second has been his inconsistent linemates. He has been shuffled around a lot, and it’s clear that he does better when he can build chemistry with his line. His rookie season he spent the whole year with Palat on his left wing. His sophomore season he was with Palat and Kucherov all year. But the past two years he has often gotten mixed up with different players.
One thing Johnson does well, no matter what, is produce in the playoffs. He has a knack for playing big in big moments and is the kind of player you want on the ice in big spots during the playoffs. If there is any asset other than Bishop that could net the Lightning a young top-four defenseman, it’s Tyler Johnson.
Someone like Sami Vatanen from the Anaheim Ducks would be very nice. Or even if the Lightning could pry Shea Theodore or Brandon Mountour out of the Ducks, that would be a real coup.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The moment same-sex marriage became legal in New Zealand
New Zealand's parliament has legalised same-sex marriage, the first country in the Asia-Pacific region to do so.
Lawmakers approved the bill, amending the 1955 marriage act, despite opposition from Christian lobby groups.
The bill was passed with a wide majority, with 77 votes in favour and 44 against.
Hundreds of jubilant gay-rights advocates celebrated outside parliament after the bill was passed, calling it a milestone for equality.
People watching from the public gallery and some lawmakers immediately broke into song, singing the New Zealand love song "Pokarekare Ana", AP news agency reported.
Some opinion polls have suggested that about two-thirds of New Zealanders support the reform, although others polls suggest the public are more divided.
Parliamentarians were allowed a conscience vote, and, crucially, the reform had the backing of both the Prime Minister John Key and leader of the opposition David Shearer, the BBC's Phil Mercer in Sydney reports.
Celebrations have been held in pubs and clubs in the capital Wellington, our correspondent adds.
Same-sex civil unions have been legal in New Zealand since 2005.
'Human rights'
"In our society, the meaning of marriage is universal - it's a declaration of love and commitment to a special person," Labour MP Louisa Wall, who introduced the legislation, said.
Historically and culturally, marriage is about man and a woman Bob McCoskrie, Family First
"Nothing could make me more proud to be a New Zealander than passing this bill," she added.
Drag artist Jake Andrew said he learned of the news at a club in Hamilton.
"We cheered, yelled, cried and sang - it was just amazing," he told the BBC.
"I am so happy, not only because I can now marry the person I love, but because New Zealand has moved a step further towards gay and lesbian people becoming completely equal with the rest of our society."
Tania Bermudez and Sonja Fry, a same-sex couple, said the bill was about human rights.
"It means that we can actually call each other wife," Ms Fry said.
However, Conservative Party leader Colin Craig said there were many people who disagreed with the bill.
"We're seeing the politicians make a decision tonight that the people of this country wouldn't make," he said.
Bob McCoskrie, founder of the lobby group Family First, said the bill undermined the traditional concept of marriage.
"Historically and culturally, marriage is about man and a woman, and it shouldn't be touched," he said.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption People gathered in bars and pubs to watch the vote and celebrate the results
New Zealand becomes the 13th country to legalise same-sex marriage.
Other countries include the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, Argentina and Uruguay.
French and British lawmakers have also voted in favour of legislation allowing gay marriage, although the bills have not yet been passed into law.
No other country in the Asia-Pacific region allows gay marriage.
Australian members of parliament overwhelmingly voted against a bill that would have legalised same-sex marriages in September. However, some states allow civil unions for same-sex couples.
China does not allow gay marriage. However, transsexuals who have undergone surgery are able to marry someone of the opposite sex, provided their new gender is verified by the local public security authorities.French authorities are under pressure after reports one of the killers had been arrested over links to terrorism but then released
The teenage jihadis who murdered a priest celebrating mass in a French church made a video pledging their allegiance to Islamic State before the attack, it was reported on Wednesday.
Two men, believed to be Adel Kermiche and his accomplice, named by French investigators on Thursday as Abdel Malik Petitjean, 19, are shown in the video released by Isis’s Amaq news agency.
The minute-long film shows one of the men speaking in Arabic, while the other nods in agreement. At the end both pray out loud. The second man is displaying a piece of paper on which the Isis flag is printed.
A still from a video released via Isis’s news channel, claiming to show the two attackers Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Petitjean.
It is the third time in nine days Isis followers in Europe have sent video footage pledging allegiance to the Islamist group before carrying out attacks. The previous two films were made by an Afghan refugee who hacked at passengers on a train in Würzburg, Germany, wounding five people on 18 July, and a 27-year-old Syrian who blew himself up outside a bar in Ansbach, also in Germany, injuring 15 people on 24 July.
Witnesses to the Normandy church attack say Kermiche and the second man, a 19-year old from Aix-les-Bains in the Savoie region, also filmed themselves slitting the throat of Father Jacques Hamel, 85, as he celebrated mass in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen.
French authorities have come under intense pressure to explain how they let Kermiche loose after judges believed his claims that he regretted trying to join Isis and was not an extremist.
Kermiche had twice attempted to reach Syria to join Isis when he appeared before an investigating judge earlier this year, it emerged on Wednesday. Despite repeat warnings from the state prosecutor that there was a major risk he would reoffend if freed from prison, he was given parole after convincing judges he wanted a new start “to see my friends, to get married”.
He was ordered to wear an electronic tag to monitor his movements, but Kermiche, 19, used his freedom to murder the Catholic priest on Tuesday, forcing the elderly cleric to his knees before slitting his throat.
The teenager and his accomplice took five others hostage, including three nuns and two worshippers, one of whom, an 86-year-old parishioner, they left for dead after trying to cut his throat. The attackers were shot by police as they walked out of the church.
It was the second major terrorist attack in France in less than two weeks after an Isis follower ploughed a lorry into crowds celebrating Bastille Day on 14 July in Nice, killing 84 people and injuring hundreds more.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jacques Hamel during a church service in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, France. Photograph: EPA
On Wednesday the wife of the injured hostage said the attackers had handed her husband, Guy, a phone and demanded that he take photos or video of Hamel after he had been killed. Her husband was then knifed in four places by the attackers and is now in hospital with serious injuries.
The woman, identified only as Jeanine, told RMC radio that her husband played dead to stay alive. Two nuns were held hostage along with the couple and the priest.
“The terrorists held me with a revolver at my neck,” she said, adding it was not clear to her now whether the weapon was real or fake. “He [the priest] fell down looking upwards, toward us.”
Shock and grief at what France’s president, François Hollande, described as an “act by Islamic State terrorists”, turned to anger 24 hours after the attack, when details of Kermiche’s release from jail were revealed.
Details from the police investigation into Kermiche, published by Le Monde, showed he was first interviewed by anti-terrorist officers on 20 March 2015 when an Adel Bouaoun, also from Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, entered Syria carrying a French identity card in Kermiche’s name.
The Guardian view on terror in Europe: the search for a political answer | Editorial Read more
Three days later Kermiche disappeared, but was arrested in Munich that evening on a coach to Belgrade carrying his brother’s identity card.
Kermiche’s father told police he was a religious fanatic and his sister added: “It took two months (for him to become radicalised) and he was no longer my little brother. It was religion above everything … I don’t know what happened to him, it was a real brainwashing.”
He was sent back to France where he was given conditional parole while awaiting trial. He spent his 18th birthday in police custody and was officially put under investigation on 28 March, then released under court supervision requiring that he report to police and remain in the area.
On 11 May 2015, less than two months later, Kermiche broke the terms of his probation and flew to Istanbul with a 15-year-old friend he had encountered two weeks previously on Facebook. The teenagers were expelled from Turkey and Kermiche was flown back to France where he was placed in jail awaiting trial.
The 15-year-old accomplice told detectives their aim had been to go to Syria and “die there as quickly as possible”.
While in jail, Kermiche, described by police as “naive and easily influenced”, was interviewed between October 2015 and February 2016 for a character report, which found he had been treated for psychological problems between the ages of six and 13.
A primary school report stated: “Angel or demon? Depends on the day, sometimes a model child … more often aggressive, angry and not in a fit state to work.” The report also stated that he was expelled from secondary school in his second year for “behavioural problems” and had also spent time in a hospital secure ward and psychiatric unit. Although teachers said he was brighter than other children, he was warned about physical and verbal violence against classmates. He left school at 16.
Le Monde said the character report was produced when Kermiche appeared before the judge in February this year when he insisted he was not an extremist, citing the fact he often missed morning prayers because he had difficulty getting up |
this topic, check out the exchange between Yasheng Huang and Eric X. Li in the January/February 2013 issue of Foreign Affairs.)
Now Ron Unz has put his oar into these murky waters with a piece titled “How Social Darwinism Made Modern China.” American Conservative, March 11, 2013 The great interest of Unz’s article is that it introduces human biodiversity [HBD] a.k.a. race into the argument.
Unz’s inspiration here is Gregory Clark’s 2008 book A Farewell to Alms. Clark, an economic historian, argued that British society for centuries favored certain characteristics of personality and intelligence—loosely, the “bourgeois virtues”: that persons possessed of these characteristics had prospered and borne more children than those not so possessed: that since personality and intelligence are considerably heritable, and a good quantity of downward mobility inevitable given the birthrate differential, the result was a trickle-down bourgeoisification of British society: and that this was the underlying cause of Britain’s sensational economic success in the 19th century.
Unz then asks: Can some similar analysis be applied to China? If it can, what are the implications for China’s future?
With supporting documentation from published historical research, Unz argues that such an analysis can indeed be made.
He lays great stress on the long history of meritocratic promotion into the Chinese upper classes:
Across the six centuries of these two dynasties [the Ming and the Ch’ing, 1368-1911] less than 6 percent of China’s ruling elites came from the ruling elites of the previous generation...
Those elites, like Clark’s Britons (but unlike those of early 21st-century America) produced far more offspring than did the poor and feckless:
Each generation, the poorest disappeared, the less affluent failed to replenish their numbers, and all those lower rungs on the economic ladder were filled by the downwardly mobile children of the fecund wealthy.
It is, as Unz boldly admits right there in his title, an argument from—indeed, a partial rehabilitation of—Social Darwinism, applying basic biological principles of heritability and selection to the development of societies.
If, like me, you have always thought that the Social Darwinists were on to something, Ron’s your man.
He even gives favorable mentions to a couple of actual early 20th-century Social Darwinists: E.A. Ross and Lothrop Stoddard, both of whom predicted, on racial grounds, a successful, modernized China challenging the white nations for supremacy.
Given that neither Ross nor Stoddard was particularly knowledgeable about China, and given the poor track record of China prediction among people who were, I’d say there’s a big element of luck there. Unz does not mention Rodney Gilbert.
Still, it is encouraging to see HBD being brought back into the argument by a writer of Unz’s talent and resources. (He is the publisher of The American Conservative.) As he says:
The impact of such strong selective forces obviously manifests at multiple levels, with cultural software being far more flexible and responsive than any gradual shifts in innate tendencies, and distinguishing between evidence of these two mechanisms is hardly a trivial task. But it seems quite unlikely that the second, deeper sort of biological human change would not have occurred during a thousand years or more of these relentlessly shaping pressures, and simply to ignore or dismiss such an important possibility is unreasonable. Yet that seems to have been the dominant strain of Western intellectual belief for the last two or three generations.
Of course biology doesn’t explain everything about social development across history. Probably it does not explain very much. It must surely explain something, though; it must be a factor.
One of the commenters on Unz’s piece raises the obvious comparison of North and South Korea, the geopolitical equivalent of a Twin Study. As a friend of mine likes to say when this comes up, a more revealing comparison would be between North Korea and some place equally badly governed—Zimbabwe, say: “Sure, the Norks are crazy, but it’s high-IQ craziness!”
It can’t possibly be the case that the fortunes of millions of souls across hundreds of years have been perfectly unaffected by basic forces of biological change: inheritance of characteristics and natural selection. Yet that is what current Western ideology demands we believe; and that is the premise of popular books about socio-historical development by authors like Jared Diamond or Acemoglu and Robinson (concerning which latter duo, Unz offers some pointed remarks).
Unz’s piece is a very welcome corrective to this distortion. As he says, we of the West are working from a model of reality that is false; or at the very least, is ideologically blind to an important factor. That puts us at a disadvantage with a proud and competitive people like the Chinese, who do not share our peculiar phobias. And this is especially so in an age when the biological sciences will underpin major new technologies.
There are a few nits to pick in “How Social Darwinism Made Modern China.” Unz himself picks one of them: the fact that the Japanese and Koreans show the same elevated mean IQ as the Chinese and have modernized very successfully in spite of having socioeconomic histories quite different from China’s.
It is, too, a stretch to describe Imperial China, or for that matter modern China, as an “orderly and law-based society.” Robert van Gulik told good stories, but the common reality of Chinese justice was bribery and the beating of suspects until they confessed, or died. (In civil cases it was not unusual for both defendant and plaintiff to be beaten.) Foreign observers—including, in the run-up to the Opium Wars, common sailors from Charles Dickens’ Britain—were shocked at the arbitrariness and cruelty of Chinese justice.
Respectable scholars have also questioned the degree to which traditional Chinese society was meritocratic. I don’t know the facts of this matter, but I do know there’s a difference of informed opinion. I imagine Unz would respond, fairly enough, that since the society was considerably meritocratic, at worst the developments he described might have proceeded more slowly under different quantitative assumptions.
Here’s another nit:
During the Cold War, the enormous governmental investments of the Soviet regime in many fields produced nothing, since they were based on a model of reality that was both unquestionable and also false.
Surely they didn’t produce nothing. Late-Soviet society certainly had dire shortcomings, but it sustained two hundred million people in a condition much better than Third World misery, with nuclear weapons and a space program to boot.
A person who is not a blank-slate universalist—a person like, say, Ron Unz—might even argue that the Soviets made as much as can be made of the Russian people, given their historico-biologically developed statistical profile of behavioral and personality types. (I hope my Russian friends won’t think I am arguing this. I am only saying it might be argued.)
Those are sidebar points for discussion, though, not refutations of anything central to Unz’s argument. Some of them are chewed over in the comment thread on the article. (Which also contains some idiocies. Particularly hilarious was the Chinese guy writing that: “We avoid overly risky situations.” Plainly this commenter has never ridden the Chinatown bus to Atlantic City, or observed play at the tables in Macau.)
Once again, Ron Unz has written a spirited and well-informed piece of commentary that will make a lot of people mad—including a lot of the kind of people I like to see made mad—and stir up some interesting debate.
He may even have advanced the prospects for making HBD a respectable component of discussions about social, historical, and political topics, including—bless the thought!—immigration.
The fortress of utopian egalitarianism has been looking more and more impregnable these past few years, so perhaps it is foolish to hope: but this latest cannonball from Ron Unz may perhaps have knocked a few stones from its parapet.
If it has, then all of us who revere truth, however discomfiting, and despise lies, however pretty, should give hearty thanks to Ron Unz.
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire's writings at VDARE.com can do so here.Mohamed Fahmy, a Canadian-Egyptian journalist, was the Cairo bureau chief for Al Jazeera's English-language network when he was arrested on Dec. 29, 2013, by Egyptian authorities and held in jail for 412 days on charges of terrorism and "broadcasting false news." He was sentenced to seven years in prison and is currently preparing his appeal case.
I am thankful for the campaign initiated by Al Jazeera and the millions of supporters of Peter Greste, Baher Mohamed and I, including the hashtag #FreeAJStaff – thankful to those of you who kept our story alive while we three journalists fought for survival behind bars.
Despite this gratitude, my celebratory mood has been rather reserved in this state of semi-freedom I have enjoyed since being released on bail, pending appeal, by the Egyptian courts.
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The integrity I have embraced throughout my journalism career is why I feel obliged to reveal what Al Jazeera has opted to hide from the eyes of the public. I may lose the privilege of being able to write these words if the judge decides to boot me back to prison at any stage of the retrial.
The news I must reveal, unknown to most outside observers, is that unfortunately, there was "evidence" to incriminate us in this case.
This is because Baher Mohamed – my colleague, cellmate, and friend – had confessed, under duress according to him, the result of which was a mind-boggling 20-page testimony he signed which agrees perfectly with the blanket accusations brought against us – accusations which include assisting the Muslim Brotherhood, who have been designated a terrorist group, and fabricating news to portray Egypt as being in a state of civil war. The media did not pick up on the confessions because the press was not allowed in the courtroom during the first twenty minutes while the prosecutor presented the case.
I learned the details of this farcical testimony during my detention, and wrote from prison to two Al Jazeera executives – Salah Negm, the director of news, and Al Anstey, the managing director – demanding that they contest it in court. All we had to do was ask the judge to question Baher again in court, citing duress during the initial interrogation. I also asked management to display in court video reports we produced that would dismiss Baher's allegations.
An Al Jazeera security representative visited us in prison and relayed the message of the network: "It [the confession] will disappear – don't worry." I knew it would not, as I lost sleep behind bars, and indeed it came back to haunt us when the judge referred to it in his judgment report explaining the verdict that led to my seven-year prison sentence.
Upon my release on bail, I spoke to Farag Fathi, the long-time Al Jazeera network lawyer who represented my colleagues Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed. Because of bad experiences my colleagues had with Mr. Fathi in the past in cases unrelated to ours, I rejected Mr. Fathi and instead employed lawyer Khaled Abu Bakr, whose fees Al Jazeera at first refused to pay because, they said, they were worried he might defame the network in court.
Mr. Fathi told me he had been instructed not to contest Baher's confessions. Al Jazeera had launched a $150-million civil lawsuit against the Egyptian government a month before our verdict, which apparently took priority over our criminal case. This negligence of responsibility, I believe, contributed directly to our sentencing.
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Mr. Fathi then delivered the final blow to me and my two cellmates when he abruptly quit in court, without our prior knowledge, and yelled a denunciation of Al Jazeera: "The network is [selling out] their journalists behind bars by opting to sue Egypt… against my advice."
I know how the grapevine works in Al Jazeera and that the managers who defend the actions of the channel are only parroting the instructions filtered down from its Qatari chairman, who happens to be from the royal family. It is Qatar's business if they opt to sue Egypt, but not when I am stuck in a cage in such a politicized case.
I have been clear in my rhetoric that this case is about freedom of speech in the sense that three journalists have been silenced. Yet, what can't be ignored is the political score-settling between Qatar and Egypt that has left us pawns behind bars. The verdict killed two birds with one stone: Egypt sent a clear message to my fellow reporters to toe the government's line, and delivered a punch in the face to Qatar for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.
Before the appeal began, I called Al Jazeera from the prison hospital and gave them the choice of appointing one of two prominent lawyers of my choice to represent me. The head of the channel refused both of them because, in his words, "They don't suit the politics of the channel." I then politely presented the name of Negad El Borai, a lawyer Al Jazeera had approached earlier in the initial case to defend us (he had been unable due to short notice). Once again, my request was rebuffed -- Al Jazeera would not pay for him. Thankfully, Mr. El Borai agreed to waive the majority of his fees. He did a great job on Jan. 1, 2015, in the appeals court. He stood outside the court in his elegant suit and eloquently defended me to scores of journalists: "If you work for Al Jazeera it does not automatically mean that you are in the Muslim Brotherhood."
Nevertheless, the e-mail my family received from Mr. Negm, the director of news, relaying the message of his masters was clear. "We will not reimburse you for your legal fees for appeal."
Amal Clooney, the prominent British-Lebanese lawyer, also waived her fees to represent me and only requested minimal payments for her office staff and expenses related to the job. She wrote a nine-page annex submitted with my appeal in which she highlighted Egypt's violation of international treaties regarding the lack of due process and the medical negligence in prison that left me with a permanent arm disability. She continues to challenge all parties that have harmed my chances for freedom, including Al Jazeera.
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I was able to pay these lawyers their highly reduced fees only after I started a crowd-funding campaign. I am extremely thankful to the hundreds of supporters who donated and sent messages to me in prison, including a $10,000 donation from Sweden's Kality Foundation and a $23,000 contribution to the next stage of my defence from the London-based Media Legal Defence Initiative.
Today, Al Jazeera has opted to continue its neglect of my case by releasing statements which seek to defame me (even though I had once defended them in court when a prosecutor alleged that Al Jazeera had destroyed Iraq). Part of a statements they submitted to my former employer CNN and British broadcaster Sky News stated: "Mohamed decided to have his own lawyers despite the fact that we elected to cover his legal fees….People reporting what he is saying should be mindful of the strain and literal or effective duress under which he may be speaking. It is telling that he is critical of everyone other than those holding him."
I have raised my concerns to the network countless times in a constructive manner. They left me no choice but to go public when all my warning signs were met with deaf ears. The managers do not understand that there is no space for mistakes when one's life is at stake.
I recently asked Amr El Deeb, the new Al Jazeera-appointed lawyer representing Baher: "Are you going to contest his confessions in court in the retrial?" I have received no answer.
I have not lost sight of the Egyptian prosecution who unjustly put me behind bars, and I have been the most outspoken in court and in my statements released from prison throughout the past year against my captors. However, challenging Al Jazeera's epic negligence on behalf of scores of current and former staff members is also my responsibility before they end up behind bars.The full text reads:
February 10, 2016
Dear Congress,
By now you have seen my budget for the next fiscal year. In poring over the numbers, you may have realized that we are all out of fucks to allocate for the coming year. Unfortunately, due to poor planning, most fucks were foolishly spent on things like my birth certificate, the Affordable Care act, gay marriage, and the economy. Don’t worry. I’ve found ways to work around this shortfall in my new budget.
The most obvious new line item in the budget is the new $10 gas tax I’m proposing. This new revenue should more than offset the fucks shortfall, and when we have a citizenry driving electric vehicles and using public transportation, I think we’ll have more than enough fucks to give. In fact, I project a surplus in just five short years, provided we approve this budget.
You’ll also notice we’ve set aside 11 billion dollars for the homeless. One of the major issues the homeless have faced in our country has been the inability for anyone to give a fuck, and now that we’re all out of fucks, I think we should give them money instead. 11 billion dollars. Let’s get that approved with all due haste.
As our office began putting this budget together, we realized that we did have one fuck left to allocate, so I looked at the military budget and asked the team, could we give a fuck? Indeed we could, which is why there is a slight increase in military spending — 2.1% to be exact – in this year’s budget.
We look forward to working with you on getting this budget approved. We would like to avoid another government shutdown, and, as we’ve been more than clear about, we’re all out of fucks to give – so let’s avoid going down that path.
President Barack ObamaBolo Zenden has refused to rule out a return to Liverpool as part of the club’s attempt to rebuild Brendan Rodgers’ coaching team.
Liverpool manager Rodgers and the club’s American owners, Fenway Sports Group, are set to recruit a new assistant manager and first-team coach following last week’s decision to sack Colin Pascoe and Mike Marsh from their coaching roles at Anfield.
Pako Ayestaran, Rafael Benítez’s former assistant at Liverpool, and former Manchester United first-team coach Rene Meulensteen are understood to be the leading candidates to work with Rodgers.
Zenden was signed by Benítez in 2005 and later played in the 2007 European Cup final
But Zenden, who made 47 appearances for Liverpool under Benítez between 2005 and 2007, has admitted he would relish a return to the Premier League after being asked about the Anfield position.
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Did you know Telegraph Sport has a Liverpool Facebook page?
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“I keep all options open for the new season,” Zenden said. “I always enjoyed my time in the Premier League.”
Former Holland winger Zenden, who also played for Chelsea, Middlesbrough and Sunderland, is currently working with PSV Eindhoven’s reserve team following a spell as Benítez’s assistant at Stamford Bridge in 2013.[rust-dev] Using libgreen/libnative
Greetings rusticians! Recently pull request #10965 landed, so the rust standard library no longer has any scheduling baked into it, but rather it's refactored out into two libraries. This means that if you want a 1:1 program, you can jettison all M:N support with just a few `extern mod` statements. A brief overview of the current state of things is: 1. All programs not using std::rt directly should still continue to operate as usual today 2. All programs still start up in M:N mode, although this will likely change once 1:1 I/O work has been completed 3. There are two more libraries available, libgreen and libnative, which allow custom fine-grained control over how programs run. 4. Whenever a new task is spawned, it is by default spawned as a "sibling" which means that it is spawned in the same mode as the spawning thread. This means that if a green thread spawns a thread then it will also be a green thread, while a native thread will spawn another OS thread. With this migration, there have been a few changes in the public APIs, and things still aren't quite where I'd like them to be. PR #11153 is the last major step in this process as it allows you to link to both libnative and libgreen, yet still choose which one is used to boot your program. Some breaking changes you may notice are: * it's still not possible to easily start up in 1:1 mode - This is fixed by #11153. In the meantime, you can use #[start] with native::start in order to boot up in 1:1 mode. Be warned though that the majority of I/O is still missing from libnative (see PR #11159 for some progress) https://gist.github.com/8162357 * std::rt::{start, run} are gone - These are temporarily moved into green/native while #[boot] is getting sorted out. The green/native counterparts perform as you would expect. https://gist.github.com/8162372 * std::rt::start_on_main_thread is gone - This function has been removed with no direct counterpart. As a consequence of refactoring the green/native libraries, the "single threaded" spawn mode for a task has been removed (this doesn't make sense in 1:1 land). This behavior can be restored by directly using libnative and libgreen. You can use libgreen to spin up a pool of schedulers and then use libnative for the main task to do things like GUI management. https://gist.github.com/8162399 And of course with the removal of some features comes the addition of new ones! Some new things you may notice are: * libstd is no longer burdened with libgreen and libnative! This means that the compile times for libstd should be a little faster, but most notably those applications only using libstd will have even less code pulled in than before, meaning that libstd is that much closer to being used in a "bare metal" context. It's still aways off, but we're getting closer every day! * libgreen has a full-fleged SchedPool type. You can see a bit of how it's used in gist I posted above. This type is meant to represent a dynamic pool of schedulers. Right now it's not possible to remove a scheduler from the pool (requires some more thought and possibly libuv modifications), but you can add new schedulers dynamically to the pool. This type supercedes the ThreadPool type in libextra at this point, and management of a SchedPool should provide any fine-grained control needed over the 'M' number in an M:N runtime. * libgreen and libnative can be used directly to guarantee spawning a green or a native task, regardless of the flavor of task that is doing the spawning. In the coming months, I plan on filling out more native I/O to bring it up to speed with the M:N implementation. I also plan on rewriting the core components of extra::comm to be performant in both scheduling modes in order to bring the extra::{comm, arc, sync} primitives up to date with their std::comm counterparts. If there are any questions about any of this, feel free to ask me! This thread is always available, and I'm also reachable as acrichto on IRC or alexcrichton on github.Alan Wake on PC gets a release date. It is the oh my goodness it’s only two weeks away. The 16th Feb. And tis being sensibly priced too, for a two year old game, at $30. Developers Remedy have been putting some proper effort into the PC version. Not only has it been souped up with improved graphics, but it’ll also support multiple monitors and stereoscopic 3D.
It’s one of those lovely moments of a PC developer returning to their roots and remembering why they loved it in the first place. Remedy’s CTO, Markus Mäki, released upon the press:
“We’ve done our best to do justice to the PC version and do things the way they should be done for PC. The PC version looks absolutely beautiful. We’re bringing the game to life in a whole new way.”
Here’s the full list of what’s new in the PC version:Bitcoin Weekly Recap 7-1-2016
Another French Politician Denounces Bitcoin
Yet another French politician has come out against Bitcoin recently. This time, it was Paris’ Bernard Debré, who currently represents the city as a National Assembly of France deputy. After learning that some people are using Bitcoin to purchase drugs online, Debré responded to a question about how to deal with the situation by calling for the well-known digital currency to be banned in the city. He then went a step further and suggested that Maison du Bitcoin – the Bitcoin center that was first opened in Paris in 2014 - should be removed from the city entirely.
Referring to that online Darknet where those drugs were being bought and sold, Debré noted that you can purchase almost anything from it. He cited weapons, explosives, drugs, and other illicit items among the items he found listed for sale. The Assembly member reportedly believes that a ban on Bitcoin operations in the French capital will have a significant impact on reducing Parisian participation in that online criminal activity.
Indian Merchant Payment Processing Brings Bitcoin to Main Street
BitPay has partnered with India’s Coinsecure Bitcoin trading platform to successfully provide merchants in India with the ability to accept Bitcoin payments from the nation’s 1.2 billion consumers. That means that the world’s second-most populous country will see the digital currency take on a more mainstream feel as Indian Bitcoin users begin to use their coins to purchase tangible goods. Merchants who accept the payments will be able to receive the country’s national currency as payouts.
The achievement is being promoted as an excellent opportunity for the people of India, who often confront a variety of payment challenges in their everyday lives. Many lack basic banking services, and many others have difficulty getting debit or credit cards. This new option will enable those consumers to buy and use Bitcoin for online purchases, expanding e-commerce in the country even as it expands awareness and acceptance for Bitcoin.
New Plutus App Makes Crypto Wallets Contactless Cards
Despite new technologies designed to facilitate merchant ability to accept Bitcoin for purchases, overall acceptance for digital currency payments has been a slow work in progress. London-based startup Plutus hopes to accelerate that mainstreaming process with a new app designed to enable any contactless payment terminal to accept either Bitcoin or Ethereum payments. Unlike many previous payment terminal options, however, the new app will enable the payments even when the merchant does not actually accept digital currency payments.
Bitcoin and Ethereum are converted during the payment process so that the actual payment amount is presented as fiat currency. As a result, merchants will not only not need to actively accept digital currency as payment, but will not even be aware that those currencies are being used.
The company plans to launch the decentralized exchange that will provide support for the app in the fall, once testing and security evaluations are completed. The app is currently ready, but won’t be unveiled until sometime this winter. Users will then be allowed to register, with Know Your Customer processes in pace to ensure that the company is in compliance with regulatory requirements.
July 1 Florida Ruling: Judge to Determine Whether Bitcoin is Money
The debate about whether Bitcoin can be accurately considered money is about to get even more interesting as a Florida judge is set to rule on a money-laundering case on July 1, 2016. At issue is a question raised by the defense in a money laundering trial that has its origins in an attempt by defendant Michel Espinoza to sell $30,000 in Bitcoin during an undercover sting operation at a motel in Miami Beach. When prosecutors charged him with money laundering violations and prohibitions against operating unlicensed money transmitting businesses, Espinoza’s attorneys countered by arguing that the laws could not apply since Bitcoin is not considered to be money.
This decision is likely to only add to the ongoing confusion among officials across the country, as different states and federal agencies have reached different conclusions about Bitcoin’s status. Defined as property by the IRS and currency by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, how Bitcoin is ultimately addressed remains an open question. It is unlikely that this ruling will be the final word on the matter.The Wyoming Democratic Party decided to forward a petition to the Democratic National Committee to propose a change in the way the state allocates its delegates.
The proposed change would give Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersSenate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Bernie Sanders Town Hall finishes third in cable news race, draws 1.4 million viewers Woman to undecided Biden: 'Just say yes' to 2020 bid MORE five district-level delegates and party front-runner Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails County GOP in Minnesota shares image comparing Sanders to Hitler Holder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' MORE three delegates, Politico reported. The shift would give Sanders an additional delegate.
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The change is meant to better represent the outcome of the Wyoming presidential caucuses.
In the caucuses, Sanders won 55.7 percent of the vote, while Clinton received 44.3 percent, according to The Associated Press.
"I have studied the Delegate Selection Plan and found that this is wrong," Richard Kusaba, a Wyoming land surveyor, wrote in his petition.
Kusaba said after Nevada, the "party realized that it needs Bernie Sanders' supporters in order to win the presidency," according to Fox News.
National Democrats were looking to prevent the chaos and violence that erupted at the Nevada convention earlier this month.
DNC Vice Chairman Ray Buckley, who attended the Wyoming convention, said everything remained orderly.
"All's well in Wyoming," Buckley wrote on Facebook.High school teacher, 23, 'tweeted nude photos of herself, called her students JAIL BAIT and talked about getting high'
A 23-year-old math teacher has been suspended from her job after it was revealed she had been posting half-naked photos of herself on Twitter and joking about using drugs at school.
Carly McKinney, a math teacher at Overland High School in Aurora, Colorado, was placed on paid administrative leave on Tuesday after admitting to a local TV station that she created the Twitter account CarlyCrunkBear (@crunk_bear) with the help of a friend.
The page, which has since been taken down, included explicit photos of the blonde teacher along with multiple posts about smoking marijuana on school grounds.
Trouble: Carly McKinney, a math teacher at Overland High School in Aurora, was placed on paid administrative leave on Tuesday after admitting to a local TV station that she created the Twitter account CarlyCrunkBear
Questionable conduct: The 23-year-old math teacher apparently referred to a student who called her Ms McCutie as 'jail bait' online Racy: Carla's Twitter page included provocative photos along with many posts about using drugs
The explosive allegations came to light after 9News was tipped off about the Twitter account by a viewer Monday. McKinney later admitted to the TV station that she was behind the tweets.
One post read: 'Naked. Wet. Stoned,' while another said: 'Watching a drug bust go down in the parking lot. It's funny cuz I have weed in my car in the staff parking lot.'
Other messages suggested that the teacher was grading papers while under the influence of drugs and spending time on Twitter 'instead of being productive' during the school day.
In one post allegedly referring to a student, McKinney wrote: 'Just got called Ms McCutie. Point for being clever, however you are still jailbait.'
In a bizarre twist, one of the most revealing photos allegedly depicting McKinney doing a handstand wearing only a paid of lacy panties was retweeted by DJ Diplo to promote his newest single, Express Yourself, iDigital Times reported.
The first-year teacher and a friend told 9News that the Twitter account was intended as a parody.
The 23-year-old woman claimed that she was not aware of some of the provocative posts her unnamed friend was making, adding that she never was in possession of drugs on school property.
Naughty: The 23-year-old teacher claimed that she and a friend created the page as a parody, and that it she never was in possession of drugs during the school day
'Girl gone wild': McKinney joked on her Twitter account that she was grading papers while high and kept a stash of marijuana in her car on school property
Cherry Creek School District officials responded by saying that all employees are trained about social media use and are encouraged not to post anything online that they would not want to put on the classroom blackboard.
Officials, however, added that teachers have first amendment right to free speech, especially in so far as personal social media sites are concerned
In a phone interview with MailOnline Tuesday evening, Tustin Amole, director of communications for Cherry Creek School District, said that officials launched an investigation into McKinney's conduct after learning of the allegations from 9News.
Short career: McKinney has not been named in any other complaints during her tenure at the school
Scene: A Cherry Creek Schools teacher must explain to district officials why a Twitter page contained half-naked photos and a claim of possessing marijuana on school grounds
Amole emphasized that the paid administrative leave is not a disciplinary action, but rather a routine measure.
According to the district spokesperson, the main goal of the probe is to determine whether the 23-year-old educator used or was in possession of drugs on school property, which is illegal under state law.
Amole went on to say that to the best of her knowledge, McKinney has not been named in any other complaints during her tenure at the school.What Is, And Isn't, Considered Domestic Terrorism
Enlarge this image toggle caption Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
The investigation into the Las Vegas shooting is still in the early stages, yet there already is a familiar debate about whether to call it an act of "domestic terrorism."
"It was an act of pure evil," President Trump said — but the president and law enforcement officials have refrained from calling it terrorism.
Several members of Congress, from both parties, did describe the attack as terrorism, including Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee.
Two key questions crop up every time this debate takes place.
First, what was the attacker's motive?
The Patriot Act defines domestic terrorism as an attempt to "intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping."
So far, law enforcement officials say they don't have an answer on the motives of Stephen Paddock, 64.
"We don't know what his belief system was at this time," said Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, referring to the shooter.
The second important point is that there isn't a federal charge of "domestic terrorism." The Patriot Act's definition gives the Justice Department broad authority to investigate an individual or any group a suspect might be affiliated with. But the federal law doesn't come with an actual criminal charge.
To be charged with terrorism, a person has to be suspected of acting on behalf of one of nearly 60 groups that the State Department has declared a foreign terrorist organization. Some are well-known, including the Islamic State and al-Qaida, while others are far more obscure. Most, but not all, are Islamist.
A person who carries out a mass attack and survives can face a range of charges, but unless the person is linked to one of the banned groups, a federal terrorism charge won't be one of them.
Consider the following cases, all of which prompted discussions of domestic terrorism:
-- Suspect James Alex Fields is accused of driving his car into a crowd in Charlottesville, Va., in August, killing a female counterprotester who came out to march against white nationalists. Fields faces state murder charges — but not terrorism.
-- Dylann Roof has been convicted of and sentenced to death for a host of federal and state crimes in the shooting deaths of nine African-Americans at a Charleston, S.C., church in 2015. He said he wanted to start a race war. But terrorism wasn't among the many charges.
-- Timothy McVeigh was widely described as carrying out the worst act of domestic terrorism when he killed 168 people in a 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. By his own admission, his motive was clearly political — he hated the federal government. Yet he was convicted of and put to death for killing federal officers and variety of other charges — but not for terrorism.
The al-Qaida attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, made terrorism virtually synonymous with Islamist extremism in the minds of many. The political debate appears to be shifting, with growing numbers calling for domestic extremism to be identified as terrorism as well. But that's a political discussion, not a legal one.
Legally speaking, many in law enforcement say they are wary of creating a criminal charge of domestic terrorism.
They say they already have the tools to investigate and bring charges in any case involving an attempted or actual mass attack — and creating a domestic terrorism charge could quickly raise all sorts of First Amendment questions, about free speech, religion and ideology.
There's one additional wrinkle to consider: Some states, including Nevada, have their own anti-terrorism laws. But those state laws tend to be invoked rarely.
Greg Myre is a national security correspondent. Follow him @gregmyre1.The state’s highest criminal court Wednesday morning dismissed all three appeals filed on Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s behalf, saying his lawyers neglected to include everything needed on the petitions.
The Court of Criminal Appeals gave Paxton 10 days to add what was missing — a copy of the concurring opinion from the Dallas-based 5th Court of Appeals, which in June rejected Paxton’s request to dismiss criminal charges related to private business deals from 2011 and 2012.
Defense lawyers corrected the mistake a little more than two hours after the court issued the unsigned order, which was opposed by Judges Barbara Hervey and Michael Keasler.
"We inadvertently left off attaching to our petition a copy of the concurring opinion from the court of appeals. We have cured the oversight and have refiled," Paxton lawyer Philip Hilder said.
SPECIAL REPORT: Are Ken Paxton’s legal troubles motivated by politics?
The error isn’t expected to significantly delay the handling of Paxton’s appeal.
"They’re called rules for a very good reason, because they apply to everyone," prosecutor Brian Wice said of the dismissal.
Paxton is seeking to dismiss, before trial, |
borders on racism.A period longer than ten moons has passed since I last served up one of my juicy feasts of these forgotten treats. 2016 was a year spent in the deepest recesses of darkness (one could call me a pathetic fool, trapped inside my skull), and although 2017 is shaping up to be even more horrid in much more tangible ways, I’m back with my metaphorical shovel, coming in the dead of night to unearth more ghastly obscurities, many of which have been lost to time as we all will be. Draw your curtains, light a candle, and prepare yourselves for my latest offering. Are you ready to accept the gift of sin? Let’s begin with:
MASK FOR
Germany’s Mask For is the perfect deathrock band. Their poisonous potion of a sound is equal parts lamenting and truculent, reminiscent of both Christian Death’s Only Theatre Of Pain and Ausgang’s Manipulate. Much like a locomotive, the powerful, massive-sounding drums propel each of their songs forward while besieged by the tortuous guitarwork, and grounded only by the trudging basslines which all but prevent this death trap from toppling; and somehow rising above all this turmoil are the unsettling vocals, more akin to mournful howling than anything else. Mask For’s eponymous 12” is the quintessential deathrock record, and should be considered essential. After their demise, one of the members went on to play in German post-punk legends Abwärts. And while we’re looking at European groups, let’s hop over a few countries to check out…
VONBRIGÐI
In recent years, Iceland has been churning out some fantastic dark punk and post-punk (e.g. Börn, Dauðyflin, ROHT), but I’m sure that unbeknownst to many of you, these bands are just a continuation of what’s been happening there for quite some time. In fact, Börn is a good point of reference, as they draw heavily from Vonbrigði’s material. Vocals half-sung, half-shouted pierce the murky air, clouded by the entwined forces of the sinister bass, plodding drumming, and the dissonant, often harsh guitar; their approach is as catchy as it is punishing. Vonbrigði is an outstanding band, and definitely worth spending some time with – but then again, I’d say the same for all the artists I write about (not to minimize how great this particular one is). But – since I’m already beginning a tangent – another band who really nailed the odd amalgam of aggressive, dark, and bouncy requires another geographical leap, this time to Japan for…
MANNEQUIN NEUROSE
Ah yes, the original pastel pink goth band. Mannequin Neurose would have fit right in with the ADK Records roster, but I guess weren’t a part of that scene. Admittedly, I haven’t found much information on them outside of their releases, but I can tell you that their music is ferocious, disquieting, and dour. The verve which permeates their overall sound feels almost sardonic in its actuality; there is a distinct sense of acerbity and contempt that gets under your skin, almost as if this apparent liveliness is a poignant farce. Despite the scathing dread that Mannequin Neurose inspires through their derisive delivery, the inherent vivacity remains palpable, which makes them a perfect band to play at parties where you hate everyone. Or maybe not, I would probably have a better idea if I actually went to parties. A digression, but if I haven’t convinced you that Mannequin Neurose is a killer band by now, I’m not sure what else I can say. So, it’s time to move onto another Japanese band – who are truly an oddity – called…
DATSUSTORA
Of course a band this amazing has an incredibly limited known output (one flexi, a track on a compilation 7” that’s impossible to find, and an elusive split tape with Criminal Party, a project with shared members). Datsustora is not a band who generally are associated with Japan’s deathrock scene, which I assume is largely due to the fact that two of the four songs on their flexi are industrial in the vein of Grim; and also possibly because it was the project of the singer from ADK Records’ band LSD. But don’t be fooled, this lack of association means nothing. Datsustora is one of the darkest fucking bands you’ll ever hear. Preceding this with Mannequin Neurose felt just right, because of the similarities two seem to have, however Datsustora’s offerings are far more baleful, spine chilling, and melancholy. The skilled use of industrial/electronics – something unfortunately underutilized by contemporary deathrock bands (that should be changing soon; wink, wink) – adds an air of trepidation which has gone unmatched since Datsustora’s demise. Of course, the use of industrial/electronics was present in a band who many consider to be one of the very first deathrock bands, better known as…
THEATRE OF ICE
I love that Theatre Of Ice (reportedly) initially formed in Nevada in the late 1970s to record the soundtrack for a horror film, and then transformed into one of the spookiest, most interesting bands to grace the world with its existence. Their sound can best be described as a goth take on SPK and Chrome’s industrial; or perhaps as a more lofi, psych-leaning Minimal Man, whom they predated. But really, no comparison can do them justice. Even though their output during their original lifespan was limited to poorly circulated tapes, and their following was generally confined to more obscure circles, Theatre Of Ice was – and still is – immensely influential on all forms of dark music; whether it be goth and deathrock, industrial and electronics, dark ambient, or whatever else, one element or another can be traced back to Theatre Of Ice. They may be more well known than the other artists in my Defining Deathrock: Deeper Cuts series, but they often go just as underappreciated.
While you rub your stomachs and wipe the drool from your mouths, let me remind you there is one more course to come in this celebratory feast of the forgotten and the dead. I cannot promise as to when it will come, but I implore you to remain vigilant. Heed my portent, and your desire for deathrock shall be fulfilled…According to information coming directly from EVGA's forums, it appears that EVGA's GTX 1080 FTW and GTX 1070 FTW graphics cards might have some issues with overheating which should be fixed soon.Apparently, the issue is in the lack of thermal pads over the VRM area which makes some of these graphics cards to run as hot as 107ºC in that area.The issue was originally detected by Toms Hardware site which pushed EVGA to investigate the issue and find out that the issue can be fixed by applying additional thermal pads between the backplate and the PCB and between the baseplate and the heatsink fins.EVGA will offer these optional thermal pads free of charge to those graphics cards owners with such graphics cards.If you are running on one of those graphics cards, you should check out more details via link below.Source: EVGA.comPlease turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Health Secretary Andy Burnham has accused a Tory MEP who attacked the NHS on American TV of being "unpatriotic". Labour has stepped up its criticism of Daniel Hannan, who waded into the debate over Barack Obama's health bill. They claim his view - that the NHS is outdated, unfair and should be scrapped - is shared by many Conservatives. But David Cameron said Mr Hannan's view was "eccentric" and accused Labour of making a meal of the row, stressing that the NHS was his top priority. Mr Hannan has made a series of appearances on American television in recent weeks, describing the NHS as "60 year mistake" and saying that he "wouldn't wish it on anyone". 'Ring-fenced funding' He has stressed that these are his own views and not those of the party - but they were backed by fellow Tory MEP Roger Helmer, who told BBC Radio 4's PM programme: "I think Dan has done us a service by raising these issues which need to be looked at. The Conservative Party stands four square behind the NHS
Conservative leader David Cameron
Analysis: A healthy debate? "If 80% of Americans are getting better health care than we are in the UK then we ought to ask why, and we ought to ask how are we going to deliver equally good results." Tory leader David Cameron, who has vowed to protect health from spending cuts if he comes to power, has been at pains to stress his commitment to the NHS and distance himself from Mr Hannan. "The Conservative Party stands four square behind the NHS," he told BBC News. "We are the party of the NHS, we back it, we are going to expand it, we have ring-fenced it and said that it will get more money under a Conservative government, and it is our number one mission to improve it." And he rebuked Mr Hannan, saying: "He does have some quite eccentric views about some things, and political parties always include some people who don't toe the party line on one issue or another issue." 'Unpatriotic' The Leader of the Conservative group in the European Parliament, Timothy Kirkhope told the BBC he believes Mr Hannan should be disciplined for his comments about the NHS and said he would be given a "stern talking to" by the party's chief whip Brussels.
Healthcare around the world But Mr Hannan's words have been seized on by Labour and the Liberal Democrats who have questioned the party's commitment to the NHS. Health Secretary Andy Burnham said: "What has happened within the last 48 hours is what Cameron has feared most because it lays bare the Tories' deep ambivalence towards the NHS." And he hit back at criticism that the government had not done enough to defend the NHS from attacks in the US, saying: "We will stand up for the NHS and we will make sure that it is properly represented in the international media. And that is why what Mr Hannan has done disappoints me so much. "I would almost feel... it is unpatriotic because he is talking in foreign media and not representing, in my view, the views of the vast majority of British people and actually, I think giving an unfair impression of the National Health Service himself, a British representative on foreign media." 'Duped' He said Mr Hannan's words were an "insult" to the 1.4m NHS workers and "he should not be voicing those views in the foreign media in my view". Former deputy prime minister John Prescott has recorded a video message to the American people accusing Mr Hannan of "misrepresentation of the NHS here in Britain". Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Earlier this week, Prime Minister Gordon Brown took the unusual step of adding his voices to the welovetheNHS Twitter campaign, set up defend the health service from US attacks. In a message posted from Downing Street's Twitter feed, the PM said "thanks for always being there". His wife Sarah, also sent a message of support to the campaign. US critics of the NHS claim it is an example of an overly-bureaucratic system which rations care and denies treatment to the elderly. But campaign groups and right wing pundits have also attacked it as "socialist", with one TV debate even discussing whether it was a breeding ground for terrorism. One British woman said she felt "duped" after becoming the unwitting star of an anti-Obama health campaign. FROM THE PM PROGRAMME Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
More from PM Kate Spall, who appeared in a US free market group's TV commercial opposing Mr Obama's health bill, said her views were misrepresented. She told BBC Radio 4's The World at One: " "Absolutely I was deceived yes because when I then found out the link to the website and it was a huge political machine I was horrified because it was the polar opposite of what I believe in. I absolutely believe in universal health care." Ms Spall and fellow Briton Katie Brickell's descriptions of poor treatment at the hands of the NHS featured in the Conservatives for Patients' Rights (CPR) advert.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionLocated in the center of the South China Sea is a small, innocuous group of uninhabited island atolls named the Spratly Islands.
From first observation, this island group would be deemed worthless and uninhabitable. This observation would be grossly in error…
Exactly why is the South China Sea important?
These islands sit on the edge of the most lucrative fishing area in the South China Sea. They are also on the edge of one of the most oil- and gas-rich areas yet discovered.
And the Spratlys are claimed by no fewer than seven different countries.
"This is definitely a situation you want to watch closely," Money Morning Executive Editor Bill Patalon told readers on Dec. 8. "Any kind of a major 'incident' there will clearly have a big – and negative – impact on the world financial markets."
Here's a look at the irresistible treasures that make ownership of the South China Sea crucial…
Why Is the South China Sea Important? It's a Vital Shipping Route
The South China Sea region includes more than 200 small islands, rocks, and reefs, with the majority located in the Paracel and Spratly Island chains. Many of these islands are partially submerged islets, rocks, and reefs that are little more than shipping hazards not suitable for habitation; the total land area of the Spratly Islands is less than 3 square miles.
The islands are important, however, for strategic and political reasons. Ownership claims to them are used to bolster claims to the surrounding sea and its resources.
To that end, the region is the world's second-busiest international sea lane – more than half of the world's supertanker traffic and 30% of all global maritime trade passes through its waters. Tanker traffic through the Strait of Malacca leading into the South China Sea is more than three times greater than Suez Canal traffic, and well over five times more than the Panama Canal.
Virtually all shipping that passes through the Malacca and Sunda Straits must pass near the Spratlys. The large volume of shipping in the South China Sea/Strait of Malacca littoral has created opportunities for attacks on merchant shipping. With the exception of 2007 to 2012, when piracy in East Africa spiked, the South China Sea has been the most piracy-prone region in the world, with up to 150 attacks annually, according to the Center for International Maritime Security on Sept. 6, 2014.
Shipping (by tonnage) in the South China Sea is dominated by raw materials en route to East Asian countries. Tonnage via Malacca and the Spratly Islands is dominated by liquid bulk such as crude oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG), with dry bulk (mostly coal and iron ore) in second place. LNG shipments through the South China Sea constitute two-thirds of the world's overall LNG trade. Nearly two-thirds of the tonnage passing through the Strait of Malacca, and half of the volume passing the Spratly Islands, is crude oil from the Persian Gulf. Rising Asian oil demand could result in a doubling of these flows over the next two decades.
Additionally, the Spratly's themselves contain oil and gas resources strategically located near some of the world's largest energy-consuming countries, such as China, India, and Japan.
In its World Oil Outlook released on Dec. 23, 2015, OPEC estimated that global energy demand will increase 50% by 2040, with gas and oil expected to supply roughly 53% of energy demands.
The Asian region accounted for much of that total demand. In 2015, total global oil demand reached 94.6 million barrels per day (BPD). Nearly a third of total demand went to the Asian-Pacific and Americas regions, according to Statista.
Imports to sate Asia's growing energy needs will largely pass through the strategic Strait of Malacca into the South China Sea. As it is, over half of the world's merchant fleet (by tonnage) sails through the South China Sea every year.
Why Is the South China Sea Important? It's Oil-RichPage To Screen In Page To Screen, we compare a movie to the book that spawned it. The analysis goes into deep detail about specific plot points—in other words, you’ve been warned.
When I was really struggling with depression, I would lie in bed every day, and I couldn’t get up. And I would watch people doing these normal things, going to their jobs and having their relationships, and I would think, I could never do that. And it felt like they were doing magic. And when I started to get better, and I started getting up, and I started doing all these normal things, I felt like I was a magician.
That’s Lev Grossman on his experience with depression, and on how depression and magic interact in his Magicians books.
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In The Magicians, people literally do magic, and the idea that magic can literally cure depression is one of the most beautiful and seductive fantasies of both the books and the TV show. But that’s always balanced by its inverse: the sneaking, insidious suspicion that even with magic you will still feel like a sad, depressed loser. The tension between the fantasy (that magic creates happiness) and the fear (that you are too broken for magic ever to fix you) gives The Magicians its visceral force.
It’s also a tension that was entirely missing from The Magician’s astonishingly weak pilot. Over the course of the first season, the show slowly develops Quentin Coldwater’s (Jason Ralph) quest for a magic cure for his depression in some fascinating directions, first through magic’s sheer existence, then via his stint as a fox, then through his attempts to magically bottle his emotions. But to do that, the show has to work hard to overcome the shoddy groundwork laid in its first episode.
That pilot has a lot of issues—rushed pacing, sloppy character work, the frankly indefensible decision to replace book-Julia’s nerdy academic quest for a safe house with a scene where she gets tied up and has her clothes ripped off—but it was its refusal to give any indication that magic might not actually be a cure for depression that crippled it.
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The general consensus on The Magicians’ first season is that it’s at its strongest when it deviates most from the books, like it did with episodes like “The World In The Walls,” or with Penny’s arc. In terms of plot mechanics, that’s more or less accurate: A lot of the issues with the pilot, for instance, came from a desperate attempt to cram 115 pages of Grossman’s first Magicians novel into less than an hour of television, and as the show became more comfortable generating its own plot it became more elegant. But it has consistently been at its most thematically interesting when it’s tracking the themes of its source material, and it only starts doing that halfway through the season.
“Everyone medicates,” says Quentin in the pilot, and in the universe the episode offers, magic is just one of many possible medications. When Quentin gets into Brakebills University, he no longer needs to take his antidepressants. When Julia is denied admission to Brakebills, she cuts her wrists and joins a seedy cult. Cue the faux-edgy tagline: “Magic is a drug. Get hooked.” It’s a world where magic is like nothing so much as a super-antidepressant.
And if magic is an antidepressant, then the fears that accompany it are entirely different than the fears that come along with magic as a fantasy cure. They are external rather than internal: Instead of asking, “What if I am so broken that not even magic can fix me?” the question becomes, “What if I lose access to this drug?” or “What if magic turns me into a sexy dangerous drug addict?” That’s not to say that an exploration of addiction can’t be deep and probing, but in the pilot of The Magicians, it isn’t. Only shallow, easy questions are asked of its characters.
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In the books as in the TV shows, Quentin is also depressed, and in the books as in the TV show he thinks that finding magic will make him happy. The difference is that in the source material, that belief is framed from the beginning as a delusion. Quentin is constantly surrounded by unhappy magicians, and by magicians who tell him explicitly that the reason they can do magic is that they are unhappy. In the TV show, the dean of Brakebills is the one who tells Quentin that he won’t be needing his antidepressants now that he has magic. The books destabilize the idea that magic can make Quentin happy as soon as the idea is introduced, and that gives Grossman room to explore depression, happiness, and magic, and create tension. The TV show lives in the fantasy of magical antidepressants for long episodes at a stretch, and that means its exploration of the idea stays shallow for much longer than it needs to.
This shallow externalization of themes that were internal in the books extends even into the pilot’s climactic confrontation with the Beast, the monster from another world who is the primary villain of both the first book of the trilogy and the first season of the TV show. In both, Quentin is accidentally responsible for summoning the Beast. But in the book, Quentin is trying to get back at a teacher for asking him a question to which he does not know the answer, and this is what allows the Beast entry; it’s a stupid bit of childish pettiness on Quentin’s part, and he is powerless in the face of the Beast’s attack. What he takes away from the whole incident is intense shame and guilt that he could have done something so awful—that he could be such a broken, destructive person, even with magic.
In the show, Quentin is nobly attempting to solve a mystery and help Alice communicate with her dead brother when he lets the Beast in. He is one of the few people brave enough to fight against the Beast and is instrumental to its defeat, and what the incident leaves him with is terror that he will be expelled from Brakebills and will lose access to magic. The books leave Quentin afraid of himself; the TV show leaves Quentin afraid that he might lose magic.
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Halfway through the season, The Magicians began to allow magic to fail, and by extension allows the characters to be afraid of themselves. Part of that change comes from expanding the magic metaphor, so that Julia leaves her gang of drug dealer hedge-witches to get religious, and magic-by-good-works becomes a metaphor for faith. But most of the change comes from allowing Quentin to begin to fear that magic will not make him happy.
“I’m here,” Quentin says in “Impractical Applications.” “I’m in this amazing place. I have literal magic in my life and I’m still running. I’m still this person that I fucking hate.” As the season develops, Quentin comes to realize that he still has the capacity to hate himself and to make himself unhappy even when he has magic. And although his brief spate as a fox teaches him that “everything I needed to survive was me and it’s not just to survive, but to be happy,” it becomes clear to him a few episodes later that the fox’s lessons are only temporary. “Sometimes it’s not that easy, you know,” Alice tells him, “like when we were foxes.” “I’m sorry I’m not a fox,” Quentin snits in response.
By the end of the season, the closest thing Quentin has to a magic cure for depression is the literal bottling of emotions that he uses to practice battle magic—and it only leads to an intense emotional hangover once the emotions have been let out. The Magicians at last developed a world in which the fantasy of a magic cure for depression—the hope offered by the fox—is balanced by Quentin’s fear that it’s too late for him, that not even magic will truly make him happy.
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Part of the reason it took a whole season to get here is intrinsic to adapting a book into a TV show: Themes that a book can lay out almost immediately have to be slowly teased out on an episodic serialized TV show. But laying the groundwork for deeper explorations of a theme does not have to play as shallow and facile. There are ways to give indications that you are eventually going to destabilize your characters’ simple and facile beliefs, and The Magicians’ earliest episodes did none of them. Even “The World In The Walls,” the episode most explicitly focused on Quentin’s depression, offers a simple magical solution to Quentin’s problems. There is no possibility in “The World In The Walls” for a Quentin Coldwater, a clinically depressed magician. There is only either Quentin Coldwater, depressed mental patient, or Quentin Coldwater, well-adjusted magician.
The Magicians’ first season proved to be an incredibly uneven experience, with the show shifting dramatically in quality from week to week. But as it developed and found its voice, it evolved from the story of how a depressed young man uses magic as an anti-depressant, returning to the book’s important theme to create a nuanced and complex exploration of how difficult it can be to live with mental illness in daily life, and how the idea of a magic cure is both seductive in its possibilities and terrifying in its inaccessibility.Portugal’s right-wing government falls after no confidence vote
By Paul Mitchell
11 November 2015
Portugal’s 11-day-old right-wing minority coalition government, comprising the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and Democratic and Social Centre-People’s Party (CDS-PP), fell yesterday after a no confidence vote in the National Assembly.
The no confidence motion was voted by the social-democratic Socialist Party (PS), the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), Greens (PEV) and the Left Bloc (BE). These parties had collectively received 50.8 percent of the vote in the October elections, with the BE doubling its share of the vote to 10.2 percent. Nonetheless, President Anibal Cavaco Silva initially formed a minority PSD/CDS-PP government.
Now, however, Cavaco Silva, a former PSD prime minister, will have to name PS leader António Costa as prime minister or leave PSD leader Pedro Passos Coelho as head of a caretaker administration until new elections are held—at the earliest in June next year.
The attempts by the PS to form a government supported by the PCP, PEV and BE are a reactionary attempt to head off escalating social anger against austerity in the working class. Like Greece, Portugal is staggering under the weight of devastating European Union austerity measures imposed since the outbreak of the global economic crisis in 2008. Also as in Greece, however, pro-capitalist “left” parties are cynically manoeuvring to continue imposing austerity even if they come to power—as did Syriza in Greece.
PS deputy Mário Centeno, a former Bank of Portugal economist and architect of the economic programme being promoted by the PS, BE and PCP, told the Financial Times that a PS government would not “throw money at the economy”.
He signalled that the PS-led government would continue toeing the austerity line. “We will stay on the path of fiscal consolidation. … It’s not the direction we challenge but the speed of travel. …We will continue to bring down the deficit and debt, but at a slower pace”, he explained.
Centeno insisted that a PS government would not countenance any form of debt restructuring, adding, “Nobody with any sense thinks of not paying debts they have contracted.”
The PCP, PEV and BE are being drawn in to provide “left” cover for yet another reactionary PS government, committed to deep social attacks on the working class. It was the PS that agreed initially to the 2011 bank bailout and the accompanying Economic Adjustment Programme, which launched the EU’s austerity drive in Portugal. In the face of escalating public anger with the resulting meltdown of the Portuguese economy, however, the social democrats decided they had to present a different political face.
In an attempt to distance itself from the PSD/CDS-PP coalition and prevent an independent movement of the working class, the PS installed Costa as its leader last year, proclaimed itself an anti-austerity party, and said it would no longer carry out IMF demands.
Costa declared he would “turn the page on austerity” and announced a package of 55 measures that formed the basis of the party’s election manifesto. These included increased spending on health care and education, rolling back labour reforms, reviewing privatisations, cutting social security contributions for workers and employers, increasing public sector pay and introducing a new inheritance tax. In fact, even the right-wing PSD and CDS-PP felt compelled to promise similar measures.
Costa’s election and the 55 measures were the signal for the BE to issue a call for a so-called “government of the left” that would include the PS.
As Syriza’s capitulation to austerity in Greece showed, however, it is impossible to obtain any relief from crippling austerity measures without repudiating the debt and breaking with the EU. Pro-capitalist parties like Syriza and the PS, and its satellites in Portugal, are ferociously opposed to such policies, however. The PS’ promises to both satisfy the bankers and the EU, on the one hand, and make limited improvements in workers’ living standards, on the other, will rapidly prove to be lies no less blatant than those peddled by Syriza.
These parties have no fundamental differences with the EU or the Portuguese right. Indeed, Cavaco Silva installed a PSD/CDS-PP minority government on October 30, because he hoped that the PS and its allies could still be persuaded to give it tacit support. The PSD/CDS-PP enjoyed broad support in the ruling elite, as it was pledged to continue unpopular EU austerity measures in the face of mass opposition from working people.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker congratulated Passos Coelho on his “victory”.
The PS changed tack, however, faced with the unexpected vote for the BE and the huge abstention, pointing to an explosive social and political situation. It indicated that it would seek to form a government. Cavaco Silva rejected these proposals, however, declaring that “anti-European forces” would never be allowed to take part in government.
Since then, the PS has been in talks with the BE, PCP and PEV to work out a deal. At the same time, Costa assured Cavaco Silva they he could form a government that would guarantee Portugal’s continued membership of the EU, the eurozone and NATO.
Given the profound economic crisis, however, such commitments are incompatible with any policy in favour of the working population. Total combined public and private debt still remains at more than 370 percent of GDP, the highest in Europe. The IMF has demanded the next government impose a “comprehensive reform of public sector wages and pensions.” The PSD/CDS-PP government has failed to publish its latest budget projections, suggesting they may be worse than expected. The EU is demanding another €600 million in cuts.
The markets and financial institutions have already begun putting pressure on Portugal. The interest rates on Portuguese government bonds have climbed 0.58 percentage points since the start of October. Financial analysts have warned that the country could lose the investment grade rating needed to obtain fresh loans from the European Central Bank’s Quantitative Easing programme, of which it is the biggest beneficiary.
Financial officials are now pointing to the danger of market speculation against Portugal triggering a renewed financial crisis across Europe.
Writing in the Washington, DC-based the Hill, former IMF deputy director Desmond Lachman warned, “It would be a mistake to dismiss Portugal as a small economy on Europe’s southern periphery of little systemic consequence”. He warned that the “imminent rise to power of a Socialist government, dependent on the support of a far left anti-austerity bloc, could usher in a new phase of the European sovereign debt crisis.”
Lachman also raised the risk of such a crisis provoking a disintegration of the EU. He warned that the Portuguese crisis was “coinciding with renewed foot-dragging in Greece about the implementation of its IMF-EU program; separatist tendencies in Catalonia (Spain); Spain moving from a two-party system to a four-party system; a rising anti-euro movement in Italy; and Angela Merkel’s authority in Germany coming into increased question over the immigration issue.”
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Tuesday Tips: 25 Tips For Being A Clutch Role Player
It’s not all about the superstars.
For every Michael Jordan out there, you need a Steve Kerr; someone who can pick up the slack with fresh energy, strong teamwork, and specialized skills in clutch situations, especially when everyone’s eyes and attention are on someone else.
Whether you’re a college rookie, have just made that strong club team, or are somewhere in between, oftentimes you have to find a role and adjust to it. The bottom line is that a good player does what it takes to help the team, even if that means accepting that smaller, more specialized job: everything from zone specialist to fourth handler to fresh defensive legs.
Every role, no matter how small, will matter.
Here are 25 ways to be a key role player for your team:
Find your job: Recognize what you do well and what your team needs. Analyze your role and playing time. Find out in what situations you’ll be asked to play or to have more of an impact on the game.
Be ready for your time: Keep mentally focused to know the situation and stay loose on the sidelines during those stretches where you are off the field. Be ready to be at 100% when your name gets called.
Buddy up: Find someone who you play with often—even better if he/she is a player you want to model yourself after. Work with that player to find out what they want to do on the field to succeed. Complement their skills with your own in any way that you can.
Talk to the captains: Be honest with your concerns and urge them be honest with their assessment. If you want to improve or take on a different role, ask about it, but also be sure to know—and execute—what they expect from you now.
Do your job—and not much else—to start: You have to walk before you can run. Execute your role to perfection before you try to branch out in another area. If you’re a D-line depth sub, focus on shutting down your man completely and syncing with your offense before you start trying to get poach d’s and tossing 40-yard hammers.
Be the loudest sideline presence: Good teams win using every player on their roster during every point. If you’re not on the field, that means you should be quality sideline help, a role that is important, yet often overlooked. Keep the energy high, stay positive, and be loud and infectious with your praise. Bring water from the sideline during timeouts.
Communicate effectively: Don’t just be the sideline cheerleader, but also an in-game aide. Learn to give information—not direction—to teammates about what is happening on the field so that they can play better. Be the person that everyone wants talking to them when you’re off the field.
Work hard off the field: Both in work and play, do what you need to help the team off the field. The clutch role player watches twice as much film, has the plays memorized perfectly, knows the best players on the other team, and still wins the party.
Train physically and specifically: Your role is specialized; so should your training. If you don’t play more than two points a game, there is no need to focus on long-term endurance. Instead built up your explosiveness for that key moment.
Simulate game throwing: Similarly, if you aren’t a hucker, but instead are expected to shoot through the cup or hit continuation unders, do your best to replicate those situations so that you can execute them ten times out of ten.
Bring something extra to the table: Whether its hummus and chips, that awesome boom-box, or the goofy jokes that keep everyone relaxed, go above and beyond to be a supportive teammate off the field.
Be prepared: Channel your inner boy scout and make sure you have everything ready for every weekend. Don’t be the space cadet who forgot jerseys or was late to team warmups.
Do the little things well: Role players are judged more harshly than stars; your basics have to be on lock. Make perfect dump throws, clear hard, and do all the little things well.
Don’t miss a practice or workout: Show everyone how hard you are working. Build the trust with your team. Set the bar for consistency and determination.
Branch out by connecting: It’s always good to want to improve, but don’t forsake your strengths when trying to improve a weakness. Grow by connecting skills that are similar. If you have good forehand inside breaks, work on forehand around breaks; eventually you’ll be all-around strong.
Show the heart: If you’re the Rudy of your team, you’ve got to give it your all, all the time, and you’ve got to inspire everyone else.
Accept the things you can’t change: As a role player you have to be OK with the fact that you may not get to play in the do-or-die game, that you may not get to be on during the double game points. Accept it and move on, don’t complain and bring the team down.
Own your plus-minus: Limited role means limited opportunities to hit the stat sheet. But you should always be in the positive. No turnovers are the name of the game; keep your risks low on offense and the plus-minus will go up.
Pick up your teammates: If the team is down, keep the positivity going. If one teammate has made a mistake, tell that person you have his or her back.
Fight through adversity: Role players have harder jobs than most. Oftentimes you’ll go in cold, get the toughest job on the field, and get no glory in the process. Keep your head down and push through.
Be proud: Be proud of what you do and your abilities. Confidence is key to success and knowing you can overcome the odds.
But check your ego: No bragging or arrogance can be allowed. Know what you can do and let your teammates know it through actions; boasting is only likely to hurt you.
Visualize the fundamentals: Visualization is a powerful tool. Mentally see yourself doing the correct things right: swinging, clearing, and staying close to your mark on the force-side.
Get fired up: With the fundamentals on mental-lockdown, take the not-so-obvious with passion. Sometimes, you’ve got one shot; make the most of it with adrenaline pumping and emotion driving you to success and to make the play when it |
and very comfortable. Then my tunic, and a little hat all of it the same silvery material. The clothing felt cool and wonderful against my skin. But there were no shoes offered, so I figured being barefoot was going to be part of the custom. Toren looked a bit worried.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, “Doesn’t it look right?”
“Well, yes except your hair is very unruly and the hat doesn’t fall quite the way it should, let me see.” He lifted the hat and set it down on the bed, went over to the dresser and came back with a comb. I took it reluctantly and walked over to the dresser and looked at myself in the mirror. There was a stone wash basin sitting atop the dresser so I dipped the comb in, then corralled my hair back and parted it. He took the hat and placed it back atop my head, “There now, it fits perfectly” he said, “And might I add sir that your hair looks very nice like this.”
“Thank you Toren” I said, “do i have to do anything?”
“Yes, young master, you and master Chester are a very important part of the events in this evenings ceremony, never you worry, you will be guided through the steps.”
“Can you give me a clue about what I’ll be doing?”
He went into thought a second and then said, “But then you’ll lose the joy of discovery young master.”
“I understand. I just want to do a good job.”
“You will. Now, lets go to the Grand Square, everyone will be gathered.”
I took one more look at the unbelievably beautiful room that was given to me for my stay here, and then followed Toren out into the hall.
The Grand Square was behind the palace and stretched out some way past the palace into the sea. Three of its four sides touched the ocean and it is large enough to fit at least a thousand people, and it certainly looked as though that many people were in attendance. Everyone was dressed very well for the occasion. There was a lot of joyful commotion and people held up banners and sang songs and laughter burst out like little bright explosions amidst the sea of people. Suddenly, almost magically I thought, the sounds faded into a respectful silence and that’s when I noticed the lady dressed in white.
“Enter child of Earth, come to the place of ceremony!” she said. I turned and looked at Toren nervously and then walked forward. He smiled at me trying to assure me again that all will be fine.
Set up in a large open area was a pedestal and two large gongs. There was a multi tiered daïs that went to the edge of the square to the edge of the ocean facing the direction where the sun, even lower now, was setting. A large and beautiful oak tree grew in the center of the square. It looked very old, its bark was turning grey and it was laden with garlands of flowers, in its branches were unlit lanterns. When i walked around the tree I suddenly noticed Chester waiting for me, smiling, he was dressed like me but his clothing was shiny and of golden hue. We then walked together to the daïs and stood next to the King and Queen. They were dressed in their royal clothing except that everything the King wore was silvery and the Queen wore a magnificent golden dress.
I began to realize that i might be playing the ceremonial part of the moon and Chester, the sun. I stood next to him nervously and we both now had our backs to the tree and were facing the setting sun and moon.
“Your majesty may we begin?” Said the beautiful lady dressed completely in white. She looked like a high priestess of some kind. Her head was covered with a white cap that fell to her shoulders and down her back, and the tail that went down her back was adorned in stitched symbols or runes in silver and gold.
The king nodded his approval.
“Thank you my lord.” She walked passed me and stepped to the highest tier of the daïs toward the sea then turned and faced the audience.
“People of the realm, People of the sea, prairies, forests and mountains, we gather at this time to witness our blessed Sun and her consort, Moon as they leave this realm to the sacred place of Ura-shantye-anisharapynda; The blessed Realm of the ancient ones. There they will engage in the mysterious ceremonies that we mortals cannot know to renew their promise to the universe and to themselves.”
She paused for a moment as the gongs were struck. “The Priests of old called this moment, the Absent night. For it is a night absent of her Majesty’s consort, ever reflecting her glory as she journey’s to other realms that require her renewing and life-giving energies. Tonight we reveal the secret passed through the ages, given to the first King who was so beloved by the sun that she gave him a piece of herself to always keep him and his people safe.”
A series of gongs chimed and now the sun began to set behind the sea. The gongs continued to chime as the sun dipped completely and the sky appeared brighter just for a moment while the last rays of sunlight faded away. Now there was just the moon setting.
Suddenly there was a fanfare of trumpets! The gongs chimed once more and the King and Queen stepped forward. They shimmered in the kindling of sunlight and the now stronger moonlight and as they walked forward, two children approached them with seashells that contained a material that was on fire like candles in their hands.
“Earth lords, we bring to you this gift of light from the great sky mother, the Queen of all! So beloved was the first father of your line that this secret was given to him, her most deep secret, that of life.”
The King took one of the shells, and handed it to the queen, and then took the other. The Children, a boy and a girl, turned and walked back to the crowd. The king and queen faced each other now and then turned to the moon.
The Queen spoke first, “Great father! you were given this fire by the mother of all because she loved your goodness and brave heart so much she could not bear the thought of your discomfort and suffering when she traveled to Ura-shantye-anisharapynda.” She smiled at me, “And with this you created the Kingdom of love and made certain it would stand the tests of time and earth through out the ages. When you were certain your people would be safe for eternity, you joined your beloved queen and became her consort. Thus you are set in our sky, reflecting her majesties beauty through your silvery face. Your chase is rewarded one night every year, on this night we show you that we have not forgotten what you have taught us great father, and we will be safe as you go to be with your beloved queen.”
Now the King began to speak. “My cherished people, we have learned the secret of life from the first King. Now he awaits our sign to go with ease to the ancient lands of Ura-shantye-anisharapynda. The Children came once again, now holding two unlit seashells and the King and Queen touched the new seashells with theirs and they burst gently alive with flame. The children once again went into the crowd and very quickly, lights began to shine through out the audience as people lit their candles. Then the palace became bright as the torches and lights inside came on, and then the village and then the edge of the forest and the mountains. As all this happened the Moon quietly set behind the sea and the people applauded.
I didn’t notice anyone light the lanterns in the branches of the old tree but they were now glowing too. It was utterly beautiful. Someone’s hand touched my back and I noticed it was the priestess. “Blessed Children it is now the time for you to light the lanterns.” I looked up at her and then at Chester. “Just do what I do.”
Chester took my hand and walked up to the king and queen. Gracefully he said to them, “Lords of earth, we present ourselves before you now.”
The King looked at us and spoke, “You do not carry the fire of life, where are you from children?”
“We are the two that are one, star children, mortal and immortal. We saw a faint light from our place in the heavens and it led us to discover you, our unknown kindred.”
Now the Queen spoke, “The light you saw is the fire of life, and it was given to us by our beloved mother of all, the sun. We share with you the fire of life so that you may live as we do and be blessed.”
Chester looked at me and with his eyes indicated that I should go and get the shells. I stepped up to the King and Queen and took one of the shells, the one offered by the queen, and Chester took the other.
“Thank you benevolent lords, we accept this gift from you and show you now our gratitude. We reveal to you the secret of the universe. This life fire which you give generously to us we now share with our brothers and sisters.”
The King and Queen parted and there on the pedestal were two lanterns. We walked over to them and carefully lit the flammable disks balanced inside them. My lantern had an image of a crescent moon and Chester’s that of a sun. The lanterns began to glow and then when it was time, they lifted up away from our hands and began drifting away out toward the sea. We walked back to the Dais and joined the rest of the Royal family and the Priestess.
“They are beautiful.” I said to Chester as we watched the lanterns drift higher in the sky. He held my hand and just then into my vision came more little lanterns floating over our heads, I turned around and there were thousands and thousands coming from all over, from the mountains, the forests, the prairie, rising up and chasing the first two. The sky was a light with dots of light! People began to sing in a beautiful chorus and as they sang the great oak tree seemed to glow on its own. A beautiful bluish green light surrounded it.
The singing went on for quite a while and when it finally quieted down, the king and queen took the top tier of the Dais and the trumpets began to proudly, gaining everyone’s attention. “Now, let us rejoice and celebrate for all the revelations of the Absent Night! We give thanks for our many blessings!”
Suddenly you could hear bands strike up from every direction and people started laughing again and dancing seemed to spontaneously commence through the square. The smell of food came into the air as well! Chester and I danced several times, little jigs that we made up and arm in arm twirling around. I danced with the Queen and she asked me about my family and friends back home.
I could scarcely remember or imagine a time where I had more fun, and time seemed to stop for most of the night.
When all was quieting down and the revels continued elsewhere, I found Chester sitting on the edge of the square with a goblet of wine next to him. I sat down next to him and when he noticed me, he smiled a huge beautiful smile.
“Hello boy.” he said.
“Hello sir” I said.
He smiled. “Do you ever wonder how I always know when to go to the forest to meet you?”
“You sound like you are drunk” I said with a disapproving tone.
Chester seemed puzzled by my observations of his state.
“This, oh yes, you don’t drink do you?”
“No, but I suppose I don’t mind if you do.”
We laughed, “Well I’m glad I have your permission my dearest friend.”
I looked out at the beautiful starlit sea and said, “I just always figured you feel something in your stomach, or felt a tingle in your heart or brain.”
Chester smiled and laughed a little, “I do feel all those things, but only after I see something in the sky.”
He came closer and put his arm around my neck and drew me closer to his face, he then pointed in the sky, “Do you see those two stars next to each other right there?”
I looked up at two extremely bright stars, “Do I see them? I don’t suppose they are easy to miss, they are very bright!”
“The one on the left is visible even in daylight, and something you will never witness because it depends on you is, the second one, the one to the right, it does not shine except when you are here. And it becomes visible just hours before you arrive, every time.”
“What, really?”
“Yes, really. We all know you are going to visit when the second star shines. I am told that the first star appeared the night I was born.”
“When was that?”
He blushed and smiled a little, “Tonight.”
My eyes widened! “It’s your birthday? Happy Birthday!”
Chester beamed and looked down with a tinge of shyness in his face, “Thank you.” He looked up at me again and with a strange look on his face said, “Now my dear friend the hour grows late and you ought to be in bed.”
“What? I’m having so much fun though! Can’t we stay up a bit longer?”
“You may. In the time it takes us to walk to your chambers and for me to tuck you in. How about that?”
I mumbled rather disappointed, “fine.” But I could already feel my entire body becoming heavy and my mind shutting down.
We walked to my bedroom, I changed into one of those long shirts that people used to wear to go to bed and Chester helped me to put on a nightcap. He set his seashell down on the dresser and mine next to his, and they flickered dimly now.
I was about to climb into bed but he half whispered, “Wait, just one more thing, come and sit in this chair a moment.” Then he brought over the stone wash basin and set it on the ground in front of my feet. He took my feet and dipped them into the surprisingly warm water, after washing them, though the water never got cloudy he dried my feet and he led me to my bed. He tucked me in, I could remember thinking that the bed was so comfortable and immediately I started to fall asleep. I remember him kissing me on the forehead and stroking his fingers through my hair, I heard him say, as though whispering it, “I don’t mind it combed like this, but I prefer it the way you usually have it.” I barely mumbled my reply, “I’ll remember that…” before I blinked out of consciousness.
When I woke up, I was back in my bedroom in my pajamas. I really wished that I had woken up in that ancient and magical place. It felt so real; I couldn’t believe it was just in my dreams. What comforted me though was that whatever was causing the dreams, it wasn’t the first, and I felt there would be many more adventures there."It was insane. You can't imagine something like this ever happening to you. I was working in a bookstore, making $10 an hour, only able to work 30 hours a week, and just living this very simple life. "I shelved other people's books all day. My co-workers watched me hole up in the conference room every day to write in utter darkness. When the books started marching up the bestseller lists, none of us could believe it, and we were all waiting for it to come to a crashing halt. "Instead, I'm getting calls from Hollywood producers and literary agents, and it seemed like every day was some new piece of startlingly incredible news. It makes no sense, even as you're living through it."
"I do, I think you really nailed something. The low expectations really can add to the enjoyment. "There's a sense of having discovered something, having stumbled upon a secret I get this with indie music and small-budget films and video games. When I saw Moon for the first time, I felt like I'd been inducted into a club and I now knew the handshake. "That's so much more powerful than seeing billboards and a dozen trailers and feeling like you "have" to see or read something. I think it's also more difficult to be critical of a self-published work. "You understand that it's a labor of love done on a shoestring budget, just like how I forgive an indie album for some pops and hits."
"I didn't have the rest of the series in mind when I wrote the first novelette I began outlining the rest after Wool took off. "The transition was tricky because of the way Wool ends, but I decided to use the second entry as a bridge to the real star of the show, and I think it worked out okay."
The outside world is dead, the air poisoned, the last traces of civilization lie crumbling on the horizon. Humanity has taken refuge in a giant silo buried in the ground. The only view of the outside world is a video screen on the uppermost of 144 levels. Society is divided by proximity to the surface. The working class trudges through life in the down deep while those in charge live up top. History of the outside world has been reduced to quickly fading memories. The silo is the only history worth remembering and it is filled with uprisings that are not spoken of openly. This is the World of Wool. Hugh Howey's self published 2011 post apocalyptic story takes us deep inside a world that is limited by available space and what little information is available is strictly controlled. How would society react? Would they seek out the truth? These are just some of the questions Howey tackles. Wool isn't your typical success story. Howey was working at a book store when he penned the short story that started it all. Disenchanted with the current publishing model he recognized an opportunity within the current slate of e-pub tools and decided to self publish his next story. Readers loved the book and it made its way onto the bestseller lists. Fans clamored for more so Howey sat down and penned five more chapters, eventually publishing the entire series as the Wool Omnibus. By crafting an incredible world, a unique story and a brilliant cast of characters Howey created a story that shot up the bestseller lists almost exclusively by word of mouth. A prequel, the Shift series followed shortly thereafter and the final book in the saga, Dust, is slated for release on August 17. Ahead of this latest release Mr. Howey granted an interview with WhatCulture.com to discuss the success of Wool, his characters and upcoming projects among other topics.“It's not a sprint. It's a marathon.”
– Every motivational speaker ever
If you are reading this article, you probably have some lofty goals related to Magic. As a player, perhaps you want to win a PTQ and go to the Pro Tour. If you're a judge, maybe you aspire to be a Level 3. These are both long-terms goals that can take years to see fruition. After all, it's not a sprint...
Four years ago, I set a long-term goal for myself to run an actual marathon. I told quite a few people this goal. I'm not sure why I decided to make this something I wanted to do. I remember reading Haruki Murakami's novel “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” and thoroughly enjoyed it. There were just a few problems with the idea of me running a marathon.
First, I was in terrible shape. I had been an athlete in high school, four years on the tennis team, but hadn't really kept up with anything athletic since then, over a ten year gap at this point. Many of you might be too young to understand this, but as you get older, there is a certain conceit that you will always be as smart, or athletic, or as good-looking as you were when you were younger. Part of it is self-delusion, but part of it is that it is very hard to notice a slow decline. When I was in high school, I could run a seven-minute mile. I didn't really train back then. Why would I be that much slower now? I found out just how slow I'd become when I began working out again on a treadmill. I could barely even run a mile at first.
It turns out that after many years of not exercising and having unhealthy eating habits, I was overweight. I never weighed myself at my heaviest before I started working out again, but my guess would be that I was over 200 pounds. That's for someone who is 5'7'' and was around 140-150 through most of high school. It is a shocking number from my perspective, and looking at pictures from that time period and comparing them to me now, it is clear that I was not healthy, and yet I never felt fat, obese, overweight, or whatever word you want to use.
Part of the problem was that I didn't look particularly fat. This comes from living in America where everyone is at least ten, twenty, thirty pounds overweight so you don't really notice too much that you've let yourself go. I also tended to wear clothes that didn't fit, L(arge) sized T-shirts when M(edium) would have fit me better. So I slowly grew into those Ls until they fit snugly, and I never went through a period of “why don't my clothes fit anymore?”
Here's a pretty good comparison of me over the years.
Shortly after starting my running regimen, I joined a Weight Watchers group at work. I got a lot of sideways glances from my coworkers, mostly women in their forties and fifties. “Why do you need to lose weight? You're so skinny.” (Again solidifying the fact that I didn't look that overweight.) Those are hard words to hear. Maybe it's not as bad as someone saying “You need to lose some weight,” but it is a different kind of emotional pain to be told that you aren't fat enough to want to lose weight. My initial weigh in was somewhere north of 190 pounds. It was the first time I had stepped on a scale in years and I was embarrassed at that number.
Being in that group was very helpful. Although they were skeptical at first, my coworkers did accept me and we helped each other through the process. I'm not here trying to sell this, or any other particular brand of weight loss / fad diet. I think the most important thing is that you find a system that you can commit to and have a support system so that you don't fall back on old habits.
Over the next few months, I steadily lost weight and running became a lot easier. In Magic player parlance, “It turns out that it is easier to run when you don't have to carry as much weight.” After three months with WW, I was down to about 160 and I ran a half marathon in Oakland in 2 hours 10 minutes, or just about a ten minute-mile pace. Things were going well. Another couple of months and I was at my goal weight of 150 pounds.
Riding on a wave of feel goods, I took a job with StarCityGames in the (then) Events Department. I moved to Roanoke, Virginia. As a Californian moving to Virginia, I suffered quite a bit of culture shock. I won't go into the depths of most of that now. For this story, the important thing is that I fell off the healthy wagon. Southern food is delicious. It is also mostly fried or barbequed meat. Our workplace also featured a bunch of fast food and stuff-your-face buffets nearby that made for convenient and fattening lunches. The final nail in the coffin was that I stopped running. I could list off a few of the excuses why. My apartment's gym had a crappy treadmill. It rained a lot, so I couldn't run outside as consistently. Work hours made it hard to slot in a good workout time, especially when we moved and I had to commute 45 minutes to work. On and on and on.
In the end, it is just a list of excuses. Some may be familiar to you. The end result is that I ended up in familiar territory, overweight and not knowing it (or not knowing just how much). I hadn't brought a scale with me, but I did have the unglamorous experience of having to stop wearing certain pants because I couldn't fit in them anymore and going shopping for a larger size. Again, I didn't think it was that bad. I had bought a bunch of clothes when I was at my skinniest, so I accepted that I was backsliding a little, but deluded myself about exactly how much.
It was my good friend Kali Anderson who finally got me off my ass again. Also unhappy with her weight and health, she started a diet program and started to lose weight. Being a competitive individual, I proposed a contest with her to see who could reach the goal weight of 145 first. I went out and bought a scale and weighed myself: 193.8 pounds. I had done it to myself again. But on the flip side, I knew that I could get myself out of it because I had done it before.
That weigh-in was January of this year. Tired of all the excuses, I got a gym membership and started getting up early to get in a run before work. I also went back to some of the healthy eating habits I learned at Weight Watchers, cutting out a lot of sugars (mayonnaise and ketchup have a surprising amount) and fried food from my diet. I ran another half marathon, shaving eight minutes off of my previous time. Right now, I am once again right around 150 pounds and inches away from winning my bet with Kali. And I finally accomplished the goal that started all this so many years ago. On October 6th, I ran in the Portland Marathon. It was a grind and I almost didn't make it. For more of my thoughts on running the marathon, check out my blog here.
Now a week later, I can definitely say that I will be running another marathon in the future. I enjoyed the experience and feel like I can do better. I know I made some mistakes in my training and in my pacing during the race. After the tragedy at the Boston Marathon this year, I made a Tweet about qualifying for that race someday. I'm far off from being able to do that, but I do think that it is something I can accomplish.
Why did I write this story? Why did I bare my soul? Mostly, I want you all to understand that I've been there. I understand what it is like to hate to step on a scale, hate how you look, lack energy and motivation to do stuff, and wonder how things got so bad. It happened to me twice. Although I am now healthy, I live with a constant fear that I am just going to yo-yo back and forth over the years.
I think a lot about goals, motivation, and inspiration these days. I know that a lot of people look up to me for various reasons largely related to judging this card game. I've grown up with this game, more figuratively than literally because I was already a teenager when it first released, and I feel that I am a middle-aged statesman (don't call me elder quite yet!) Given that position, I feel a responsibility to speak up on this topic. I look around me at Magic tournaments and I see unhealthy people all around me among players and judges. If America is on average obese, I feel like our community goes one step beyond that. Many of us live in the middle class, and despite all the talk about the 99%, we live in the comfortable percentage that can eat whatever we want, whenever we want, and we do so frequently.
The game we play promotes a sedentary experience. We sit to play for long hours at tournaments, and we do so at home as well. Think of how much time human beings spend in front of a computer now. We Magic players probably blow that figure away. MTGO, reading websites, watching videos and streams, and chatting with friends in other cities are just a few things we do for hour after hour. The game can also contribute to unhealthy eating habits. McDonald's for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (and an after-tournament meal). You've done it. You see others do it.
I am now at an age where many of my friends are getting married and having kids. First off, this is a fantastic thing. You all have beautiful babies. Now stop posting so many dang pictures on Facebook. Second, kids are another time sink. When I watch The Biggest Loser, one of the things that keeps coming up with the contestants who are parents is how hard it is to find the time to exercise between cooking meals, taking kids to school, and everything else.
One of the things that I am afraid of is that I am now at the age when I will start losing my friends. Billy Joel sang “Only the Good Die Young,” but in today's culture it is the obese. This is just one website with some startling numbers about the current state of obesity, and the future that awaits us if things continue on the same path. Many of us are destined to die young from obesity-related illnesses.
I don't want to see a bunch of people I know die because of our unhealthy lifestyle. I love the Magic community. I live and breathe this game. My fiance is also a Magic Judge. Planning for our wedding next year, I don't have a large family, so most of the guests on my side will be filled with players and judges, as will a few on her side. I want to stay involved with this game for the next twenty years, and it breaks my heart to think that some of the people at my wedding might not make it through those twenty years not because of some accidental tragedy, but because of something that we can control.
I think it's important to start now and address this issue within the community. We need to promote healthy eating, bring fruits and vegetables to events for snacks instead of cookies and Pop Tarts. We need to promote exercise and fitness. Maybe not at events — although now I am imaging having exercise bike stations at events — but at the very least promote a culture of fitness at home. We have “crack a pack day.” Why not have a “take a hike day?” Several people have commented to me that my running exploits have inspired them to get out and take up running themselves. If running isn't your bag, join a spin class, take up bicycling, or find a group of buddies to play basketball with. Get up, get out, get fit. Let's grow old and play M40 together.
I hope you will leave a comment on this article to continue this discussion. Tell us what you are already doing to stay fit and healthy. Tell us if you've inspired to make some changes. Tell us if you're afraid or unsure about how to change your life. Together we can be stronger. Together we can survive this.Ah, the dating game.
It’s supposedly a game of love, but it can become a game of love-hate-swipe-meh as we wrestle with what our hearts, heads, and apps tell us (and you’ve probably noticed: They don’t always agree).
Whatever your relationship status is at the moment, based on your personality, you’ll most likely have certain inclinations—both good and, yes, bad. That’s right, as endearing as our characteristic little quirks are, they can also inspire some pretty bad dating behavior.
Research conducted by mother-daughter team Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers shows that all people fall into one of sixteen different personalities, expressed by four pairs of traits: directing and receiving energy (introversion vs. extroversion), taking in information (intuiting vs. sensing), making decisions (feeling vs. thinking), and approaching the outside world (judging vs. perceiving). Our Myers-Briggs personality type can offer clues as to how we might shine in romantic relationships—but also how we might be prone to certain faux pas.
It’s a good idea to tame your inner heartbreaker by avoiding these lousy dating habits common among your particular Myers-Briggs personality type.
Do any of these Myers-Briggs types sound like you?
INTJ: Leap-Frogging
Definition: Skipping the flirtations and abruptly getting straight to the point.
You don’t waste time with matters of the heart. Taking a no-nonsense approach to relationships, you jump right in to super-deep discussions—which can be a little intimidating at best and completely off-putting at worst. I know small talk isn't your thing, but maybe keep things a little light by flirting and making those quippy remarks you're so good at, before getting down to business.
INTP: Professoring
Definition: Prioritizing logical reasoning over emotional needs.
You’re a practical partner and a loyal lover once you're committed, but sensitivity isn't your thing, especially when it comes to your significant other’s feelings. So stop talking about how non-logical love is, and focus a bit more on enjoying the romance and keeping it alive.
INFJ: Snailing
Definition: Staying in a dead-end relationship out of breakup fear.
Never one for casual flings, you are OK with waiting for the right guy. But you may postpone a breakup since you hate confrontation and prioritize harmony. Be conscientious of your time (and his time) and don’t draw out the inevitable.
INFP: Princing
Definition: Ignoring anyone who doesn’t match your Prince Charming ideal.
You’re a hopeless romantic and know your soulmate is out there somewhere. But your dream guy vision can make you unwilling to take risks. Keep your standards, but be open to realistic matches.
ENTJ: Cord-Cutting
Definition: Ending a relationship abruptly when you realize it’s not forever.
Confident in your intuition, your decisiveness could come across as inconsiderate if you blindside him with a breakup. Be extra aware of your delivery and timing when you end things, as nothing is more dangerous than a spurned ex.
ENTP: Cushioning
Definition: Having a main man but still playing the field.
Your witty and spirited personality make you an exciting partner. To avoid falling into a boring relationship, you may keep a few going—just in case. So be honest with your guy and be sure he knows what's going on.
ENFJ: Pulse-Checking
Definition: Constantly checking in to see how he feels.
Empathetic and in tune with your own emotions, you might ask him a few times too many what his feelings are, where the relationship stands, etc. This is great for getting ahead of any relationship problems, but it can sometimes cause tension when it feels like too much probing.
ENFP: Breadcrumbing
Definition: Leading someone on with zero intentions of following through.
Charming and inclusive to everyone, you may unintentionally lead guys on even if you aren’t remotely interested. Try to draw a line between your friendliness and flirtiness to make your interest (or disinterest) clear.
ISFJ: Backseating
Definition: Putting his needs before your own—to a fault.
Thoughtful and selfless, you are extremely dependable and fully invest in your relationships. However, by sometimes hiding your true feelings from your S.O., you can push aside your own needs, which can then later cause you to burst in frustration, making you look needy. Remember to be initially straight-forward about what you need before you cause confusion.
ISTJ: Friend-Zoning
Definition: Keeping him a safe distance until you’re sure he checks all the boxes.
Practical to a fault, it can be hard for you to put the checklist aside. Sometimes, you send friends-only vibes until you're sure he's meeting all your prerequisites. Or sometimes you entirely miss the fact he might be interested, and accidentally friend-zone a potential suitor. Don’t be afraid to open your mind to the possibilities of romance, even if it comes unexpectedly.
ISTP: Stashing
Definition: Refusing to integrate the person you're seeing into your normal life.
Your passion and independence stimulate your relationships. Taking longer to warm up to exclusivity, however, you like keeping your options open—and don't necessarily want the guy that you're seeing to be included in other parts of your life, at least not yet. Don’t take too long, though. Keeping it low-key is one thing, a straight-up secret is something else.
ISFP: Knee-Jerking
Definition: Running away when you feel forced to commit.
You’re an intriguing enigma who keeps the surprises coming. Although you’re a sensitive individual open to serious relationships, you guard your emotional core carefully, and might have the tendency to run instead of vocalizing need for more time before you sprint out of fear long-term planning.
ESFJ: Footresting
Definition: Waiting around for him to make the first move.
You may have a set idea about how your man will pursue you. Desiring clarity and social validation, you want to confirm that he is willing to go the distance. (Bumble might not be your jam.) It’s all well and good to want him to kick things off, but don’t be too stubborn about it. Women can start the spark, too!
ESFP: Ghosting
Definition: Disappearing when the honeymoon phase ends.
You live for fun and adventure, bringing joyous generosity to all your relationships. But your fun-loving self freaks out when conflict shows up. Use your optimism to tackle trouble and give clarification rather than fleeing in fear.
ESTJ: Bouldering
Definition: Bringing up the DTR convo a little too soon.
Direct and opinionated with strong values, keeping that je ne sais quoi and mystery in the beginning stages can drive you absolutely insane. Table your intensity just a little, and let both of your feelings grow naturally before you start a confrontational "where is this going" conversation before things have a chance to bloom.
ESTP: Monkeying
Definition: Swinging from relationship to relationship without taking a break.
Attracting admirers with your positivity and exuberance, you have your pick of gentlemen. Outgoing and fun, you probably don't mind having a continuous stream of suitors, but you usually leave when things get "boring." Long-term commitment may not come naturally to you, but remember that the best part of relationships happens after the honeymoon period fades and things get real. At a certain point it's important to think past the day-to-day.San Francisco – Responding to a troubling rise in law enforcement’s use of high-tech surveillance devices that are often hidden from the communities where they’re used, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today launched the Street-Level Surveillance Project (SLS), a Web portal loaded with comprehensive, easy-to-access information on police spying tools like license plate readers, biometric collection devices, and “Stingrays.’’
The SLS Project addresses an information gap that has developed as law enforcement agencies deploy sophisticated technology products that are supposed to target criminals but that in fact scoop up private information about millions of ordinary, law-abiding citizens who aren’t suspected of committing crimes. Government agencies are less than forthcoming about how they use these tools, which are becoming more and more sophisticated |
not rule out a subsequent re-entry of people from Central Asia bearing this marker into India at a much later date. As further sub-lineages of Hartosh’s R1a1 are studied, it may well be possible to answer even this question.
The second part of their conclusions rests on the fact that the proportion of R1a1 in some Brahmin groups such as those of West Bengal is as high as 72 per cent. This indicates that the origins of Brahmins as a caste may well lie in the R1a1 haplogroup. But since the antiquity of the Ra1a haplogroup in tribals such as Central India’s Sahariyas is older than it is among Brahmins, it is reasonable to believe that Brahmins may not be entrants from outside but may have originated as a caste from the tribal population of this country.
It is a strong claim, one that hints at possible discoveries that may lie ahead as the genetics of the Indian population is studied in greater detail. The one conclusion, though, that is unlikely to change is the one Bamezai emphasises over and over: “Groups we seem to see as distinct have overlapping genetic signatures. In fact, two castes that may have great hostility towards each other may carry the same signatures. Caste, tribe and religion in India do not have any genetic basis.” Trite as it may sound, the conclusion is inescapable, there is unity in this diversity.Bitcoin PayPal To Integrate Peer-to-peer Payment Solution Venmo Soon
Paypal keeps adding additional payment methods to its repertoire over the past twelve months. Little under a year ago, the company mentioned how Bitcoin payments will be integrated through PayPal subsidiary BrainTree, although not much has happened ever since. Earlier today, an announcement was made regarding the integration of peer-to-peer payment platform Venmo.
Also read: Following Money20/20, Bitcoin Investor Conference 2015 Held at Las Vegas Hotel “The D”
Venmo – A Rage Among Collegiate Americans
Peer-to-peer payment solutions have a certain appeal, regardless of what age the user is. There is no better feeling than being able to send money directly to other peers while using a convenient way to do so. Venmo checks all boxes in that regard as has gained a lot of traction over the past few years.
In more recent times, Venmo was acquired by BrainTree, a Paypal subsidiary. Putting two and two together, it only makes sense for PayPal to integrate Venmo payment support in an official capacity, as it is – technically speaking – one of their own platforms. That being said, there hasn’t been much profit made by Venmo, as the platform processes transaction free of charge unless a credit card is used.
With the upcoming integration, Venmo users will be able to use the mobile application wherever Paypal is accepted, both in online and offline fashion. However, there is some less good news too, as all Venmo transactions will become subject to the standard PayPal fees. It remains to be seen how the platform’s users will respond to this change.
Venmo has gone through an interesting growth spurt as of late, as the company was processing just shy of US$1bn worth of transactions per quarter 2014. But in Q2 of 2015, that number suddenly increased to US$1.6, and that trend continued through Q3, resulting is US$2.1bn worth of transactions.
According to PayPal, Venmo has become one of the fastest-growing companies in the payments space. Assuming the company is successful in retaining existing Venmo customers after changing the fee structure, there is a lot of money to be made. Additionally, the growth of consumers relying on mobile phones to make payments will be a new customer base to tap into.
The Rise of Peer-to-peer Payment Solutions
Even online payment giants like PayPal are starting to realize just relying on credit and debit cards, as well as bank accounts, is no longer a viable business model. Consumers want access to hassle-free payment solutions, and the peer-to-peer aspect is becoming one of the top priorities to achieve that goal.
Venmo and Bitcoin are two of the most promising peer-to-peer payment solutions in existence today. Despite BrainTree announcing Bitcoin integration quite some time ago, it is still up to individual PayPal users to enable digital currency payments through the platform. Whether or not this will be the same for Venmo, is unknown at this time.
What are your thoughts on Venmo integration? Have you ever used this peer-to-peer payment service? Let us know in the comments below!
Source: The Verge
Images courtesy of PayPal, Venmo, ShutterstockWhen Apple ended its WWDC keynote in June 2014 by announcing Swift, an all-new language for creating iOS apps, it was an unusual moment for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it was a seriously technical bit of news during a keynote that traditionally addresses consumers as much as it does engineers. For another, Apple had successfully kept Swift secret, making its debut a genuine shocker.
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The prospect of a modern programming platform designed with iOS in mind got plenty of developers excited. But it also raised questions. How easy would it be to recreate apps written in Objective-C, the existing standard for iOS development? Would the benefits of working in a more up-to-date environment counterbalance the hassle of starting from scratch? If Swift was the future, would it make more sense to dive right in or wait until it was a polished, proven platform? Among the app developers that wrestled with such issues was Lyft, the San Francisco-based driver-on-demand car service. It thought the matter over, then put one developer on Swift to investigate the situation, and then, in due time, decided to redo its entire application in Swift. A bit over a year after Apple’s announcement, it was ready with an all-Swift version of Lyft. The company believes that it’s the largest app to make the move, both in terms of lines of code and number of users. “Early on, we regarded this as somewhat of an experiment, and very risky,” says Chris Lambert, the company’s CTO. But by pursuing the project at the right pace, it ended up with a version of the app that made its developers far more productive and happy–and which performed just like the old one, right out of the gate. Out With The Old In a way, it’s remarkable that Apple waited until 2014 to unveil something like Swift. Objective-C originated in the early 1980s, long before it occurred to anyone that software engineers would someday write programs for telephones. It came to Apple by way of NeXT, Steve Jobs’s second startup, which Apple acquired in 1996. When the company drew on NeXT technology to provide the technical underpinnings of the iPhone and iPad, Objective-C was part of the package. The language doesn’t have a reputation for being a cakewalk to learn or a delight to work in. But Lyft didn’t see it as a particular problem, either. “I would say Objective-C wouldn’t have seen nearly the adoption it saw without iOS, obviously,” says Lambert. “But no one avoided writing Objective-C, no one dreaded writing Objective-C.” We basically hacked together Lyft in the course of two weeks. Still, no language with roots dating to the first Reagan administration is going to feel cutting-edge. “You could see the advantages of Swift, just in compactness and the more modern programming paradigm that came into play,” says Pete Morelli, Lyft’s VP of engineering. Moreover, the Lyft app itself was showing its age. The company had whipped up the original version in 2012, when it was known as Zimride and decided to pivot from being a conventional ride-sharing service into something more directly competitive with Uber. As it added features, it slathered them on top of that original foundation.
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“Most of the code has been rewritten over the past three years, but some core parts of it were still holding strong,” explains Lambert. “But we would have built a different app if we’d started over.” “We were a very different company in 2012 when we started this,” adds Sebastian Brannstrom, Lyft’s very first developer. “We basically hacked together Lyft in the course of two weeks, Eduardo [Perez Rico] and me. A lot of the sins of those days are still with us. But that’s how you get started.” Lyft engineers Sebastian Brannstrom and Martin Conte Mac Donell Photo: Harry McCracken Starting Small If nothing else, moving to Swift would give the company the opportunity to fix every little irritating thing about its code that had built up over the years. But the company still didn’t know enough about Swift to be positive that it was ready for an app as ambitious as Lyft. So rather than rolling the dice, Lyft did something that wasn’t risky at all. Last September, it assigned a single developer–recent recruit Martin Conte Mac Donell–to start dabbling in Swift. He began putting together a prototype. After a month of working by himself, he had a rough draft working. Basically, it let you request a car. The experience impressed him. Swift was powerful and easy to learn. “I was actually able to be really, really productive in a short amount of time,” he says. Lyft’s Swift app Conte Mac Donell’s confidence made Lyft more confident. “Come January, we definitely had enough to make us confident that this was something we wanted to invest significant resources into,” says Brannstorm. In March, the company began to put more developers on the Swift project. It got even more familiar with the new environs by implementing certain features in the mostly Objective-C version of the app at the same time it was working on the all-Swift revamp. By June, nearly every iOS developer was working in Swift; on average, it took two or three weeks for any given engineer to be up, running, and comfortable.
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As Lyft’s engineers dived into Swift, their experience mirrored Conte Mac Donell’s early favorable impressions. “By the time we were working on this Swift project, we were also working in parallel on revamping the entire onboarding flow of the app,” he says. “On the old [version], that was a project that took more than a month, with multiple engineers. And with Swift, that was a project that took a week for one engineer.” Swift code was also far more compact than Objective-C, which made it easier to understand and manage. Over the years, the original version of Lyft had ballooned to 75,000 lines of code. By the time the company was done recreating it in Swift, they had something that performed the same tasks in less than a third of that. Flipping The Switch Swift was so new that Lyft’s engineers were essentially debugging the language itself as well as their app. “Because we were one of the biggest projects using only Swift, we had all the biggest challenges,” says Conte Mac Donell. “We worked side by side with Swift developers in reporting these problems.” “They were extremely responsive to all the issues we found early on,” adds Morelli. “Having that strong relationship and having that back-and-forth, which can be unusual sometimes with Apple, was really helpful.” When the company had a Swift app that more or less worked, it began testing it from both a passenger and driver standpoint–the latter of which was possible in part because numerous Lyft employees are also Lyft drivers on the side. “Even with just an employee beta test, we were able to catch driver-side bugs, passenger bugs, the whole ride flow,” says Lambert. “It was a pretty thorough process.” For all the beta testing Lyft did, it couldn’t be positive how trouble-free its Swift app was until it released it on the app store. And if there were problems, they might affect vast numbers of passengers and drivers all at once, presenting a danger to a business that relies on so many things working correctly in real time.
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Even as new features were added, the Swift people were able to catch up. “One of the challenges of doing something like this is, you don’t really have a viable gradual rollout strategy for iOS,” says Lambert. “Android has a little bit of a leg up there, where you can do a 1%, a 5%, a 10% rollout. With iOS, basically, it’s live or it’s not, which puts a lot of the burden on the engineering team. Everyone who has auto-update turned on on their phone will have it within an hour.” On July 16, Lyft deployed the Swift version to the App Store. And... it worked. Making the day momentous for the company, but utterly uneventful for its passengers and drivers. In retrospect, one of the most striking things about the project was that it didn’t slow down the development process. Normally, the company pushes out a new version to the App Store on a weekly basis. With the move from Objective-C to Swift, it skipped a weekly cycle–but only one. Which shows that the transition, ambitious though it was, wasn’t a time sink. Instead, Swift’s efficiency compensated for the labor involved in learning a new language and recreating an uncommonly complex app. And it did so right away. “We saw that as we were porting to this new infrastructure, people were able to do things much faster,” says Morelli. “Even as new features were added, the Swift people were able to catch up.” As smoothly as the effort went, most of the benefit is yet to come. “Using modern tools opens the doors for everything Apple is already planning—new platforms, new devices,” says Conte Mac Donell. “Everything’s going to revolve around Swift.” As it does, Lyft won’t have to scramble to get with the program. Thanks to its early decision to go all-in with Swift, it’s ready right now.
advertisementWHO, WHAT, WHY?
The Magazine answers...
If anyone knows how to operate within the law, it's a police officer.
So those who gathered outside the Palace of Westminster knew not to shout or wave placards.
Nor is what they are doing a protest in the usual sense - it's a queue to lobby their MPs, all wearing white baseball caps emblazoned with the slogan saying "Fair p(l)ay for police".
THE ANSWER It's not a protest but a "mass queue" Protesters cannot hold placards, banners or use loudhailers Police used same tactic in 2002, copied by other groups since the law banned unauthorised protests
A Police Federation spokeswoman hoped there would be as many as 10,000 queuing for the "bobby lobby", although as it turned out there were barely hundreds.
"We're policemen and we have to work within the law and we're happy to do that. We're just doing what we did six years ago in 2002 and it worked well then."
Back then they did it because it was a dignified way of getting their point across. This time, with their march on Parliament outlawed, it had greater meaning.
The march was re-routed to avoid Westminster, and in the afternoon, members unable to squeeze into the rally in Central Hall instead formed a line outside the St Stephen's entrance to Parliament to lobby their MPs.
The point, protesters have told the BBC, is to make a highly visible statement.
Thin blue line
So do scores of officers wearing baseball caps and T-shirts making a point constitute a "protest"?
Is this a protest?
What is certain is that it's a tactic that others have tried before, such as the Stop the War coalition last October.
"We did have banners and it wasn't really a queue, it turned more into a demonstration but we had discussed just marching to Whitehall and then having a queue but the police would not agree to it," says Chris Nineham.
"This is a loophole and I'm pleased the police have become another group that is making its point through one means or another."
Jeremy Corbyn MP, who strongly opposes protests being banned, says: "It's [lobby queuing] a partly-effective tactic but the real issue is that we shouldn't have to accommodate this particular law. We should be allowed to participate in democracy inside and outside Parliament."
Brian Haw has overcome the ban on unauthorised protests, exempted by the High Court after successfully arguing that his one-man protest, which has been going on for seven years, pre-dates the legislation.
But others have been prosecuted, including Mark Barrett, who organised tea parties in Parliament Square in protest at the law change and was fined £250.The following is a guest post from SUNY-Buffalo political scientist Phil Arena.
*****
Observers of international politics can be forgiven for being skeptical about ceasefire between Israel and Hamas recently brokered by the United States and Egypt. In substantive terms, it is nearly identical to the ceasefire reached at the end of Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009. Moreover, as Joshua Tucker discussed just the other day, recent work on conflict management paints a pretty grim picture. Though mediators might be able to achieve genuine conflict resolution under some conditions (see here), those conditions appear to be quite rare (see here and here). The conditions under which conflict management can be achieved are more easily met, but simple management of conflict appears to merely delay the inevitable (see here, here, and here).
However, I think there is a case for optimism. (Those who know me well will understand how unusual it is for me to write those words.)
I say this for two reasons. First, though I largely agree with the conclusions of extant work on conflict management, I think there theoretical reasons to believe that these unhappy conclusions need not apply under certain conditions. Second, I think those conditions may well apply in the current case.
Anna Pechenkina and I have a working paper in which we demonstrate formally that third parties can bring lasting peace by providing conditional subsidies, even if they fail to resolve the underlying information or commitment problems that can cause conflict. They do so, quite simply, by raising the opportunity cost of war. If you promise to throw a ton of money at people, but only if they don’t shoot each other, there’s a pretty good chance they won’t shoot each other.
That is, we think, exactly what the US did with Israel and Egypt. In the second half of our paper, we argue that the reason why Israel and Egypt have seen nearly 40 years of peace, after fighting five interstate wars between 1948 and 1973, has less to do with Camp David and more to do with the dramatic increase in foreign aid outlays that began almost immediately after the Yom Kippur War.
Analyzing all contiguous dyads involving Israel from 1948 to 2001, we demonstrate that the number of Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) involving the use of force that are initiated in any given dyad in any given year is positively associated with parity (which exacerbates information problems) and anticipated future shifts in power (which can induce commitment problems), but these relationships are conditioned by the total amount of economic aid provided by the United States. In the presence of sufficiently high levels of foreign aid, the effects of parity and shifts in power disappear, and the predicted number of MIDs drops precipitously.
Of course, correlation is not causation. To strengthen the case that the reason why Israel and Egypt have not fought another war since 1973 is because of the foreign aid the US has provided, and that the US has provided aid for precisely this reason (at least with respect to Egypt – there are of course other reasons for the US to provide aid to Israel), we also analyze the total amount of aid provided by the US to any given dyad in any given year. We find that the amount of money provided by the US is significantly greater in years where observable factors would suggest that the risk of conflict would otherwise be great – but only after 1973, when we argue that the US experienced a large exogenous shock to its interest in stability (in the form of the OPEC oil embargo placed enacted to punish the US for its support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War.)
We also note that recent events support this interpretation. Earlier this year, after Egypt’s ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) began cracking down on pro-democracy non-governmental organizations in Cairo, Representative Ron Paul and Senator Rand Paul attempted (unsuccessfully) to cut off all aid to Egypt (see here). The Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm immediately threatened to “revisit” the 1979 treaty with Israel if aid was to be cut off (see here), explicitly linking peace to the provision of foreign aid. As the New York Times says, “Egyptians have long considered American aid as a kind of payment for preserving the peace despite the popular resentment of Israel.”
It is therefore quite interesting that though the recent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is very similar to the one that followed Operation Cast Lead, this time around, as Haaretz reports, “Netanyahu received American compensation for his agreement to a cease-fire. President Obama…promised to increase U.S. military assistance to Israel, especially regarding the prevention of arms smuggling into Gaza…and to purchase more Iron Dome and other anti-missile systems. According to the understandings, Israel has undertaken not to launch any attacks on Gaza – by land, sea or air – and to stop the assassinations of the heads of Palestinian militant groups and not invade any Palestinian-held land.”
To sum up, we see little reason to believe that the underlying issues have been resolved. But conflict management can bring sustained peace even when it fails to achieve that lofty goal. Simply by manipulating actors’ material incentives, specifically by raising the opportunity costs of war, third parties can bring peace in the long term. We think the remarkable transformation of Israel-Egyptian relations serves as an example of this strategy. That the US seems to now be mimicking the approach that brought peace between Israel and Egypt suggests that, this time, the ceasefire may bring more than a temporary reprieve.
Of course, that assumes not only that the United States will continue to offer even larger foreign aid disbursements to Israel than it has provided in the past, but also that it will make clear that (the increase in) foreign aid will go away if Israel renews hostilities in Gaza, and that Israel will consider such threats credible. Threats to withdraw or reduce aid disbursements to Israel should Israel target Hamas again may or may not be as credible as threats to withdraw aid to Egypt should Egypt attack Israel. If my (uncharacteristic) optimism proves unwarranted here, though, I would not interpret that as further evidence that mediation merely delays the inevitable. The culprit will not be a fundamental shortcoming of conflict management so much as the inability of the US to credibly commit in this particular instance to subsidizing peace and punishing the breakdown thereof.One playoff win has not eased the mounting pressure on Indiana Pacers coach Frank Vogel.
Sources close to the situation told ESPN.com that Vogel, despite a 56-win season that secured the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference, is "coaching for his job" in the wake of a prolonged slide that has stretched into its third month.
After Indiana's 101-85 triumph over Atlanta in Game 2 of the teams' first-round playoff series, sources told ESPN.com that coming back to win the series against the Hawks would not automatically ensure Vogel's safety. After a 40-11 start, the Pacers went just 16-15 the rest of the way before a humbling loss in the series opener to the eighth-seeded Hawks.
Frank Vogel is on the hot seat in Indiana, according to sources. Pat Lovell/USA TODAY Sports
The decision on whether to retain Vogel at season's end ultimately rests with Pacers president Larry Bird, sources said, but frustration throughout the organization has been mounting thanks to a nose dive that began in February with a loss in Orlando just before the All-Star break and has shown few signs of abating.
Expectations were raised not only externally but also internally after in-season moves Bird made to acquire Evan Turner from Philadelphia and add Andrew Bynum for bench depth on top of last summer's additions of Luis Scola and C.J. Watson. All of Bird's moves, sources said, were made with the intent to get the team at least one step further and back to the NBA Finals for the first time since 2000, when Bird was the coach.
Lance Stephenson acknowledged Wednesday that he and Turner got into a practice "scuffle" last week before Game 1 against Atlanta but denied the two threw any punches.
Vogel and Indiana's players concurred with Stephenson's version of events, though the descriptions were different. Yahoo! Sports first reported that Turner had to be "dragged out of practice" last week after the argument and that fists were flying.
Turner denied that, saying simply that they got tangled up but that there was no fight. Vogel and All-Star center Roy Hibbert said every team has similar scrapes during practice but neither considered it a fight
But sources told ESPN.com it wasn't the first time in recent weeks that Stephenson has clashed with a teammate.
Sources said that Stephenson and guard George Hill had to be separated on the bench during a 26-point home loss to San Antonio on March 31. And when Roy Hibbert made his well-chronicled complaints to NBA.com in late March about "some selfish dudes in here," sources say he was essentially referring to Stephenson, who ranks as one of the league's most improved players this season as he approaches free agency in July and is well-known to be a Bird favorite.
Vogel and his staff coached the Eastern Conference All-Stars in February on the strength of Indiana's fantastic start, but questions about his job security began to bubble in coaching circles in March after Bird told The Indianapolis Star that he's been disappointed at times with the team's approach this season.
"A lot of times, we don't take the fight to [the opponent]," Bird told the newspaper. "A lot of times we sit back and wait and see how it goes. And that was the case even when we were winning a lot of games early in the season. We've got to be mentally prepared to really go after the teams we're playing against. We can't have the mindset it's just another game; it's a very important game. All of them are.
"I'm sort of going to Frank's side because he's had so much success by staying positive. We do have to stay the course. But I also think he's got to start going after guys when they're not doing what they're supposed to do. And stay on them, whether you've got to take them out of the game when they're not doing what they're supposed to do, or limit their minutes. I will say, he hasn't done that enough."
During the last week of the regular season, though, Bird told local ABC affiliate WRTV-6 that "I back Frank 100 percent."
Vogel received a two-year contract extension during the 2012-13 campaign that has him under contract through next season. Yet it should be noted that Vogel received the extension while Bird was away from the Pacers on a one-year sabbatical.
ESPN The Magazine's Chris Broussard reports that sources with knowledge of the Pacers' locker room dynamic have been insisting for months that Indiana would miss the presence of assistant coach Brian Shaw, who left the club last summer to become the Denver Nuggets' head man.
Broussard reports that, with Vogel known for being "completely positive" in his approach to dealing with players, Shaw often played the role of "bad cop" and helped keep the Pacers' potentially volatile locker room from imploding. Shaw's absence didn't appear to be an issue early this season, but some insiders think it has been felt during the Pacers' splintering over the past few months.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.Given the number of unpleasant emails I have received over the last few days, it appears that people have forgotten what the purpose of the [testing] repo in Arch Linux is for. Wait for it…. testing packages! Who would have thought!
Now to clarify some things. While the [testing] repo is for testing, we do our best not to break things in it. In fact, the [staging] repo was set up to allow rebuilds to occur away from the main repos and allow [testing] to always be in a usable state. Also, many (maybe even most) of the Arch developers use the [testing] repo on their main computer. I know I use it on all of mine, including on my work laptop. So I really do not want things to break either. And of course, if I cause breakage, that limits my ability to yell at other people who break packages.
One of the common criticisms I got in my “fan mail” was that I did not do enough testing of the change that saw the /lib directory change into a symlink to /usr/lib. Perhaps the need for testing was why I put the package in the [testing] repo… But, also I did do a fair amount of testing of this update. I tested that pacman stopped the update when there was a file in /lib (or in a subdirectory of /lib ), both when the file was owned or unowned by a package. I checked that pacman -Syu --ignore glibc && pacman -Su worked from and old base install.
What I did not test was using pacman -Sf glibc to resolve a conflict, mainly because even with my low expectations on the general population’s intelligence, I did not expect Arch Linux [testing] users to be quite that incompetent. I also did not test having another package owning the /lib directory or a subdirectory within that folder but with no actual files in it (or having its files manually moved from in it). And I did not test upgrading from a more complete install that could have packages with versioned dependencies on glibc (which does not actually break the update but makes it a bit more difficult).
Now ignoring the usage of -Sf … the only case I did not test that actually causes breakage was an empty subdirectory in /lib or another package owning /lib with no actual files in there. That should never actually happen, but it appears people manually moved module or firmware files from /lib to /usr/lib without fixing thier packages, creating this situation. In both these cases, pacman would get to extracting the /lib symlink, see there was still a directory there and refuse to extract. That left people with a system looking for the linker in /lib, but it not being there. Annoying, but this situation is easily recoverable, even without a rescue CD.
You may ask why pacman did not detect those conflicts before attempting the extraction of the package. That would be a good question… It seems the situation of changing a directory to a file or symlink is not a very common operation and so was not very well tested in the (quite extensive) pacman test-suite. Also, a bug fix in pacman 4.0 (prevent removal of empty directories if they are owned by another package), will have caused this bug to be exposed much more frequently. A couple of patches to pacman and these conflicts are now caught prior to the upgrade taking place. These patches are now applied to our pacman package, so non-testing users will not be exposed to this issue.
So a couple of things to note… Firstly, this was not a bug in the glibc package. Secondly, I fixed the bugs in the pacman conflict checking code. So… just maybe… I am not as “incompetent” as the emails I received claimed and I should not be “forced to stand down” as an Arch Linux developer.
Finally, if you are going to send angry emails to me, at least attempt to make them well enough worded that they can join my “angry email hall of fame”. The latest batch were surprisingly uncreative… In fact, the two emails claiming I would be responsible for the authors failing a course due to them spending time fixing their system instead of doing work were just stupid. Why would you update right before a major assignment is due and why would you send me an email if you are running late? Also, the style of the emails makes me think this was one person sending from two different accounts, so they seem to have plenty of spare time… I did enjoy a comment in the bug tracker that said the glibc maintainer was going postal.Having rebounded rapidly from the ETF-decision disappointment, Bitcoin suffered another major setback overnight as Chinese regulators are circulating new guidelines that, if enacted, would require exchanges to verify the identity of clients and adhere to banking regulations.
A New York startup called Chainalysis estimated that roughly $2 billion of bitcoin moved out of China in 2016.
As The Wall Street Journal reports, the move to regulate bitcoin exchanges brings assurance that Chinese authorities will tolerate some level of trading, after months of uncertainty. A draft of the guidelines also indicates they aim to bring practices in line with how bitcoin is traded in other markets. The draft states that Chinese bitcoin exchanges would be subject to current banking and anti-money-laundering laws and be required to collect information to identify customers, according to people familiar with the matter. They say the draft, if implemented, would require exchanges to install systems for collecting and reporting suspicious trading activity to authorities; China’s central bank would be in charge of handling violations by the exchanges. The people said officials could still revise the guidelines, which were passed to exchanges in recent days.
Chinese investors have fled the market since authorities started scrutinizing bitcoin trading in the country, prompting exchanges to install trading fees and, in some cases, to suspend withdrawal of bitcoin from their platforms.
The central bank opened up investigations in January at the country’s three largest bitcoin exchanges, Huobi, OkCoin and BTCC, and delivered a terse warning last month that bitcoin platforms risk being shut down if they skirt rules on money laundering and foreign exchange.
In the past 30 days, yuan-denominated bitcoin trades accounted for 17% of global volumes, down from 97% in the past six months, according to data tracker Bitcoinity.
However, as Bitcoin has dropped, Ethereum has exploded in popularity since the JPMorgan-linked blockchain alliance news hit...
The 'other' virtual currency has seen its price explode to almost $50...
Massively outperforming Bitcoin
* * *
For those who are new to Ethereum and are curious about the distinctions between that technology and bitcoin, below is a quick primer courtesy of CryptoCompare:
1. In Ethereum the block time is set to 14 to 15 seconds compared to Bitcoins 10 minutes. This allows for faster transaction times. Ethereum does this by using the Ghost protocol.
2. Ethereum has a slightly different economic model than Bitcoin – Bitcoin block rewards halve every 4 years whilst Ethereum releases the same amount of Ether each year ad infinitum.
3. Ethereum has a different method for costing transactions depending on their computational complexity, bandwidth use and storage needs. Bitcoin transactions compete equally with each other. This is called Gas in Ethereum and is limited per block whilst in Bitcoin, it is limited by the block size.
4. Ethereum has its own Turing complete internal code... a Turing-complete code means that given enough computing power and enough time... anything can be calculated. With Bitcoin, there is not this form of flexibility.
5. Ethereum was crowd funded whilst Bitcoin was released and early miners own most of the coins that will ever be mined. With Ethereum 50% of the coins will be owned by miners in year five.
6. Ethereum discourages centralised pool mining through its Ghost protocol rewarding stale blocks. There is no advantage to being in a pool in terms of block propagation.
7. Ethereum uses a memory hard hashing algorithm called Ethash that mitigates against the use of ASICS and encourages decentralised mining by individuals using their GPU’s.Lonzo Ball will be reevaluated in a week. (Getty)
Los Angeles Lakers rookie Lonzo Ball will miss Monday’s Christmas Day game against the Minnesota Timberwolves with a shoulder injury.
The Lakers announced Sunday night that Ball, who was injured in the first half of Saturday’s loss to the Portland Trail Blazers, had an MRI on Sunday. The MRI revealed a shoulder sprain.
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Medical Update: Lonzo Ball, who was injured in the second quarter last night, had an MRI today. Results of the MRI revealed a shoulder sprain in his left shoulder. Ball will be out for tomorrow’s game vs. Minnesota and will be reevaluated in one week. : https://t.co/ttyQZFcZV6 pic.twitter.com/TIkdFyL3K4 — Los Angeles Lakers (@Lakers) December 24, 2017
The Lakers said Ball will be evaluated in a week. The rookie point guard will therefore miss games against the Memphis Grizzlies (Dec. 27) and Los Angeles Clippers (Dec. 29). He’ll likely miss the Lakers’ New Year’s Eve matchup with the Houston Rockets as well.
The Lakers meet the Timberwolves again on New Year’s Day, and then host the Oklahoma City Thunder on Jan. 3.
Ball was injured in the second quarter at Staples Center on Saturday:
Lonzo Ball went back to the locker room with an apparent shoulder injury pic.twitter.com/yPfth5iX9X — Def Pen Hoops (@DefPenHoops) December 24, 2017
Story continues
He left the game, and the Lakers blew a second-half lead without him to lose 95-92.
The Lakers host the Timberwolves at 10:30 p.m. ET (TNT), the fifth of five NBA games on Christmas Day.The symphony and its music director, Michael Stern, have planned an ambitious, varied opening season featuring three world premieres and works by Messiaen, Schnittke and Lutoslawski in addition to grand standards like Brahms’s “German Requiem” and Mahler’s Second Symphony. On Friday evening it presented a broadly dramatic program: Bartok’s “Miraculous Mandarin” Suite, Prokofiev’s Suite from “The Love for Three Oranges,” Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber” and Rachmaninoff’s “Paganini Variations” (with the young pianist Behzod Abduraimov, who plays with technical assurance and phrases with refreshing naturalness).
Mr. Stern has built an impressively taut ensemble; sometimes, as in the Rachmaninoff, that tautness veered toward stiffness. While not the subtlest of this season’s tantalizing programs — it had a lot of Orientalism for one sitting — it was good fun and an alluring showcase for the hall’s acoustics and this excellent orchestra’s many colors.
The Kauffman Center’s architectural references aren’t very subtle, either. From the outside the two theaters are curving inverted ziggurats, pristinely white, that evoke Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum; the stainless-steel cladding on the arched exterior gives off a Frank Gehry vibe. And those nesting arches recall a familiar Australian opera house: when I told someone here that I was in town to see the new performing-arts center, he said, “Oh, the Sydney-looking one?”
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The building nevertheless manages to feel distinctive and local. The Wright shout-out is honestly earned: three of Wright’s works, including the pristinely white Community Christian Church, stand in Kansas City. |
probably help the campaign because it’s going to show a lawlessness and lack of respect for political discourse,” he said. Trump, who said he plans to speak on the convention’s opening night Monday, will officially accept the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday…. “The speech will be him,” said Manafort, noting that Richard Nixon’s acceptance speech at the 1968 RNC is one Trump himself liked and may look to for inspiration.
In case you had any doubt that Trump views things in precisely these terms, this morning he kept up his strategy of explicitly trying to foment division. In an interview, he seemed to insinuate that Obama’s condemnation of the killing of police is suspect:
“I mean, you know, I watch the president and sometimes the words are okay but you just look at the body language,” Trump said. “There’s something going on. Look, there’s something going on. And the words are not often okay, by the way.”
So Trump, whose new convention theme is “make America safe again,” thinks this is 1968, and he’ll be able to do what Nixon did. In his 1968 acceptance speech, Nixon painted a picture of a country sliding into chaos and mayhem, referencing “cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” “sirens in the night,” and “Americans dying on distant battlefields.” And he vowed to stand up for “the forgotten Americans,” “the non-shouters,” and “the non-demonstrators.” Nixon added that “they are good people, they are decent people; they work, and they save, and they pay their taxes,” and they are “the real voice of America.”
As Michael Cohen put it in his terrific book on the 1968 campaign, this speech became the template for Nixon’s victorious campaign message, one that resonated with “millions of Americans” who “felt the country slipping away from underneath their feet,” one that “spoke to very real and very raw emotions in the American body politic.”
Yet there are many differences between 1968 and today that call into question whether such a strategy will work for Trump this time.
As Christopher Ingraham details, at the time, the murder rate was in the midst of a dramatic spike; now it is down at “historic lows last seen in the early 1960s.” What’s more, it’s worth recalling that in the late 1960s, the backlash against the big legislative and social achievements of the Civil Rights movement — many of which had happened only a few years earlier — was well underway among northern whites. The resulting social tensions arguably dwarfed anything we’re seeing right now, even amid the rise of Black Lives Matter, the police killings of black men, and the retributive killings of police officers. The year 1968 saw assassinations and race riots in scores of American cities. By contrast, as Jonathan Chait has explained, the scenes of unrest surrounding police-community violence mask the surprising degree of consensus right now on the underlying disputes themselves, with most people agreeing that both sides have legitimate grievances, thus making an effort to exploit these divisions less likely to gain serious traction.
In 1968, with hundreds of thousands of American troops in Vietnam, domestic unrest over the war was also on the rise. As the repeated allusions in Nixon’s acceptance speech show, both antiwar protests and urban racial unrest were crucial in feeding the sense of a country spiraling out of control. Lyndon Johnson, who had announced he would not seek a second term, saw his approval rating hit a low of 35 percent in August of 1968. Obama’s approval is trending upwards and is now in positive territory.
On top of all of that, it remains unclear whether a strategy emphasizing a supposedly forgotten, disaffected majority can work in an America that is demographically very different from the America of 1968. As political scientist Michael Tesler recently explained:
There are a number of reasons why rising racial tensions are unlikely to help Trump’s campaign. For starters, the Democratic Party relies much less on white voters than it did in 1968. The electorate was about 90 percent white in 1968, compared with an expected 69 percent in 2016. Perhaps more important, race no longer holds the same capacity as a wedge issue to divide the Democratic Party. In the mid-to-late 1960s, white Democrats and white Republicans had similar positions on racial issues. White backlash against rising racial tensions, therefore, had the potential to push racially resentful Democrats toward the GOP. Over the past 50 years, though, Democrats and Republicans have polarized over matters of race, with that polarization rapidly intensifying during Obama’s presidency. Democrats and Republicans now have very separate realities about race in the United States.
In other words, despite Trump’s hopes otherwise, this probably won’t have the potency as a wedge issue it had in 1968. Meanwhile, the declining importance of blue collar whites to the Democratic coalition, and the rising importance of college educated whites to it, might also be relevant here. Trump’s strategy seems likely to appeal more to the former, but it could conceivably further alienate the latter, who tend to be more culturally liberal and may not be as susceptible to Trump’s white grievance-mongering. As it is, Trump is already on his way to becoming the first GOP nominee in many decades to lose among college educated whites. They are likely, if anything, to be revolted by Trump’s efforts to capitalize on racial division (and would be unlikely to embrace Trump as a result of violence at the GOP convention). Further alienating that demographic will undermine Trump’s hopes of winning enough white voters to offset his deficiencies among nonwhites (which will be made worse by his neo-Nixonian strategy).
Last but not least, Trump is seen as a far more racially divisive figure than is Hillary Clinton. The new CNN poll finds that Americans say by 61-31 that Clinton would handle race relations better than Trump would. Notably, white voters say this by 55-38; independents say it by 64-28; moderates say it by 71-22; and even noncollege whites say it by 49-42. Putting aside the fact that social conditions just aren’t anything like they were in 1968, it’s hard to imagine that there are that many culturally conservative white swing voters out there who constitute anything like the “forgotten Americans” of Nixon’s time.How Does Kinky Speed Dating Work?
Once you’ve signed up for Kinky Speed dating you will be sent a link to fill out a confidential form to help us get to know you better, and hopefully help you find a match a bit easier. We will take your answers and try our best to see if there is a good match for you. At some point in the evening, we will make sure you and the special match say hello to each other.
On the night of the speed dating we will meet promptly at 8pm. When you check in, you will be given a “match card.” This is where you will fill out any information about your potential dates.
After our quick announcement you will be assigned your table to sit at and the speed dating will begin. Each date will last for 5 min. We feel this is just the right amount of time to get to know each other. Remember, it’s okay to let the person that you’re "dating" about your kinks and fetishes. Hopefully you’ll meet that special someone that shares some of your kinks.
After speed dating is over you’ll return your “match cards” to your host. Within 72 we will send you an e-mail letting you know who would like to meet you. Masked men fired gunshots at unarmed officers and a police helicopter during this month’s riots in the English city of Birmingham, the city’s police force says.
West Midlands Police on Saturday released footage of the men firing shots during the riots on Aug. 9, and said 11 shots were fired.
Chief Constable Chris Sims called it “a concerted and organized attempt to kill or injure police officers” and appealed for people to help police catch the gunmen.
Police also said Saturday they had arrested two more suspects over the deaths of three men run down by a car in Birmingham as they protected shops from looters.
A 33-year-old man was arrested Friday and later released on bail. A 28-year-old man was detained Saturday.
The arrests bring to nine the number of people arrested over the deaths of Haroon Jahan, 20, and brothers Shazad Ali, 30, and Abdul Musavir, 31. Four have been charged with murder.
More than 1,300 people have been charged over the riots that flared in London and other English cities over four nights, and two-thirds of them have been jailed.
The flood of new inmates has brought the total prison population in England and Wales to a record 86,654, according to official figures — just 1,500 places below the countries’ operational capacity.Foto: Wikipedia
Ljubitelji "alternativne istorije" postavili su interesantno pitanje: "Šta bi se desilo da je jugoslovenski kompjuter Galaksija pretekao svoje zapadne rivale, spasio Jugoslaviju od dezintegracije i ponudio jeftiniji oblik kompjutera tržištima zemalja "trećeg sveta".
Foto: Wikipedia Galaksija računar, 1984.
S tehničke strane, hakeri, inženjeri i eksperti za veštačku inteligenciju nastavljaju da pišu disertacije i emulatore odajući na taj način počast jugoslovenskoj mašini.
Iako je ovaj kompjuter koristio kasetofon kao spoljnu memorijsku jedinicu umesto hard diska, umesto monitora običan televizor, memoriju veličine jednog imejla i samo tri obaveštenja o grešci u sistemu, 1983. godine svaki tehno entuzijasta želeo je svoj primerak Galaksije.
U to vreme, unos proizvoda vrednijih od 1.500 dinara u zemlju (oko 70 današnjih evra) bio je zakonom zabranjen. Iako su neki od tadašnjih "zaluđenika" nabavljali strane kompjutere na crnom tržištu, ove mašine bile su preskupe za većinu jugoslovenske populacije.
Upravo ova zabrana doprinijela je razvoju domaćeg tržišta kompjutera. U središtu nove kulture našla se Galaksija, jeftin i "sastavi ga sam" mikrokompjuter.
Galaksija računar bio je napravljen po principu "sastavi ga sam"
Galaksija je postojala u dve verzije. Komercijalnu verziju je sklapala i prodavala školarcima mala radionica Elektronika Inženjering, dok je "uradi sam" verzija opisana u specijalnom izdanju časopisa "Galaksija" pod naslovom "Računari u vašoj kući". Da bi amaterska samoizgradnja bila lakša, organizovano je unošenje raznih delova iz Austrije, pravljenje i distribucija matičnih ploča i tastatura kao i programiranje EPROM-a sa operativnim sistemom. Za sklapanje računara je bilo potrebno između 8 i 24 sata.
Tvorac ovog kompjutera Voja Antonić, došao je na ideju da napravi Galaksiju dok je bio na odmoru u Crnoj Gori. Naime, osnovna ideja bila je da se napravi kompjuter koji će generisati grafiku preko softvera, a ne pomoću skupih grafičkih kartica. Cena računara u samogradnji je bila oko 200 nemačkih maraka što nije bilo malo, ali barem dva puta jeftinije od bilo kog računara za igrice koji je mogao da se kupi na tržištu.
Ubrzo, novinar i ekspert za tehniku, Dejan Ristanović sastavio je specijalno izdanje pomenutog naučnog časopisa "Galaksija" nazvano "Računar u vašoj kući", u kome je dobar deo ukupnog broja stranica posvetio Antonićevom izumu.
Prodaja je vrlo brzo prevazišla očekivanja, tiraž je planuo, a štampanje novih primeraka ponovljeno je nekoliko puta do konačnog tiraža od 120.000 prodatih magazina.
Mali jugoslovenski kompjuter postigao je veliki uspeh. Na početku, Antonić i Ristanović su mislili da će stotinak ljudi poželeti da kupi mašinu. Ideja da će taj broj dostići 1.000 smatrano je izuzetno optimističnom i gotovo smešnom. Ipak, na kraju je kompjuter sastavljen u više od 8.000 primeraka.
Uprkos svojoj uslovno rečeno "slabosti", Galaksija i dalje inspiriše i fascinira. Tomaž Solc, elektro inženjer iz Ljubljane nedavno je napisao tezu o tehničkim specifikacijama jugoslovenskog izuma. Solc je dokazao da Galaksija nije zasnovana na neovlašćenoj kopiji Majkrosoftovog BASIC-a, kako su neki tvrdili, a pored toga razvio je i čitav niz alatki koje su dostupne besplatno na njegovom veb sajtu.
Doprinos istoriji
Bruno Jakić, ekspert za veštačku inteligenciju napisao je članak "Računar u vašoj kući: Galaksija, novi talas i kompjuterska kultura u Jugoslaviji 1980-ih" u kome je istakao nekoliko vrlo zanimljivih detalja.
Jakić je primetio da se Galaksija pojavila bez kućišta, što znači da su korisnici mogli da je ukrase i sastave po svom nahođenju. Za razliku od današnjih kompjutera koji se masovno prozvode ili Galaksijinog rivala iz 80-ih, Komodora 64, ne postoje dve Galaksije koje izgledaju isto.
Solc je zaključio da je jedinstveni jugoslovenski doprinos kompjuterskoj istoriji to što su njeni dizajneri, iako nekoliko godina iza poslednje reči zapadne tehnologije, uspeli da nešto nauče od svojih zapadnih kolega i dizajnera kompjutera, čija su dostignuća pojednostavili istovremeno ih učinvši raznovrsnijim.Golf's next wave might be very, very good. UCLA's Patrick Cantlay earning low amateur honors at the 2012 Masters after his fantastic, insane final round is a good bit of evidence for that.
Cantlay began his round with a prosaic front nine: an eagle, two birdies, and two bogeys left him in shape to make a run at even par for the tournament. But then came a bizarre back nine that made roller-coaster rides look sedate.
Cantlay started with a bogey on No. 11 and a birdie on No. 12; that was the easy part. Then Cantley fired a quadruple bogey nine on the par-5 No. 13, and followed it up with a double bogey six on No. 14.
He might have been forgiven had he walked off the course crying after taking 15 strokes to complete two consecutive holes, but, instead, Cantlay recovered to go eagle-birdie-birdie over his next three holes, and ended up coming in in 2-over 38 and finishing with an even-par 72.
Cantlay's low amateur honors match the same distinction he earned at the 2011 U.S. Open, and he can add the laurel to a growing list of accomplishments that includes a 60 at the 2011 Travelers Championship that was the lowest round ever by an amateur on the PGA Tour and a runner-up finish in the 2011 U.S. Amateur.
It might not be long before Cantlay, who turned 20 on St. Patrick's Day in March, is holding trophies instead of amateur records.
For more on the 2012 Masters, check out SB Nation's golf page and this StoryStream.Nashville Predators center Ryan Johansen on Wednesday detailed the path from a hit during the Western Conference Final to emergency surgery on his left leg that will keep him out of the Stanley Cup Final.
"It was absolutely incredible how much this thing was swelling up," Johansen told TSN 1040/1410 Vancouver radio. "I couldn't even believe it looking at it."
Johansen was injured during the second period of Game 4 on May 18 when he was checked against the boards by Anaheim Ducks defenseman Josh Manson.
"It all started right there. That was the play," Johansen said. "He just kind of led with his knee a little bit, and I was trying to reverse hit him a bit just to create some separation and [he] just got me on the right spot I guess, and it just kept getting worse from there."
Video: ANA@NSH, Gm6: Fiala, Johansen rally Nashville crowd
Johansen struggled but finished the game, which Nashville lost 3-2 in overtime, before encountering difficulty in the locker room.
"It happened pretty fast," Johansen said. "I got off the ice and I was having a tough time just standing and getting my gear off, and then obviously I went right back to the medical guys on our team. First thing, looked at it, looks like it was going to be a charley horse, started swelling up, so started icing it and doing all that stuff, and then I was going to go shower and come back and put some wrap on it, and then get home and get some rest.
"By the time I walked to the shower, finished showering, and tried to get on my underwear, I couldn't walk. I had to get one of the guys to grab a trainer and come back and help me to the medical room. And then the docs looked at it again, and the swelling increased by like triple it seemed in those 20 minutes when I was walking around and getting ready to go home.
"It turned into pretty quick transition where I just needed to head over [to the hospital] and get it looked at and take the next step, I guess."
The Predators said Johansen was treated for an acute compartment syndrome of the left thigh, an injury that can cause nerve and muscle damage because of pressure decreasing blood supply.
Johansen said Wednesday he is expected to make a full recovery.
The 24-year-old was unable to play in Games 5 and 6 against the Ducks, which the Predators won to reach the Stanley Cup Final for the first time in their history. He finished the Stanley Cup Playoffs with 13 points (three goals, 10 assists), second on the Predators to linemate Filip Forsberg (15 points; eight goals, seven assists).
"I just had a lot of confidence in my ability at the time," Johansen said. "Obviously a big reason why it [stinks] so much right now that I can't play anymore."
Games 5 and 6 of the conference final were the first games Johansen missed since he was traded to the Predators from the Columbus Blue Jackets during last season. His streak was 152 in a row, regular season and postseason, according to The Tennessean.
Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final is Monday at either the Ottawa Senators or Pittsburgh Penguins. They will decide the Eastern Conference Final in Game 7 at Pittsburgh on Thursday (8 p.m. ET; NBCSN, CBC, TVA Sports).
"It was pretty killer," said Johansen, who was on crutches on the ice for the Western Conference trophy celebration. "It's definitely been making it a lot easier right now, the guys being successful and putting themselves in a position to win the Cup.
"It's been pretty tough, I won't lie, it's been difficult and I'm sure it's going to be a little frustrating not being out there even moving forward now."At the National Institutes of Health, officials have started drafting guidelines they will need to start funding human embryonic stem cell research that has been off-limits for nearly eight years.
At the University of California at San Francisco, scientists are poised to dismantle the cumbersome bureaucracy they created to segregate experiments that were acceptable under the federal restrictions from studies that were not.
At the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge, Mass., graduate students and other scientists paid with federal grants are eagerly awaiting the day when they can contribute their eureka moments to projects that are forbidden under the current policy.
But in the month since Inauguration Day, the moment they have been awaiting has not come, prompting some to ask: When will President Obama deliver on his campaign promise to lift one of the most contentious policies imposed by his predecessor?
"Everyone is waiting with bated breath," said George Daley, a leading stem cell scientist at Children's Hospital in Boston. "We're all waiting to breathe a huge sigh of relief."
President George W. Bush imposed the restriction in 2001, limiting federal funding to studies of cell lines that were already in existence on that date to prevent tax dollars from encouraging the destruction of more embryos.
The limitation, welcomed by those who believe that destroying human embryos is immoral, has been denounced by many scientists for severely hindering research on hundreds of new cell lines developed since then. Such cells could lead to cures for a host of ailments because they can become any type of tissue in the body, they say.
Proponents expected Obama to lift the restriction in his first week in office, when he issued a flurry of executive orders to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, make government less secretive and lift a ban on funding international family planning groups that support abortion, among other things.
"We were surprised and disappointed it wasn't in there," said Amy Comstock Rick of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, which has been leading the lobbying effort to lift the restriction. "We're wondering why it's taking so long."
Advocates on both sides still expect Obama to act. Obama repeated his promise in a private meeting with House Democrats last week, and top adviser David Axelrod said on "Fox News Sunday" that the president is "considering" an executive order and will act soon.
But the delay and the vague language are making proponents nervous. Has Obama simply been too preoccupied with the economic crisis to focus on the issue? Is he hesitant to wade into one of the flashpoints of the culture wars? Could he even be considering a moderate move as part of his broad strategy of seeking the middle ground on even the most contentious issues?
"The word the president is 'considering' it is too vague a word for me," Rick said. "I don't know entirely what that means. If it means he's just working out the details, that's great. But if 'considering' means'reconsidering' we would be very upset."Greenwich Village
12 East 13th Street
Car buffs, stop! Don’t move to L.A. just yet! You are going to love this building. The former Hertz parking garage on 13th Street between Fifth Avenue and University Place has been converted into a 45,000-square-foot building with eight residences. They start at 2,800 square feet and range upward to 6,000 square feet, each offering oversize windows, private storage and at least one parking spot. The developers, DHA Capital and Continental Properties, nod to the building’s past and feature Park Plus’ robotic parking system on the second floor, which commands robots to retrieve the owner’s car in 90 seconds by smart phone.
Harlem
23 West 116th Street (The Adeline)
Red Rooster, the Apollo, an unparalleled music scene—why would anyone not want to be in Harlem right now? L+M Development Partners is making it even trendier with its development at 23 West 116th Street, the Adeline. Adding to the growing list of luxury residences north of 96th Street, the Adeline offers on-site Blink Fitness, a doorman, bike storage, and a 2,300-square-foot shared roof. “We wanted to respect both the old and the new in Harlem, so we carefully layered modern and traditional details throughout the Adeline,” explained Tell Metzger, the development director of L+M Development Partners. Once vistors see your wide-paneled oak floors and herringbone tiles, they’ll be humming “Take the A Train” with a mournful, envious note.
Lower Manhattan
50 West Street
(50 West)
Like to have cocktail parties? How about cocktail parties with absolutely breathtaking views of the Manhattan skyline? Time Equities’ Francis Greenburger is developing his legacy and passion project at 50 West Street, simply marketed as 50 West. The residential building will stand 63 stories tall, with some seriously jealousy-inducing views of the river and Manhattan skyline. Thom Juul and Helmut Jahn were brought in as interior designer and architect of the building, respectively, adding to its decadence with Jahn’s rare and artfully curved-glass facade. Get those martini shakers ready.
Upper East Side
60 East 86th Street (Sixty East Eighty Sixth)
The Upper East Side is about to get less stuffy. “Our buyer appreciates design and aesthetics and understands that Sixty East Eighty Sixth is a truly rare opportunity for something new and fresh in this historic neighborhood,” said Beth Fisher, senior managing director of Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. “There has been virtually no new construction to select from in the Fifth/Madison Avenue corridor.” Pricing for three- and four-bedroom apartments in the building range from $7,000,000 to $20,000,000. A highlight of the building is the chef kitchens, which feature Vals quartzite flooring, expansive white marble slab countertops, Gaggenau appliances, Lefroy Brooks fixtures and lacquer cabinetry with polished nickel fixtures. Trust us, it looks nothing like your grandmother’s apartment.
Tribeca
67 Franklin Street (Cast Iron House)
How would you like to live in the coolest-looking building in New York? The Cast Iron House at 67 Franklin Street inherits its name from the iron that blankets the building; during the conversion project, the developers shipped out each of the 4,000 cast iron pieces to Alabama to be restored. “This is a distinctive building not only in Tribeca, but all of New York City,” said Jourdan Krauss, the president and founder of Knightsbridge Properties. “The Cast Iron House is a combination of the preservation of a historic landmark that took over three years to meticulously restore, coupled with the reinterpretation of a visionary and iconic contemporary architect, who created a landmark within a landmark.”
Upper East Side
155 East 79th Street
O.K., this one does look like your grandmother’s apartment, if your grandmother was a Rockefeller. Anbau Enterprises’ Barbara van Beuren is leading the über luxurious development behind 155 East 79th Street. “Interestingly, Barbara grew up not only in this neighborhood but in the building next door!” added Beth Fisher, senior managing director of Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. “Her nostalgia for the charms of the neighborhood continue, and she observes that it really hasn’t changed much. The motivation certainly was to build family-size and scaled residences.” The building, spanning 14 stories, will include seven duplexes complete with custom hardwood floors, Italian marbles, wood-burning fireplaces, Juliet balconies and terraces. Each of these massive residences will have five bedrooms and five-and-a-half bathrooms.
Soho
180 Avenue of
the Americas
(One Vandam)
Let’s play “what penthouse are you.” It’s relevant, because 180 Avenue of the Americas has one for each type of personality. Penthouse A sets the tone for luxury in the downtown market with three wood-burning fireplaces, an outdoor spa, triple-height staircases with floor-to-ceiling windows and a private elevator. Penthouse B is less on the extravagance and more on the functionality, including four bedrooms, two terraces and a wood-burning fireplace. Penthouse C takes it back up a notch with another bedroom, an eat-in kitchen and a library. The building, a joint venture between the Quinlan Development Group and Tavros Capital Partners, officially opened sales for the building late last year but just placed the south-facing penthouse, the third of the bunch, on the market for a smooth $28 million. We’re pretty multifaceted, so we’re going to pick A, B and C.
Nolita
199 Mott Street
Sometimes in New York, it’s easy to miss greenery and the quaint charm of a small town. Well, it is unless you are a resident of Alfa Development’s 199 Mott Street. The building is nestled among the tree-lined streets of Mott and Mulberry, a location that offers the centrality of Soho without the gridlocked tourist traffic. The building will compliment the quaintness of the area, in addition to increasing its luxurious offerings. The outside will bear a red brick, steel and limestone façade with units that come as either two- or three-bedroom spaces with private terraces.
Meatpacking District
245 West 14th Street
(Village Green West)
It’s easy being green—if you go to Alfa Development’s 245 West 14th Street. The building, marketed as Village Green West, is a 12-story condominium that aims to achieve LEED Gold certification upon completion. The green efforts are supported by utilizing eco-friendly and locally sourced materials within the units, a green roof terrace and a wellness center. Sales range from $1.3 million to $11 million within the building for a mix of one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom units and four full-floor penthouses.
Midtown West
425 West 50th Street
(Stella Tower)
The latest developments in Manhattan would not be complete without a mention of a luxury tower in Midtown West. It’s an absolute work of art. Stella Tower, a joint venture between JDS Development Group and Property Markets Group at 425 West 50th Street, will launch in the spring. “Originally designed by Ralph Walker, the building is one of the finer examples of classic Art Deco architecture. It was built before neighborhood height limits were enacted and soars above its surroundings, offering spectacular panoramic views in every direction,” said Michael Stern of JDS. “We set out to create a building that blends the best of solid prewar construction with the latest technologies and finest luxury finishes.” The 51 units will be priced from $2 million to $10 million.Dan Royer makes many things, right now he’s most excited about robot arms. When he told me this at MakerCon, I had a moment of skepticism. What is so exciting about robot arms? Haven’t they been around forever? I think I had one made by Nintendo at some point.
“Yes” he replied, “but so have the X Y gantries that you see in all these 3D printers.”
He went on to explain that the robotic arms he is creating are relatively cheap and incredibly versatile. You can put a pen on it and make a plotter, add a blade and make a vinyl cutter, put an extruder on it and make a printer, toss a camera on it and it becomes a motion platform. The possibilities are pretty endless once you have a solidly constructed arm with fairly robust software to drive it.
That is a pretty good point. Once I began to think of the arm as a platform for other things, I could see why he was excited. For the rest of the day I kept finding myself coming up with uses for a robot arm.
His current kit, which is $294.30 CAD has the following capabilities:
3 degrees of freedom: forward/back, up/down, turn left/right.
Arm tip is always parallel to the base
125g static lift at 50cm full extension
150g static lift at 13cm full retraction
+/-180 degree left/right rotation
Movement ceiling 30cm from base
Movement floor -17cm from base
Repeatability ~2mm
When talking about the kit with him, we ended up fantasizing a bit about the future and possible uses. He mentioned that there were several improvements in the near future that would bring repeatability and precision to better levels. We even talked about adding more degrees of freedom to the head, though I’m unsure on whether he intends to implement that any time soon. As he mentions in his latest blog post, he’s been turning down feature requests for the machine so as not to have it forced into one single category or job.
The robotic arm is a platform, do with it what you will.
This week marks the official launch of Make: Volume 39 — Robotics, which drops on newsstands the 27th. Be sure to grab a copy at a retailer near you, or subscribe online right now and never miss another issue.
We are celebrating with five days of robot-related articles, pictures, videos, reviews and projects. Tune into this space for Robot Week!Emily Rose Perrin (GoFundMe)
Four-year-old Emily Rose Perrin was resting on her stomach, playing with her dolls, her golden curls hanging around her face. She was a happy child, her brother told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, though she battled cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that wreaks havoc on the lungs.
She was no doubt excited — she was turning 5 the next day.
Moments later, witnesses later told police, her mother — naked and possibly high — climbed on top of Emily and pressed her hands against the girl’s nose and mouth, according to court records. The mother was holding a chain dog leash, saying “she was sending Emily to see Jesus,” the documents said.
When first responders arrived at the home in Dupo, a village in Illinois just a stone’s throw from the Missouri border, the girl was lying on the living-room floor.
Her lips were purple, police said, and she wasn’t breathing. She was rushed to a nearby hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
“My little sister was an angel, a little princess,” her older brother, William Perrin, told the Post-Dispatch this week. “She always smiled, even though in life she was handed lemons. She had a difficult life.”
[‘You are a vicious monster’: Man sentenced for beating girlfriend’s 2-year-old to death]
The girl’s mother, 36-year-old Mary B. Lockett, has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder for “intentionally impeding the normal breathing” of the child, according to the criminal complaint.
She is being held in the St. Clair County Jail on $1 million bail. Her public defender could not immediately be reached for comment.
Mary Lockett was arraigned on first-degree murder charges in death of her four year-old daughter. @bellevillenewsd pic.twitter.com/VLZrenUyOQ — Tim Vizer (@TimVizerBND) April 12, 2016
Lockett’s roommate told police he had gone out to buy marijuana early on the afternoon of April 10, a Sunday, according to court records. When he left, he said, Lockett was smoking marijuana in her bedroom.
But when he returned, he found Lockett on top of her daughter, he said.
He pulled Lockett off the child and called 911, he told investigators.
“Lockett was going crazy inside the residence and saying she was going to kill herself,” according to the court documents.
When authorities arrived, they found the lifeless 4-year-old and her hysterical mother — still naked and holding onto her roommate for comfort. Lockett’s 8-year-old son was standing in the bedroom doorway.
Police said the boy told them that his mother had killed his sister — and that she needed to go to jail, according to the documents.
A Dupo police officer grabbed Emily and carried her to the front yard, where he tried to perform CPR.
Lockett, the officer said, told him: “Jesus came along with the dark angels.”
Paramedics took Lockett to a hospital, where she was sedated.
[‘Mommy is sleeping’: 5-year-old wandering streets leads police to her dead mother]
Court documents and local news reports portray Lockett as a struggling and unstable mother who was off and on prescription medication for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and had been on the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services’s radar since June 2015.
A department spokeswoman told the Post-Dispatch that, as far as she knew, Lockett had never showed aggression toward her children.
Around the time of the incident, police said, Lockett had sent a text to her mother saying her young son had stopped breathing earlier in the day and that she had to perform CPR to bring him back to life, according to court records.
Afterward, while Lockett was in the emergency room, she asked whether her son was dead, whether a sword had been used to cut out his heart and whether her roommate had cleaned his fingerprints off of the sword and put her fingerprints on it instead, police said.
During a recent court appearance, according to the Belleville News-Democrat, Lockett called out to family members, saying: “Please, believe me. I did not do this.”
At one point, the newspaper reported, Lockett pounced and shouted at a News-Democrat photographer, calling him “demon spawn.”
“I rebuke you in the name of Jesus Christ,” she told the |
as in this movie._
Though we have a good idea of what the Gear Fit 2 and IconX will look like, there's still no real word on those all-important specs. Blass mentioned that the design of the Gear Fit 2 would be tweaked for a "slightly more curved and ergonomic" profile, whilst including its very own GPS chipset.
The IconX earbuds, meanwhile, should employ dust and waterproofing, and could also include 4 gigs of on-board storage to hold a steady supply of music.
Hands-on: Blass' previous leak
Since these two products are continually being leaked together—they do seem to have a similar-ish target audience of fitness-focused users—it's probable that they'll be announced alongside one another. Here's hoping this little slip-up by Samsung signals an impending announcement, particularly with summer now on the way for much of the company's demographic.
We'll keep you updated on any further info relating to the Gear Fit 2 or IconX, so stay tuned.
source: Samsung S Health via Android Headlines
Last month, leaker Evan Blass offered a glimpse of two upcoming products from Samsung. Along with the sequel to the Gear Fit wearable, we got a first look at the Galaxy maker's interesting new 'IconX' Bluetooth earbuds. Though Blass' solid track record—along with the photographic evidence—leaves little reason to disbelieve the existence of these two new products, Samsung has now essentially confirmed both. The new Gear Fit 2 and cordless IconX earbuds have both been shown on Sammy's official S Health page, and while they've since been removed, we can now be almost certain that they're on their merry way to market.Ms. magazine has been accused of many things in its 40-year history, but shying away from controversy is something even our most vocal critics have never charged us with.
We have been accused of allowing ourselves to be bullied by pro-gun commenters in the wake of publishing part one of a three-part-series by freelance contributor Heidi Yewman on how easy it was for her to get a concealed weapon permit and purchase a handgun without even having minimal training.
We were soon deluged with responses, almost all of them attacking the piece and the reporter, some even including Yewman’s home address—presumably to encourage others to track her down and set her straight.
We moderate reader comments, and reserve the right not to publish comments we consider to be abusive or threatening. With thousands of comments flooding in, we weren’t able to do so with the staff we have in a timely fashion.
No one should suggest Ms. is unwilling to publish tough pieces on guns. The opposite is true. That’s why Yewman came to us in the first place. That’s why we published her piece. And that’s why her piece is still up on our site.
We regret that we didn’t have the means to initially handle the avalanche of reader comments following Yewman’s first piece, and, as we told a reporter at Media Matters America, we have a call into Yewman to offer to post the remaining pieces. We have yet to hear back from her, but hope to continue the series soon.This article is from the archive of our partner.
A British tourist took drastic measures to avoid the unwanted advance of a hotel owner offering her a "massage" at 4 a.m. Tuesday morning, in just the latest public signal that the Indian rape epidemic has spiraled even more out of control than even previously imagined.
The Associated Press reports a British woman leapt from her third-floor hotel window in Agra, the site of the Taj Mahal, after the hotel's owner refused to accept that she didn't want an early morning "free massage" from him. The woman alleges the owner of the Hotel Agra Mahal repeatedly knocked on her door — and well after she declined his offer. The Washington Post reports the owner left and eventually came back with a security guard to try and force their way in. With the owner and his crony blocking the normal exit, she was left with no other option, and out the window she went. The woman fractured her leg. Indian police arrested the hotel owner Tuesday morning.
Over the weekend, a Swiss women and her husband were attacked by a group of about seven men while on a cycling trip from Orchha to Agra, a trip ranging about 155 miles. The husband was beaten with wooden sticks and forced to watch while four men allegedly raped his wife. Five men have confessed to the crime, according to Indian police. About 20 were detained for questioning over the weekend.News Release 16-146
National Science Foundation evacuates patient from Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station
Patient is Buzz Aldrin, one of the first men to walk on the moon.
A ski-equipped LC-130 aircraft at NSF's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in a 2015 photo.
December 1, 2016
Contact for b-roll: Dena Headlee, dheadlee@nsf.gov
This material is available primarily for archival purposes. Telephone numbers or other contact information may be out of date; please see current contact information at media contacts.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has agreed to provide a humanitarian medical evacuation flight for an ailing visitor from its Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station to McMurdo Station on the Antarctic coast and then to New Zealand.
The patient is Buzz Aldrin, who, in 1969, became one of the first men to walk on the Moon, as part of the two-man lunar landing crew of Apollo 11.
The request to NSF, which manages the U.S. Antarctic Program, came on Dec. 1 (local time, U.S. stations in Antarctica keep New Zealand time) from White Desert, a private tourism firm.
Ski-equipped LC-130 cargo planes flown by the 109th Airlift Wing of the New York Air National Guard provide the air bridge between the South Pole and McMurdo. The flight to New Zealand will be scheduled as soon as possible.
NSF will make additional statements about the patient’s medical condition only as conditions warrant.
-NSF-
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Generic NSF Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station B-Roll
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Peter West, NSF, (703) 292-7530, email: pwest@nsf.gov
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year (FY) 2019, its budget is $8.1 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities and other institutions. Each year, NSF receives more than 50,000 competitive proposals for funding and makes about 12,000 new funding awards.
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When the clue about trading popped up in the Road to Crimefest, I was certain it would be item or mask trading, a feature many have wanted for a while and that mods like GoonMod enable. Instead, we got an "AI fix" which absolutely no one wanted or needed.
I made a mod called Better Bots. It's the most downloaded non-HUD BLT mod on LastBullet, and it makes offline play with bots (rather than braindead pubbies or, worse, F2Ps) a worthwhile experience. As such, I'm pretty keenly aware of what the bots are and are not capable of, and what they SHOULD be able to do. AI hostage trading is such a non-issue that, despite BB being out for MONTHS, the idea of giving the teammate AI that feature NEVER came up. I got more requests to give the bots the ability to pick up loot than I did for hostage trading (considering the requests for hostage trading was ZERO, that wasn't difficult to achieve). Here's a list of things BB changes that Overkill won't add into the game for no apparent reason (get cozy, this is a long one):
1. Three bots rather than two. PD:TH had this and the claims that using three bots would cause bugs or problems are demonstrably untrue; I don't know of anyone who has run into issues using three bots with BB or any other mod that achieves the same effect. The game is designed for four player co-op; if the resulting "players" in offline mode is actually three, then that designation of being "single-player" on the store page needs to be removed.
2. Targeting of Snipers. Overkill claimed some time ago that the bots would be optimized for attacking Snipers and that simply isn't the case. By default, the bots' weapons don't have HALF the range they need to take out Snipers, and if they did, they wouldn't be even remotely accurate enough for the task. More often than not, bots will mark the Snipers, point at them briefly, and then do nothing. If you are playing offline on, say, any Transport heist and you don't have weapons to deal with them, then there's no logical way to complete the heist. This is yet another problem that online players don't have to deal with, so the idea of PD2 being "single-player" is, once again, laughable.
3. Targeting of Shields facing away from you. One of the recent updates of BB included some code by TdlQ that gave bots the ability to target Shields as a priority IF the shield was facing away from them; otherwise, the bots would target pretty much everything else first. It was a pretty simple piece of LUA, only three lines long, and yet it increased the bots' efficiency by many magnitudes. So why hasn't Overkill, the developer, implemented anything close to that? Surely they know their own game, the code, and the language better than we do.
4. Reviving bug fix. This is, without a doubt, the biggest problem with the teammate AI. If you go down, they will stop and start reviving you ad nauseum, and their ability to treat the revival of you as a priority is pretty nonexistant. Above all other issues with the AI, this one makes offline play the most unenjoyable. You simply can't go down or the heist might as well be over, ESPECIALLY in front of a turret, which brings me to the next point:
5. Removal of "stunlocking." The teammate AI uses almost all of the same code for the cops; it would be accurate to describe them as Jokered cops with a lot of health. As a result, they have to deal with the same "hurt animations" that the cops do. However, they also don't have a "damage cooldown" like the players have. The result is that too much damage from too many sources at once (the most obvious one being the turrets) will "stunlock" them and they won't be able to do anything. This further compounds the problem with reviving you. If a bot goes down, it should be because they've taken too much damage and their health is gone, NOT because they were tossed around like a ragdoll. Once again, this is not a problem that the PD:TH bots had.
6. General improvements to their aim and damage overall. The vanilla bots will do 35 damage at close range and 5 longer than that. That's pathetic, that's barely excusable for Normal difficulty and not at all for higher than that. Their weapons will regularly be unable to break 15% accuracy; even point-blank targets can go as low as 70%, and because of their aiming and focus delays, it will take them a while to even reach that. They can't melee at all, so they won't be able to handle close-range targets particularly well, even though the cops can all melee for 150 damage regardless of difficulty. If you want the experience of playing with a crew who can take out cops and live to tell about it, offline mode simply doesn't qualify.
These are all features that are just in my mod. There are many other features that COULD be in the game if Overkill bothered to do something other than churn out more paid content, like the aforementioned bag carrying or perhaps fixing a drill or two. Another popular teammate AI mod, Keepers, allows you to tell the bots to hold a position until you call them again. Another, Bot Bullet Collision Fixer, keeps the bots from absorbing your bullets if you accidentally shoot them. These were all made by hobbyists in their spare time, many (like myself) who can't actually read LUA and just change a value here and there. ALL of this is made worse by the fact that they completely broke modding in the Crimefest update, and whether or not it was intentional is disputable. Overkill is staffed by people who once made the Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter games. There is, without a doubt, no excuse for how bad the teammate AI is in this game and the absolute gall on their part to claim giving the bots the ability to trade hostages fixes a damn thing is downright insulting.The Homeland Security Department buys more uniforms from Mexico and Central America than it does from within the U.S., a top watchdog said Tuesday, ducking the spirit of Made in the USA rules the government has on the books.
Just 42 percent of the department’s uniforms are from the U.S., the Government Accountability Office said.
By contrast some 30 percent came from Mexico, 10 percent from El Salvador and 6 percent from Honduras, totaling nearly $75 million in spending over the last three years.
Those purchases fly in the face of rules that say Homeland Security, like much of the rest of government, is supposed to buy textiles that are grown or processed in the U.S. when it comes to national security cases. That chiefly means uniforms for the law enforcement branched of the department, such as the Border Patrol, Transportation Security Administration and the Secret Service.
Homeland Security officials are aware of the rules and include language in contracts trying to follow them, the GAO said.
But in reality, there are a number of exceptions that prevent the Buy American rules from having a serious effect on government contracts.
Small contracts are exempt, and the Buy American rules are tossed out when they are deemed to violate U.S. trade deals, auditors said.
“As of June 2017, under the current uniforms contract, 58 percent of the value of ordered uniform items by DHS came from foreign sources,” the investigation found.
Foreign uniforms are, on the whole, less expensive to taxpayers, the GAO said.
Nearly 70 percent of the Transportation Security Administration’s uniforms and 46 percent of Secret Service textiles come from Mexico, compared to just 10 percent of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and officers’ uniforms.
Homeland Security didn’t provide an official response to the GAO for the report, and the department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Times on Tuesday afternoon.
But the issue has rankled some members of Congress.
Rep. Scott Taylor, Virginia Republican, introduced a bill in March that would require homeland security to procure all of its uniforms from within the U.S. The bill has nearly 40 co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle.Get the latest news and videos for this game daily, no spam, no fuss.
The Star Wars Battlefront PlayStation 4 bundles announced last month are now available for preorder at retailers across the country. Pricing was not disclosed when these were originally announced, but now we know the Limited Edition version will go for $450 while the Standard model sells for $400.
The premium console sports an epic Darth Vader design and launches November 17 alongside the game. It comes with the Battlefront Deluxe Edition, as well as a custom DualShock 4 controller inspired by Darth Vader's chest panel. For a closer look, click through the images in the gallery below.
Also included in the package are four free digital games:
They each are playable for the first time on PS4, and have "enhanced graphics" and trophy support. You can preorder these bundles today by following the links below.
The standard Battlefront bundle, meanwhile, comes with a regular PS4, jet black DualShock 4 controller, a copy of Battlefront, and the four digital Star Wars games. Preorder links are below.
In addition, you can now preorder the Disney Infinity 3.0: Star Wars PS4 Bundle, which will be sold exclusively through Walmart for $450. This bundle launches on November 13.I was going for aloo mutter soup. I’m not really sure if aloo mutter soup is really a thing. Aloo mutter certainly is – it’s that highly addictive and spicy pea and potato curry you get at Indian restaurants. A couple of weeks ago it got cold and I decided it was time to create some aloo mutter for the blog. Then I remembered I’d been brainstorming for a new twist on potato soup. This Indian curry potato soup was born.
Now, about this soup…it’s almost not soup. Soup that’s almost not soup is the best kind of soup. By “almost not soup” I mean it’s quite thick and hearty, as you can probably see from the photos. Maybe bordering on stew, but I think aloo mutter technically is a stew, and we’ve got to differentiate somehow. By day two you can call it stew, as it’s one of those soups that thickens up overnight. It’s like getting two different dishes out of one recipe! If nothing else, you can definitely classify this as a meal, as in not a dainty little appetizer soup.
The basic recipe for this is pretty similar to that for basic aloo mutter. The only real difference is more broth and a bit of blending. Oh, and the slow cooker, though if you wanted to make this on the stovetop you could just let everything simmer on low heat until the potatoes are soft. Throw it all in a vessel and wait for soup. Immerse yourself in scrumptious curry fumes as your appetite grows, all day long. I think this is my new favorite way to cook.RIO DE JANEIRO -- Jose Aldo and Frankie Edgar will be fighting for the UFC interim featherweight championship at UFC 200, but the Brazilian doesn’t care about the interim belt.
The Nova Uniao star held the undisputed gold for years, and entering a cage on July 9 to fight for an interim belt while champion Conor McGregor moves up in weight one more time to face Nate Diaz on the same night feels weird for him.
"He will be fighting at the same night in a different division, in a rematch that means nothing," Aldo said during a recent media scrum in Rio de Janeiro. "We asked for a rematch. For everything I’ve done, all the years as champion, I deserved a rematch, but what can I do? I had to accept. We’re not the ones making the call. We’ll go there and win. I respect Frankie Edgar, but it’s our first step towards the belt.
"It’s a bit frustrating, of course, because we expected the title fight, but it’s kind of what they said they would do, that we would fight Frankie Edgar for the belt, but it’s not the undisputed belt. But what can I do? We’re hired to go there and fight."
When Aldo pulled out of a UFC 189 clash with McGregor due to an injury, the UFC decided to create an interim title for "The Notorious" vs. Chad Mendes. Aldo made fun of the interim belt before and after the event, and hasn’t changed his mind now that he’s fighting for one.
"It means nothing," Aldo said. "I want the victory so I get the belt next. That’s the first step we’re taking. Interim belt is made for media and fans, not for me. I want the undisputed belt. I respect Frankie Edgar, but I’ll get there and win. This lit that fire again, this desire to go there and win."As you all know the number of kidnappings/missing persons in the US gets in the 2000-2600 range... per day (90% or so of which are children).
So I wanted to take a look at the stats to see if there was a correlation between satanic holy days and these disappearances, since we know that the sacrifice of people, especially children, is prevalent.
What I found, according to the FBI, that in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 the highest number of kidnappings ALWAYS occurs in MAY.
May 1 is May Day; it is also known as Beltane, or the 'worship of Baal' (which starts the night of April 30 with... kidnapping victims). Those missing victims would not be reported until May 1st, or later, most likely, explaining the high number reported in May.
Not surprisingly, the number of victims varies by month. 4 months of the year always have the majority of the kidnappings. May, March, April and October.
There are satanic holidays which have historically involved murdering children as a part of their ritual: Easter, Halloween, Beltane and (unfortunately) Passover.
April, as a month, gathers so many victims because it is sometimes the month in which easter falls and because it is a preparation month for Beltane on May 1. But it also houses the Passover. In the Kabbalistic tradition, killing a child and mixing its blood in with the unleavened passover bread is quite common. These are not real Israelites doing this, it is their twisted twin brother who believes God demands a re-sacrifice of the children of Egypt during the passover.
There is another factor which makes the number of kidnappings vary between either March or April: Easter's date changes every year as it is a Lunar Holiday (follows the cycle of the moon... just like Ishtar and Isis).
The number of kidnappings actually correlates with the placement of Easter in each year!
For example : In 2007 Easter was in early April, so the majority of kidnappings occurred in March (and indeed, March had more kidnappings in 2007 than April).
April, so the of (and indeed, March had kidnappings in 2007 than April). In 2008 Easter fell in late March, so the number of kidnappings in February was more than usual (by about 6000 people).
March, so the number of was than usual (by about 6000 people). In 2011 Easter fell in late April, so March had the fewest number of kidnappings of the four months.
The reason there is such a wide range in the kidnapping period for Easter is because it is predicated by the 40 day "Lent" period in which sacrifices are made to Tammuz, one for each year of his life.
Think of it this way, the priest class of the roman catholic church has its flock fast (removing temptation from the church) in order to allow for the massive infilling of Satan without the consequences from God (a double minded approach) coming down on the church as a whole; this is the idea behind the secrecy of such ritual sacrifices. The parishioners appear blameless, and the priests fall into deep sin.
40 days of sacrificing children to venerate and worship Tammuz, who is literally the False Jesus Christ (the spirit and the image) which presides over the catholic church.
Look at this:
"Inanna's [(Ishtar- Isis)] descent to the underworld is her death, and the end of fertility on earth. Her return to the upper world is her resurrection, the return of life on earth. But renewed life can be purchased only at the price of another's death, in this case her consort Dumuzi [(Tammuz)]. Herein lies the logic of ritual (even human) sacrifice."
-Powell, Barry B. Classical Myth, 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998
* Emphasis added.
What Powell points out here is that the sacrifice is made to bring Tammuz back. 40 days of waiting for Tammuz to return results in 40 sacrifices.
OCTOBER
October will always have a large number of kidnappings due to Halloween. It is a high sabbat in witchcraft and draws a lot of attention in the world as a playful holiday for kids, despite the fact that most kidnappings that occur in October are to the end of sacrificing the victims on October 31st.
The next couple of months that fall into the top 6 list are June and September (every single year). June is not only the summer solstice, but its also gay month with massive numbers of gay related parades and parties going on around the world. Statistically, around 30% of homosexuals are also pedophiles 1 2 3 (compared to around 2% of normal populations [which include homosexuals]).
September has "Feast of the Nativity" in the roman catholic religion is a little more literal than I would like to think. Its a very important day in the beast church and sacrifice of children on it is not outside the realm of possibility. But, more likely is the Autumn Equinox, in which witches sacrifice children to Apollo and various other gods.
Below is my summary of the stats and the links to the raw statistics so you can check this out for yourself. I would also like to note that the majority of sacrificing children does not happen on satanic holidays, it happens every day in your local abortion clinic. Aborting a fetus is, most often, carried out by a practicing witch. The sacrifice defiles this land, this country and this people; please always consider how horrible of an institution abortion is.
Year and Most Number of Kidnappings Sorted by Month
2007
May - Beltane 1st of May October - Halloween 31st of October March - Majority of Easter Kidnappings April - Easter 8th of April
2008
May - Beltane 1st of May April - Spill over into February October - Halloween 31st of October March - Easter 23rd of March
2009
May - Beltane 1st of May March - Majority of Easter Kidnappings April - Easter 12th of April October - Halloween 31st of October
2010
May - Beltane 1st of May March - Majority of Easter Kidnappings April - Easter 4th of April October - Halloween 31st of October
2011
May - Beltane 1st of May October - Halloween 31st of October April - Easter 24th of April March - Too far from Easter
2012
May - Beltane 1st of May March - Majority of Easter Kidnappings April - Easter 8th of April October - Halloween 31st of October
Disappearances Statistics Links at the FBI:
Glory to Jesus Christ,
JohnRichard Dawson, the British-born actor and comedian who played a larcenous prisoner of war on the comedy “Hogan’s Heroes” and became a star as the dapper and gregarious host of the game show “Family Feud,” died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 79.
The cause was complications of esophageal cancer, his son Gary wrote on his Facebook page on Sunday.
From an impoverished upbringing in post-World War II England, Mr. Dawson, whose earliest aspiration was to be a dockworker, became one of the most well-known television personalities in the 1970s and ’80s. He won a daytime Emmy in 1978 for his work on “Family Feud.”
Mr. Dawson, who rankled television executives and made housewives blush with his tendency to kiss nervous female contestants, was the host on the show’s initial run, from 1976 to 1985. Two families would compete against each other trying to guess the most popular answer to survey questions like, “Name the room in your house that is most in need of redecorating,” or, “Name something people do to entertain a baby.”
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It was among the most popular game shows in the country, leading to a nighttime syndicated version that eventually was broadcast five days a week. Television executives at times tried to get Mr. Dawson to stop the kissing, he said. Some viewers complained when he pecked the cheeks of women of different races.
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Mr. Dawson said he actively fought any discrimination in this regard.
“It’s very important to me that on ‘Family Feud’ I could kiss all people,” he said in a 2010 interview for the Archive of American Television. “I kissed black women daily and nightly on ‘Family Feud’ for 11 years, and the world didn’t come to an end, did it?”FLORENCE - Pinal County sheriff's deputies say they found a car disguised as a patrol car and another car off the side of Interstate 8 in southern Arizona, and both had bails of marijuana in the trunk.
Sheriff's officials believe the fake patrol car attempted a traffic stop Saturday night on the second vehicle to steal the marijuana it was carrying.
Deputies say the engines of both vehicles were running when they stopped to check the scene near Vekol Valley, but the occupants were gone.
The fake patrol car was a Crown Victoria outfitted with red and blue lights, a siren, spotlight and front push bar.
A deputy found it stuck in loose dirt, with the trunk partially open.
It was about 20 feet behind the other car, which had crashed.The XBIZ and AVN awards are two of the largest award shows in the porn industry. AVN is referred to as the “Oscars of porn,” while XBIZ is hosted by possibly the most famous name in porn, Ron Jeremy. And this year, both of them have showered actor James Deen with nominations, despite the numerous rape and sexual assault allegations that have come out against the actor in the past year.
Deen and his production company are nominated for a combined 20 awards between the two shows, including Male Performer of the Year in both. Deen said in a press release, “I love making adult films and always will. It is extremely satisfying to see that my labors of love have been acknowledged by the powers that be at both organizations who specialize in judging adult entertainment.”
For a long time, Deen was dubbed the face of feminist porn, mainly because he didn’t fit the mold of the beefy, slick porn star. In an interview with the Daily Dot, one woman said, “All porn guys besides James Deen are disgusto.” He spoke eloquently about consent. He became the darling of Tumblr, and made jokes about being attracted to Brad Pitt, which made him all the more endearing to women looking for an antidote to most mainstream porn.
Since then, at least 13 women have accused James Deen of rape or sexual assault. The first accusation came almost exactly a year ago from porn actress Stoya, who had previously dated Deen. She said Deen raped her as she said no, stop, and her safeword. Other actresses and people involved in the porn industry came forward with similar stories, including Joanna Angel, who is also nominated for XBIZ and AVN awards this year.
He’s dead on the inside and dead to me. He’s literally the worst person I’ve ever met. That’s all I’ll say for now #solidaritywithstoya — Joanna Angel (@JoannaAngel) November 29, 2015
The accusations initially had major ramifications for Deen. Kink.com cut ties with the actor, and updated its rules to make it easier for models to report harmful incidents. His advice column for the Frisky was axed, with editor Amelia McDonell-Parry explaining, “No amount of good rapport between us or traffic to his columns would EVER supersede the fact that I BELIEVE WOMEN.” It also appeared that the feminist sheen had worn off his image, and that those who had flocked to him for his wholesome, nice-guy shtick were ready to believe his accusers.
But just a few months later, Deen was back on top again. In fact, Deen has produced 29 films in the past year, and plenty of studios are still willing to work with him. “It was clear to everyone in the adult industry that this [the sexual assault allegations] was nothing but media sensationalism,” a Deen spokesperson told the Daily Dot.
“It was natural for there to be a lot of knee-jerk reaction,” regarding the nominations, XBIZ president Alec Helmy told the Daily Dot. “But the fact is, to date, he has not been charged with a crime and therefore we must do the right thing and assume innocence. And it seems many feel the same way because James Deen continues to be one of the most active performers in the business today.”
That none of the women have brought charges against Deen is common: Often, sexual assault victims don’t the believe anything will come of their case, they fear of lack of evidence and reprisal. That fear is also amplified if the accused is a coworker. In any industry, there is the risk that the accuser will be penalized, and if you’ve already gone through the trauma of assault, many victims fear added trauma of being suddenly unemployed. It’s not hard to see how this could have played out with Deen—the critical darling studios would be reluctant to cut ties with, no matter how harsh the accusations or famous the accusers.
Deen is not alone in having a thriving career despite accusations of violence. Johnny Depp, Casey Affleck, R. Kelly, Woody Allen, and many more celebrities have been accused or found guilty of rape, domestic abuse, and sexual assault, and continue to work. Which is not to say rapists or accused rapists should be banned from working for the rest of their lives. Only that the accused have a long history of not facing consequences or even scrutiny, while the accusers are ignored or publicly condemned.Newspaper columnist Ann Coulter, spreading the lies of the extreme right wing, called the Occupy Wall Street protestors, “tattooed, body-pierced, sunken-chested 19-year-olds getting in fights with the police for fun.”
She claimed the protestors, now in the thousands in New York, are “directionless losers [who] pose for cameras while uttering random liberal clichés lacking any reason or coherence.” (Several hundred thousand of these “directionless losers” are expected to attend rallies in more than 650 cities, October 15.)
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), House majority leader, called the protest nothing more than “growing mobs,” completely oblivious to his myriad statements that he supports “mobs” when they are from the Tea Party.
Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, tacking as far right as possible to avoid anyone thinking he was once a moderate, called the protest “dangerous.”
Republican presidential contender Herman Cain, in a moment that demonstrated how out of touch he is with the economic reality of the five-year recession, argued, “Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks; if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!”
Glenn Beck, too irrational even for Fox News, which terminated him less than two years after it tried to make him a TV superstar, told his radio audience, the protestors “will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill you.”
Lauren Ellis of Mother Jones, at one time a cutting edge magazine for social justice, believed that the protestors have a “lack of focus.” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, wrote, “A protest without an objective is like a party or a picnic of the unemployed and the indolent. Unless you have an objective, what are you doing out there?”
First, let’s see just who these protestors really are. And then, let’s see what they stand for, since the mainstream media, of which Fox News is an entrenched part, don’t seem to be getting the message from the people.
The protestors rightly say they are part of the 99 percent; the other one percent have 42 percent of the nation’s wealth, the top 20 percent have more than 85 percent of the nation’s wealth, the highest accumulation since 1928, the year before the Great Depression. Even the most oblivious recognize the protestors as a large cross-section of America. They are students and teachers; housewives, plumbers, and physicians; combat veterans from every war from World War II to the present. They are young, middle-aged, and elderly. They are high school dropouts and Ph.D.s. They are from all religions and no religion, and a broad spectrum of political views.
Support has come from senior politicians with very different philosophies. Vice President Joe Biden believes the protests are because “In the minds of the vast majority of the American–the middle class is being screwed.” Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), unlike a vast majority of Republican politicians, stated, “If they were demonstrating peacefully, and making a point, and arguing our case, and drawing attention to the Fed—I would say, ‘good!’”
Second, like all protests, there are different opinions within the ranks. But, there is a core of beliefs. The protestors are fed up with corporate greed that has a base of corporate welfare and special tax benefits for the rich. They support the trade union movement, Medicare and Social Security, affordable health care for all citizens, and programs to assist the unemployed, disenfranchised, and underclass. A nation that cannot take care of the least among us doesn’t deserve to be called the best of us.
They’re mad that the home mortgage crisis, begun when greed overcame ethics and was then magnified by the failure of regulatory agencies and the Congress to provide adequate oversight, robbed all of America of its financial security. During the first half of this year alone, banks and lending agencies have sent notices to more than 1.2 million homeowners whose loans and mortgages are in default status, according to RealtyTrak. Of course, less regulation is just what conservatives want—after all, their mantra has become, “no government in our lives.”
The protestors are mad that the wealthiest corporations pay little or no taxes. They point to the Bank of America, part of the mortgage crisis problem, which earned a $4.4 billion profit last year, but received a $1.9 billion tax refund on top of a bailout of about $1 trillion. They look at ExxonMobil, which earned more than $19 billion profit in 2009, paid no taxes and received a $156 million federal rebate. Its profit for the first half of 2011 is about $ 21.3 billion.
They rightfully note that it is slimy when General Electric, whose CEO is a close Obama advisor, earned a $26 billion profit during the past five years, but still received a $4.1 billion refund |
about our kids" and "we need a REAL man on the Sunnyside Board."
"We don't need someone who hates our values," the flier continues.
Hernandez is aware of the fliers, telling the Huffington Post, "I've had a target on my back from my fellow board members for awhile because I don't go with the flow, and if something doesn't sound right or make sense, I call them out on it.
"My governing board president has started the recall process on me, with the people who are his friends and closest allies in the community. I'm not overly concerned they're going to get the 1,300 signatures, but just the negative tone and nature of the way they're doing it has been really bothersome and upsetting," he added. "It's disheartening that this is where we are in 2013, that people think it's okay to put out these kinds of flyers about anybody."
h/t Right Wing WatchAnyone who is lucky enough to be a Facebook friend of Neil Seery’s knows that the Team Ryano man wasn’t happy with Ireland’s centenary celebrations of the Easter Rising.
In an absurd twist of events, after voicing his discontent with the state’s public commemorations, he was later photographer running through a parade in Glasnevin.
“Wasn’t that just the best ever?” he says when I ask him about the pictures that surfaced of him running alongside the parade with his German shepherd, King.
“I was watching the 1916 centenary anniversary thing on the television and I was giving out shit. I’m looking at all them tramps, that’s what I always call politicians, and they’re up there patting each other on the back for destroying our country. Those tramps were sitting up there, front and centre, where normal people should be. That fuckin’ pisses me off. I was losing my mind at these tramps and then my missus tells me to get out and get some fresh air, so I went out running.
“I always run up by the canal and then I come out at the Porterhouse, but when I came out on Sunday I ran straight into the middle of a parade with a marching band and the whole lot. I had my dog and I was just after taking the muzzle off him and I just knew he was going to get agitated.
“As I was thinking that, some little Jack Russell locked on to his harness and his owner just starts screaming ‘ahhhhhhhh ahhhhhhh’. So I was like ‘get off him you bastard’ to the Jacker and when he let go I put the muzzle back on my own dog. Then another lad went by and he was trying to pet him but I swear my dog only missed him by about a centimeter when he tried to put his hand on him.
“I started to pick up the pace as I was running by the marching band, and just when I turned a corner I see this camera. Straight away I’m thinking, ‘this is RTE’.
“I had been giving out all morning about the parade and I was just imagining my head coming up on the news running with my dog beside some copper while it was going on!”
Usually a very active fighter, there hasn’t been much news in terms of fights for the Team Ryano stalwart since his second round submission win over Jon Delos Reyes in front of his hometown crowd in Dublin last October. ‘2 Tap’ admitted that is was a case of nothing exciting him after the bout that brought on the five-month wait for an opponent.
“Nothing excited me after that Dublin card. I got offered a very short notice fight in Australia, but there was no way I could’ve made weight in a week and travel out there. I would have done it if I had one more week because I hate seeing people that have trained for so long left without a fight and an opportunity to make money.
“People are too uptight about their records. It’s great to have a decent one, but you have to look at it and ask who the person has actually fought. It hurt me to turn down that fight. I said from day one that I would never turn a fight down in UFC. Up until that short notice call up I haven’t, and honestly I think that’s why I got the Horiguchi fight.”
Kyogi Horiguchi, a former UFC title contender, will be the toughest test of Seery’s career when they face off in Rotterdam on May 8. Clearly relishing the thoughts of mixing it with one of the karate proponents in MMA, the Dubliner noted that a lot of people think that the fight is a mismatch.
“If you look at him on paper, he’s 16-2, he’s young, he’s exciting and he’s quick. He’s really tough. He fought Demetrious Johnson and lost in the last ten seconds. On paper everyone is looking at it like Seery doesn’t have a chance.
“I’m going in with a 16-11 record. I’m 36 years of age. I know people are looking at it and saying ‘mismatch’. It could be a mismatch on the night, or it could be a fantastic fight between two guys that are willing to fight. I know I’m going to give this guy everything I have, and I know when I’m at my best I can beat anyone.
“It’s a really tough fight. I believe he’s ranked sixth in the world. I’m not even in the rankings. I really don’t understand how I got him. I think a lot of people turned him down because he’s too dangerous. Why, though?
“If people are crying about money and they’re only fighting three times a year and they’re only making 20k a fight–do the sums. It 60k and then you have to pay for this, that and the other. It’s a living wage. It’s not a comfortable living wage, but why would you turn down a fight to cut your losses and not add to your wage? I don’t need this money, but I like to fight.”
It might have taken a while, but Seery has managed to endear himself to the masses since signing with UFC based on nothing more than being himself. As far as he is concerned, he would be exhausted trying to put on a front rather than showing people what he is really about.
“I don’t really notice that,” he replies when I ask him about elevated fan stock of late.
“I think people like that I’m myself. There are a lot of people that are putting on an act, but I just like wrecking peoples’ heads all day long. I can buzz off people all day, but when the time comes to switch off and go to work I can do that too. I’m just an ordinary Joe Soap, and there are so many false people these days.
“They sit around talking about their dreams all day, but it’s like ‘fuck off and get a job’, as far as I’m concerned. If I had to pretend to be someone else all day I’d be fuckin’ exhausted. So I don’t do it.”
@PetesyCarrollAccording to her website ( dambisamoyo.com) Dambisa Moyo "is an international economist who comments on the macroeconomy and global affairs." This hardly does justice to either her current profile or the progress she has made from being a mere economist to her current status of iconoclast and on to the sunlit uplands of "public intellectual", rarer in the Anglo-Saxon world than in more thoughtful societies such as France or Japan.
Moyo was included in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World. She holds a PhD in economics from Oxford and a Masters from Harvard, and her career has seen her passing through the ranks of the World Bank and Goldman Sachs. She is soon to be interviewed at the London School of Economics by the historian Niall Ferguson, and will be a star turn at the Davos international economics shindig soon after.
One critic – in fact her former tutor, the Oxford economics professor Paul Collier – has said that "Dambisa Moyo is to aid what Ayaan Hirsi Ali is to Islam". (Ali – the Somali-born Dutch feminist, writer and noted critic of Islam being the current partner of Ferguson, of course; public intellectuals inhabit a small world).
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Collier was reviewing Moyo's first book, the provocative Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is Another Way for Africa, which established her credentials as a fresh, innovative thinker of the type the media love – someone apparently from a vested interest who attacks that very interest. Such contentiousness, it has to be said, also appeals to those in the West who don't really mind whether Zambia gets a fair break or not but who do want to keep their tax bills down. They are well represented in parts of the British media.
This section of the British media meets Moyo at the Carlton Tower Hotel in Knightsbridge, a suitably glam location, and yes a long way from her Zambian beginnings. I'm here to discuss her new book, How the West was Lost, published this week, which I think you can probably guess the gist of, but the subtitle helps you along in case you're a bit rushed at the airport: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices Ahead.
As a publishing fashion, subtitling seems to he turning rapidly into précis but it's helpful if you want to judge a book by its cover. Anyway I have a bit of a stark choice ahead of myself; do I ask Moyo the personal stuff – "colour" – as we call it in the trade, at the start or the end of the interview. I had been warned beforehand that Moyo doesn't "do personal – never have, never will" but after we'd kicked around the rise of China for an hour or so I thought I'd broach the subject with the most innocuous possible enquiry. "Are you married?"
"What's that got to do with Chinese inflation?" was the instant knock-back, a high-brow version of "what's that got to do with the price of fish?" but equally useful to shut nosey parkers up. It's not so innocuous at all, she counters, pointing out that her critics "feel free to make ad hominem attacks" if she leaves them the slightest clues. I explain that her right to privacy is assured, but that she seems unusually reticent about such things. Probing a little, I discover that she was particularly stung by another public intellectual who derided her views on international development because "she didn't have a child in rural Africa".
We're on happier ground when discussing trends in the global economy. It would be easy to dismiss Moyo's book as yet another take on the China story, about how great they are, how they'll soon be taking over the world, in some sense, and how we in the West are all going to be poorer as a result, at least in relative terms.
That particular tale has been well told and is the subjects of scores of "Big Picture" airport bookstore works. Moyo reprises that, but much of her tract is about what the West did wrong rather than what China did right. She cleverly assembles bits of the economic jigsaw to throw up some revealing insights.
For example, the West's obsession with housing, and the encouragement that governments have given to home ownership through explicit and implicit incentives, has been an expensive delusion, she says. "Let's compare 1950 to 1980 when the world was pretty closed and protectionist, to 1980 to the 2000s. The growth rates in these two periods have been roughly the same, but real wages in this globalised period have been roughly flat in places such as the UK, Europe, US.
"So what that tells me is that globalisation may not have been as beneficial to the average Westerner as promised. And I would say housing is probably one of the main reasons we are seeing this. Real wages didn't actually rise. Instead the people who hold labour actually got more access to debt and that debt was essentially diverted towards housing.
"So look at the portfolio of wealth in the United States – 30 per cent plus of American's income over wealth is tied up in housing, so they have not participated in this huge benefit from globalisation. The only Westerners that have benefited from this globalisation are the ones that hold capital, not the holders of labour."
So, if we in the West had used the money we borrowed – preponderantly from China – to make productive investment then it would have cause d no problems. Instead we used it to generate a property bubble, and that has left us nothing but woes. At its simplest, that is the financial history of the past decade.
Moyo agrees with the environmentalists that the earth does not, on current consumption patterns, have the resources needed to give every Chinese the standard of living now enjoyed in the West. Still, she is certainly admiring of the Chinese, even to the extent of now learning Mandarin.
"They are innovators in the sense that they have had no problems in moving away from what was essentially a communist system into a capitalistic system," she explains. "I actually have the confidence that they are flexible enough, certainly in the economic realm because they are not hamstrung by politics. They can implement policies tomorrow that we cannot in Britain or the United States because of the democratic issue. It's those types of things that make their economy, which to me gives them a good chance."
In fact Britain's Coalition Government she rates as a potentially strong force that can implement the structural, long-term reforms that need to be done, not just "kicking the fiscal can down the street". The euro, by the way, she thinks will survive just because of the politics of it – not the least aspect of which is the enthusiasm the Chinese are showing for buying lots of Spanish government bonds. You take the point about Chinese economic muscle.
What else has the West got wrong? Pensions, obviously, and ruinously expensive, again something Chinese haven't burdened themselves with, leastways not yet, and similarly with healthcare. We in the West have also fumbled the productivity ball, an economic truth that, long ago, was fastened on to by Gordon Brown but which we haven't heard much about lately – the simple fact that we cannot consume more per head, long-term, than we produce per head, so improving the latter ought to be the highest priority of economic policy making, though it is the most neglected.
Moyo doesn't prove, though, why any of this will hurt. After all, the UK has been in a state of more or less steady decline since the 1880s, challenged by Germany, the US, Germany again, plus France, Italy and Japan, and now the "rising rest" – China, Brazil, India. Sterling ceased long ago to be the world's trading and reserve currency. The Empire is gone. Most of our utilities, car industry, the City, even chocolate factories, are owned by foreigners. But life goes on, and we're quite well off by most standards.
What's truly startling in Moyo's thinking is her suggestion, which almost creeps on one unawares, that the West might benefit from the Chinese way of doing things: "Although I love democracy – I do not think it is a pre-requisite for economic growth," she says. "This is as deeply pragmatic a view as that, appropriately, formulated by Deng Xiaoping. Three decades ago he ditched Maoism and isolation by simply declaring: "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." If you wanted to caricature Moyo's argument it would be that nations must simply choose the economic system most likely at any given time to deliver the economic goods and thus geo-political clout – whether that is Scandinavian-style social democracy, Stalinism, Hitlerian autarky, Thatcherite laissez-faire, South Korean/Japanese corporatism, or whatever.
That's unfair to Moyo, who lives in London, at least in the sense that "it's where my clothes and books are", and enjoys her freedoms. But saying the West has anything to learn from China on politics as well as economics – at a time when we never stop lecturing them on human rights – is the sort of thing that only a public intellectual could get away with. I don't believe it for a second, but I'm glad she's said it.
Dambisa Moyo's 'How the West was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices Ahead' is published on Thursday by Allen Lane
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Subscribe nowWhatever happened to the "six strikes" system that was to help civilize the American Internet?
Three years ago, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) gave up its mass litigation strategy of targeting tens of thousands of alleged file-swappers. Instead, the group announced that it would pursue a "graduated response" system in partnership with Interent providers. Infringement notices would be sent on to subscribers, who would be hit with increasing penalties as the notices stacked up.
Two years passed, and little was heard of the idea. But in July 2011, a White House-brokered deal between Internet providers and rightsholders appeared; AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable were all ready to help "educate" their customers. The deal involved "mitigation measures" beginning with the fifth or sixth alert, which might include "temporary reductions of Internet speeds, redirection to a landing page until the subscriber contacts the ISP to discuss the matter or reviews and responds to some educational information about copyright, or other measures that the ISP may deem necessary to help resolve the matter." Internet providers could choose to disconnect users, too, though the deal does not require this at any particular point.
The system would be coordinated by a new group, the Center for Copyright Information (CCI). CCI's website and Twitter account were rolled out on July 7, but neither have been in use since. The organization promised that "participating Internet Service Providers will begin implementing Copyright Alerts in 2011 and 2012" and that "in 2011, the Center for Copyright Information will be formally opened."
But now it is February 2012, and CCI has not begun operation. It has announced neither a director nor the "consumer advocates and technical experts" who were to advise it, and no Internet providers have sent any notices under the program (though some have sent notices as part of their own separate arrangements with rightsholders).
Curious if the consensus behind the deal was falling apart or proving harder to implement than expected, I spoke to several sources in the rightsholder and Internet communities; each agreed to speak off the record, as CCI has yet to make public announcements.
Each confirmed that the project is pressing ahead and that it will in fact launch shortly. CCI has just hired an executive director, and the group plans a set of new announcements once the director is in place and up to speed.
So the system remains on track and notices should be filling up user mailboxes within months. But will it matter? It's hard to say. Three years ago, when peer-to-peer file-sharing was all the rage, the scheme looked more useful (such systems make it possible for a third-party to see what other people are sharing). Now, with HTTP streaming services and "cyberlockers" accounting for significant percentages of Internet traffic, an education campaign focused on P2P use will have less effect.
Still, the industry has always claimed that no particular measure will be a piracy killer and has always sought multiple angles of attack. As the memorandum of understanding (MoU) creating the CCI put it:
While the government maintains a critical role in enforcing copyright law, it should be readily apparent that, in an age of viral, digital online distribution, prosecution of individual acts of infringement may serve a purpose, but standing alone this may not be the only or best solution to addressing Online Infringement. If Online Infringement is to be effectively combated, law enforcement must work with all interested parties, including copyright holders, their licensees, artists (and the guilds, unions and other organizations that represent them), recording companies, movie studios, software developers, electronic publishers, Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”), public interest groups, other intermediaries and consumers on reasonable methods to prevent, detect and deter Online Infringement.
Those "reasonable methods" currently include going after the online cyberlockers like Megaupload, criminal prosecution of file-sharing sites like NinjaVideo, ramping up worldwide enforcement through trade deals like ACTA, and pushing for Internet site blocking (as in the recent Stop Online Piracy Act) to target sites that can't be as easily reached by the law. In the US, a "lite" graduated response system will soon join the list.The minimum tournament prize pot for both duel and TDM has been confirmed as £7,000 with a split of £3,000 and £4,000 respectively. Further breakdown of how this will be for the eventual winners can be found below. These figures are based on both tournaments reach a minimum number of players; 16 players for duel, 10 teams for TDM.
* Prize pot subject to increase
120Hz monitors you say? This section of the news was supposed to be filled in with “120 Hz are 100% confirmed!” but the confirmation has not been signed off yet. I’m told we’ll be getting this confirmed next week. You can make of that what you will, but we’re confident you will be playing on 120Hz monitors at the event.
The TDM team jerseys have been withdrawn as not many teams have expressed an interest in having these. For teams (or even individual players) who are interested in having a simple jersey, we can still arrange this for you at a cost.
Every captain of every TDM team who signs up for the TDM tourney until next Sunday (16th of September) gets 5 votes, which will be presented to ins (by iMSG, #adroits.quake or wait for him to contact you).
The 5 most voted maps after Sunday will be the final maps for Adroits Quake Live Nations TDM tournament.
Maps available for voting:
Deep Inside
Dreadful Place
Grim Dungeons
Hidden Fortress
Purgatory
Realm of Steel Rats
Tornado
Campgrounds
Limbus
Terminus
Retribution
Intervention
1st Place: £2,000
2nd Place: £1,100
3rd Place: £600
4th Place: £300
1st Place: £1,500
2nd Place: £750
3rd Place: £500
4th Place: £250
All teams and players must sign up and pay before 17:59 CDT, 7 October 2012!
Here is the information the majority of you have been waiting for!The next duel points cup is coming up this Thursday, so make sure to sign up for that to earn points and potentially win free entry to the tournament. Twister is currently leading the pack with 70 points! Cup information can be found here Event website // AdroitsWritten by Patti Pauley
If you were alive in the late eighties or early nineties, chances are you remember those cash grabbing hotlines you saw all over T.V. and special paper view events mainly geared towards children. They were everywhere and you couldn’t escape it. Nintendo Power, 1-900 Creep, Warrant– Ummm. Yes the hair band Warrant had a fucken hotline. It was horrifying. And of course, the infamous Freddy Krueger had his own as well.
Oh yes, the thrill of sneaking behind your parents backs and dialing the forbidden 1-900 number caused a rush of weird adrenaline through your tiny body. Well, for me anyway it was the anxiety of what the hell my parents were going to do when they found out; and sure enough that phone bill a month later would secure me a spot in the third realm of Hell in the grounded department. It took me a few times to learn my lesson from that one. All I can say was that it sounded like a good idea at the time to a nine-year old. Chalk it up to good times.
The 900 hotline that was connected to the prime time horror series Freddy’s Nightmares, was like the snake offering Eve the apple. You just couldn’t resist. Well, I couldn’t anyway. I’m weak and plummeted face first into FreddyMania in the late eighties. The number that raped your dad’s wallet, consisted of a new (usually) Freddy tale of terror involving strange occurrences in Springwood and introduced by Krueger himself. Well, if you maintained self-control unlike your author here who feared not of that beastly wooden spoon that taunted me on the walls of our living room, then you’re in for a treat!
The fine horror folks over at Blumhouse recently wrote up an article over on their website sharing a Soundcloud upload by Dwayne Cathey that contains 45 minutes of raw Freddy’s Hotline stories from at the time, a fourteen year-old Taylor Basinger. The young hero to those who never got a chance to listen to Freddy’s telephone tales, used his Darth Vader phone to record his 1-900 Fred sessions. Hear it below!
Thanks little Taylor.The band have yet to comment on Heenan’s departure.
Attila drummer and founding member Sean Heenan has left the band – parting ways. Heenan revealed the news via his personal Instagram account – read his posts in full below.
Part #1
“An announcement about my future with Attila. Thank you for all the support over the years. I love you guys. I am distraught over the band’s decision however life must go on and I am excited to see what the future holds!”
Part #2
“It’s 2K17, a new year and new beginnings. It breaks my heart to announce this, but after 11 amazing years Attila and I have parted ways. I am extremely thankful to have the opportunity to travel the world doing what I love and meeting all of you.”
AdvertisementsHeiko Westermann is enjoying being out of the limelight at Real Betis.
Real Betis defender Heiko Westermann hopes to play in the United States before his career ends.
The 32-year-old former Germany international joined Real Betis on a free transfer in the summer when his contract at Bundesliga strugglers, Hamburger SV, expired.
Though Westermann intends to stay at Real Betis for some time yet, he has one other dream he would like to fulfill before his retirement. Speaking to German new agency, Sport-Informations-Dienst, he said: "I would really like to go to the United States for one year."
The Bavaria-born defender, who felt he had become a divisive figure among fans during his five years in Hamburg, said he "needed a change of scenery" at the end of his contract.
"At Hamburg, fifty percent were for me, fifty percent were against me," Westermann said, "The road had ended."
Westermann, who was nicknamed HW4 by the club in reference to Cristiano Ronaldo's famous CR7 trademark, recorded a rap song, "I am HW4", in 2014. Speaking of the hype around his trademark, he said "it created a stir nobody expected."
Happy to be out of the spotlight since moving to La Liga, Westermann told SID "I enjoy playing football again."
Though currently side-lined with an ankle injury, Westermann said: "Except my current injury everything's top here."Amazon.com is quite the classy vendor in the news lately. First, it was the handy guide to pedophilia that, after protests, was pulled from the website, and now, the online company is being asked to get rid of its books on dog and cockfighting.
PETA says two books, “The Art Of Cockfighting—A Handbook for Beginners and Old Timers” and “Dogs of Velvet and Steel,” should not be available because they encourage people to participate in the activities, which are illegal.
“These books encourage people to become involved in dogfighting and cockfighting— cruel and illegal activities that are rampant across the country,” PETA executive vice president Tracy Reiman said in a letter.
“Animals, like children, depend on us to protect them and put their best interests above profits. Please, don’t be complicit in cruelty to animals: Do the right thing and stop selling products that promote criminal violence against living beings.”
So far, Amazon has not issued a statement on its plans for these books.
via CNN.com
Possibly Related Posts:14 Glitter Eyebrows You Should Try This NYE
It’s not a party without cake and confetti. Since we love to jazz up a DIY with a couple shakes of glitter, we figured we’d apply the same treatment to our holiday makeup. We’re taking a cue from the runway trend and found 14 glitter eyebrow looks that we dare you to try.
1. Goldmember: Whether you grab silver glitter for full on disco ball brows or stick to classic gold glitter for these gilded beauties, lipgloss is the secret to making it stick so you can party all night long. (via Cheap Thrillsss)
2. Ice Queen: Flecks of metallic pastel pink paired with a frosty blue shadow is the epitome of winter wonderland beauty. (via Eyeshadow Lipstick)
3. Candy Coated: Rhinestones are typically found accenting our holiday nail art, so why wouldn’t we use them to amp up our brows? Bling. It. On. (via Buzzmakers)
4. Holographic: Isn’t this sunset gradient simply gorgeous? Use eyelash adhesive to make cellophane confetti stick to your brows. (via Gilded Foxes)
5. Gilded Lids: We’ll stick gold foil onto any DIY, so why wouldn’t we amp up a smokey eye with this magical stuff? (via Vogue UK)
6. Gone Green: If you’re bold enough to rock a sequin brow, you’re not stopping there. Bring out the reflective shades in those sparklers with a vivid shade of gold and green eye shadows. (via World Fashionzz)
7. Periwinkle Sparkle: It all started with these sparkly power brows from the Chanel runway. Each brow was custom measured for each model and applied with lash adhesive. Even brow goddess Cara Delevingne sported a pair down the catwalk. (via Daum)
8. Mermaid Confetti: A rosy cheek and lip pairs perfectly with this winter-inspired confetti look. (via Paris as Maravilhas)
9. Benefit Bling Brow ($25): You could grab Benefit’s DIY sparkle kit to zhush up your brow game or visit one of their brow bars and have an esthetician apply the look for you. How easy is that? (via Yahoo)
10. Sequin Siren: Go goth glam with a plum lip and a smoldering smokey eye accented with a variety of metallic sequins. (via Souvenirs of a Girl)
11. Rebel Rising: Planning on taking a walk on the wild side? Break out the chainmail accessories and your teasing comb for the fiercest faux hawk and black sequins against a natural face for a daring eye look. (via Free People)
12. Pretty Pastel: We love pastel-hued locks, and a sparkly metallic brow look amps up a delicate palette of sugary pink cheeks and lips. (via Garden of the Dreamers)
13. Gorgeous Gold: When you’re rocking a solid 24k brow, a slicked back ‘do and dewy skin is all you need. Glow ahead and try it. (via Total Beauty)
14. Royal Treatment: Who said you could only rock micro-sequins to stud out your brows? Delicate shades of iridescent white and metallic silver and gold steal the spotlight of this minimalist nude lip look. (via Elise Mary Yasmin Pellican)
Would you give your brows the golden (or glitzy) treatment? Tell us in the comments.The idea of President Donald Trump is one thing; broaching the reality is something else. It is a long time since “America first” resounded not as a high-flown slogan, but as a statement of intent and definition of US foreign policy. How might it work in practise?
The US system has safeguards against overweening and ill-informed power. Admittedly, some of these fall away if the same party holds the presidency and both houses of Congress, as Donald Trump will. But the rejection of Trump’s candidacy by many senior Republicans, including past presidents, means that the party is left bitterly divided (however much Americans flock to a winner) and Trump could face almost the same order of opposition from Congress as he would if the majority were held by another party. A Trump administration will have an opposition, not just from disheartened Democrats, but from other Republicans.
Given the anti-establishment mood of voters across much of the developed world, the election of a non-politician may have advantages in the implementation of domestic policy. The electorate, by however slim a majority, decided they wanted someone to lead them who had not made his way by the traditional route. A different approach from a different type of leader might also have benefits for foreign policy, what with the sour international mood, the tensions – present and potential – between the big powers, and the stalemate that exists in a range of conflicts, most conspicuously in the Middle East.
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But how different will a Trump foreign policy be? As a businessman – one who has suffered hard knocks but emerged wealthy – Trump can be expected to take a can-do, hands-on approach to what he undertakes. He should also be able to manage and to delegate. These are not skills that not every politician has. He may be good at choosing people, knowing where his own expertise falls short, selecting what advice to take, and getting things done.
What he said during the campaign about dealing with Vladimir Putin – words that got him into big trouble with the great and the good who cast him as something akin to Putin’s puppet – suggests that he will be a foreign policy realist, and not just with Russia. His aversion to involvement in foreign wars that have no direct relation to US national security suggests the same thing. It also accords with US public sentiment, which has tired of costly interventions far from home.
Less recognised, perhaps, is that this approach to foreign policy could make for more continuity with the Obama years than the approach set out – insofar as it was – by Hillary Clinton. The Obama administration had already scaled back the ideological component of US foreign policy, including the export of “democracy”. Obama honoured his promise to withdraw from Iraq, and drew fierce criticism, not just from Congressional Republicans, for not intervening directly in Syria. He said, in his celebrated Atlantic magazine interview, that there were some conflicts that the US could not resolve and some places where US interests were not at stake. Trump said more or less the same during the election campaign.
But if Trump starts off on an improved footing with Russia, his relations with US neighbours could be tricky. In Canada, Justin Trudeau is at the opposite end of the political spectrum, while Mexico has been threatened with mass repatriations and a border wall that Trump said it should pay for.
The President-elect’s track record of wheeler-dealing, though, could prove an asset in these relationships, as it could be in dealing with a difficult Congress. Trump showed during the campaign that he could backtrack when necessary. The wall could well be a case in point. A solid metal fence already exists for around a third of the US-Mexico border, authorised by previous presidents. Extending it, even a little, could be the compromise result.
Shape Created with Sketch. President Donald Trump life in pictures Show all 16 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. President Donald Trump life in pictures 1/16 Donald Trump poses in a rocking chair once used by President John F. Kennedy at his New York City residence Reuters 2/16 Developer Donald Trump with his new bride Marla Maples after their wedding at the Plaza hotel in New York Reuters 3/16 Donald Trump and Celina Midelfart watch the match between Conchita Martinez and Amanda Coetzer during U.S. Open. She was the date whom Donald Trump was with when he met his current wife Melania at a party in 1996 Reuters 4/16 U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas serving as the grand marshal for the Daytona 500, speaks to Donald Trump and Melania Knauss on the starting grid at the Daytona International Speedwa Reuters 5/16 Developer Donald Trump talks with his former wife Ivana Trump during the men's final at the U.S. Open Reuters 6/16 Donald Trump and his friend Melania Knauss pose for photographers as they arrive at the New York premiere of Star Wars Episode : 'The Phantom Menace,' Reuters 7/16 Billionaire real estate developer Donald Trump talks with host Larry King. Trump told King that he was moving toward a possible bid for the United States presidency with the formation of a presidential exploratory committee Reuters 8/16 Donald Trump answers questions as Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura looks on in Brooklyn Park. Trump said on Friday he'very well might' make a run for president under the Reform Party banner but had not made a final decision Reuters 9/16 Billionaire Donald Trump makes a face at a friend as he sits next to Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso before the start of the 2003 Miss Universe pageant in Panama City Reuters 10/16 Entrepreneur Donald Trump is greeted by a Marilyn Monroe character look-a-alike, as he arrives at Universal Studios Hollywood to attend the an open casting call for his NBC television network reality series 'The Apprentice.' Reuters 11/16 Donald Trump and Simon Cowell present an Emmy during the 56th annual Primetime Emmy Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles Reuters 12/16 Donald Trump and Megan Mullally perform at the 57th annual Primetime Emmy Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles Reuters 13/16 Donald Trump, poses with his children, son Donald Trump, Jr., and daughters Tiffany and Ivanka Reuters 14/16 Billionaire Donald Trump told Miss USA 2006 Tara Conner on Tuesday she would be given a |
of makes me rethink Hanabi a little bit. Wow! This has really added a lot to it."
"Interesting theme. I like that it does feel kind of thematic with the different roles... So the theme does actually pull you in."
ScottnotSteve, comment on BoardGameGeek.com
"The real-time aspect of the game creates a stress and excitement level I have not found elsewhere. Other co-op games can bog down but this one cannot by design."
"My kids loved it."
Pat Lane, comment on BoardGameGeek.com
"Liked it a lot. My kids liked it. I'm retired AF EOD so they thought it was cool to play a game of what dad used to do, sort of anyway."
City without Men, comment on BoardGameGeek.com
"Using a timer and not limiting hints make this a unique take on the face-out cards concept. Hints being given out rapid fire, you're trying desperately to remember what's been hinted, what's been played. It's immense, frantic fun."
Dan King, Game Boy Geek, The Dice Tower reviewer
"I am SOOOOOO looking forward to the bomb squad Kickstarter!"
Hunter Shelburne, Weaponsgrade Tabletop
"Mixes the best elements from Hanabi and RoboRally."
"This is definitely one to back."
"Easily one of the coolest Kickstarter games I've played in a very long time. One of my favorite games at the con, even out of published games that I played. This is a top contender for that spot. I wish I could have had a copy at Gen Con."
"I can't recommend it enough."
Jesse Smith, comment on BoardGameGeek.com
"Of all the games I played at GenCon 2014, this was most likely my favorite. The time limit certainly adds to the pressure and I love the mechanic of needing to help each other play cards. Both of my children played with me and it made the top 3 GenCon games for each of us."
Forrest Bower, Bower's Game Corner
"It is a TENSE game... and I love it."
"So far—granted this is day one of the show—this is the game that I have enjoyed the most from the show... I REALLY enjoyed Bomb Squad."
"For me it was difficult, but it was a good kind of difficult."
"The most important thing is the theme really fits here. I really enjoyed the theme."
Manny Duran, comments on BoardGameGeek.com
"Cooperative? Check! Hanabi-like? Check! Roborally-like? Check! Infinite Scenario/mission possibilities? Check! 10-12 minute mission playtime, fast, fast, fast? Check! Infused with theme that matches mechanics? Check! Fun?...........................Ohhhh, yeahhhhh."
"Bomb Squad, what a great game! I played the prototype at RinCon and I had a great time! This is the first prototype I've played that I felt is ready to go and hope that it gets a fast track to publishing. Congratulations to the designers Dan and David, great job, can't wait."
Lance Myxter, Undead Viking Videos
"Frankly, this is probably one of the best co-op games I've ever played. And I have played many, many, many, cooperative games."
"I love the theme. I love the tension of the game. There's nothing worse than looking over at the timer and seeing the time tick down."
Classic Lance: "Why would a madman put a timer on a bomb?"
"...innately exciting... and you feel a rush of adrenaline when you win."
"If you are a fan of cooperative games, I think this is a must-buy."
We're still looking into timer options, but an app has been developed and we're still trying to figure out what platforms are possible.
Illustrations: George Patsouras (Flash Point: Fire Rescue, Police Precinct)
Map Features: Rob Lundy (Dungeon Roll, Harbour)
Graphic Design: Luis Francisco (The Resistance, Flash Point, Coup)
A secretive organization known as BURN has claimed responsibility for this rash of recent terrorist activity. Almost nothing is known about them—we don't even know if BURN stands for something specific... or where they might be based.
They communicate no clear national or political interest, there's no apparent theological agenda, and the investigations after each mission have yielded no discernible patterns in methods or materials. Beyond the hostages and bombs, it is as if they are trying to deliberately create an inconsistent pattern of behavior.
They remain a frustrating, very dangerous mystery.
Ryan Sanders of the Inquistive Meeple recently did an in-depth interview with Dan Keltner, one of the designers of Bomb Squad. The interview covers the inspirations and intent behind the game and captures a designer's perspective on what makes Bomb Squad tick.
Please view the full interview here: http://bit.ly/bombINTERVIEW
One of the most interesting details from the interview is how the design of the game simulates real-life problem solving in crisis situations. The idea is that each agent has partial information about circumstances in the building that is being held hostage by terrorists. This concept of'situational awareness' is central to the core of the game.
Michael Mindes founded Tasty Minstrel Games (TMG) and has been making games since 2009. In 2010, he and Seth Jaffee brought Eminent Domain to Kickstarter and launched what was the start of a successful and noteworthy relationship with crowd-funding on the platform.
This campaign marks the first time that TMG has created a project not connected with either Seth or Michael's personal Kickstarter accounts, but it should be noted that the team behind Bomb Squad has been responsible for more than 17 successful Kickstarter projects... and even more great and award-winning games.
Michael and Seth are still there driving things, but a team of people are now involved to help make everything possible and to stay on top of communication. You will also hear from and see comments and updates made by either Chris Schreiber (Community Manager) or Daniel Hadlock (Game Development and Support).About
About us:
Kaleid Snow Gear (KSG) is a student start-up from London, Ontario. In 2013, KSG's founder Jessica Hodgson sustained a bone bruise injury in her local terrain park, harming her ability to teach. In a failed search to find equipment to protect her from further damage, let alone equipment to prevent these injuries altogether, Jessica began an entrepreneurial journey designing and manufacturing the world's first line of protective equipment suitable for winter sports.
In April 2014, Jessica came second in her university's business competition gaining $3,000 for the start-up's website development and provisional patent filing.
In November 2013, Jessica came first in a Toronto business competition. The prize money totalled $20,000 and currently is doing diligence to secure this financing for the order of custom molds.
With the immense support from her family, friends, and local snowboard community, Jessica has gone from hand-sawing plastic prototypes to 3D printing and low batch manufacturing.
About the product:
The Anvil uses a magnetic attachment system, allowing riders to snap the protective equipment above or below their snow pants.
This is the only product on the market specifically designed to be compatible with snowboarders' boots, style, and budget.
Now two years later, KSG needs a burst of capital to order the equipment for the community that needs it. We are receiving countless emails asking for the product, but don't have the capital to fund the first batch of inventory. We are confident that with Kickstarter's help we will change the sport of snowboarding, making days on the hill significantly more fun and safe.
As seen on:
See how we're doing:
http://kickingitforward.orgThis graphic shows the data from the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) Earth Probe, for the month of October 1999. Areas of depleted ozone over the Antarctic are shown in blue. The hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic is opening up, with ozone depletion rates that are unprecedented for this time of year, the U.N. weather agency said Friday, Sept. 8, 2000. (AP Photo/NASA)
2070 is shaping up to be a great year for Mother Earth.
That's when NASA scientists are predicting the hole in the ozone layer might finally make a full recovery. Researchers announced their conclusion, in addition to other findings, in a presentation Wednesday during the annual American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
The team of scientists specifically looked at the chemical composition of the ozone hole, which has shifted in both size and depth since the passing of the Montreal Protocol in 1987. The agreement banned its 197 signatory countries from using chemicals, like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), that break down into chlorine in the upper atmosphere and harm the ozone layer.
They found that, while levels of chlorine in the atmosphere have indeed decreased as a result of the protocol, it's too soon to tie them to a healthier ozone layer.
"Ozone holes with smaller areas and a larger total amount of ozone are not necessarily evidence of recovery attributable to the expected chlorine decline," Susan Strahan of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center explained in a media briefing. "That assumption is like trying to understand what's wrong with your car's engine without lifting the hood."
Instead, the scientists believe the most recent ozone hole changes, including both the largest hole ever, in 2006, and one of the smallest holes, in 2012, are primarily due to weather. Strong winds have the ability to move ozone in large quantities, effectively blocking the hole some years, while failing to block it in others.
“At the moment, it is winds and temperatures that are really controlling how big [the ozone hole] is,” Strahan told the BBC.
LiveScience reports weather is expected to be the predominant factor in the ozone hole's size until 2025, at which point CFCs will have dropped enough as a result of the Montreal Protocol to become noticeable.
By 2070, however, the ozone hole is expected to have made a full recovery.Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović said on Tuesday in New York that, if a new migrant wave reaches Croatian borders, Croatia would not let migrants pass through its territory since borders of neighbouring countries are closed and it needed to protect its territory. The President added that Croatia would still give assistance to all those who needed it, reports Index.hr on September 21, 2016.
The President, who is in New York for the session of the UN General Assembly, said that Croatia last year let migrants pass to other countries because there were no fences at the borders with Slovenia and Hungary, but the borders are now closed. “It turned out that over 85 percent of them were economic migrants and not genuine refugees. It will be very hard to solve this problem without a common European agreement, and without an agreement with the countries that have ultimately been the key when it comes to messages which made migrant come to Europe. However, we have to be prepared and not depend on anyone else. We should be ready to protect our territory and borders, and to help everyone who needs help”, she concluded.
President Grabar-Kitarović also spoke about the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with regards to a referendum which is scheduled to take place in the Republika Srpska on 25 September. “The referendum is contrary to the Dayton Peace Agreement, and the international community and relevant international bodies have rejected it. I hope that the referendum will not happen”, said the President.
She pointed out that Croatia firmly supported sovereignty and territorial integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina in which Croats, Serbs and Bosnians should be the three constituent peoples. Asked if she was in contact with Dragan Čović, a Croatian member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, she said that she was in constant contact with him and added that she would also discuss the issue with the Chairman of the Presidency Bakir Izetbegović who is also in New York.Full Disclosure mailing list archives
By Date By Thread [ERPSCAN-15-031] SAP MII – Encryption Downgrade vulnerability From: ERPScan inc <erpscan.online () gmail com>
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2016 20:51:04 +0300
Application: SAP MII Versions Affected: SAP MII 12.2, 14.0, 15.0 Vendor URL: http://SAP.com Bugs: Authentication bypass Send: 05.09.2015 Reported: 05.09.2015 Vendor response: 06.09.2015 Date of Public Advisory: 20.11.2015 Reference: SAP Security Note 2240274 Author: Mathieu Geli (ERPScan) Description 1. ADVISORY INFORMATION Title: SAP MII Advisory ID: [ERPSCAN-15-031] Risk: Medium Advisory URL: https://erpscan.com/advisories/erpscan-15-031-using-base64-and-des-in-sap-mii/ Date published: 20.11.2015 Vendors contacted: SAP 2. VULNERABILITY INFORMATION Class: Cryptographic issues Impact: reading private information Remotely Exploitable: Yes Locally Exploitable: No CVE Name: CVE-2015-8329 CVSS Information CVSS Base Score: 2.1 / 10 CVSS Base Vector: AV : Access Vector (Related exploit range) Network (N) AC : Access Complexity (Required attack complexity) High (H) Au : Authentication (Level of authentication needed to exploit) Single (S) C : Impact to Confidentiality Partial (P) I : Impact to Integrity None (N) A : Impact to Availability None (N) 3. VULNERABILITY DESCRIPTION SAP MII allows Base64 and DES as an encryption algorithm. 4. VULNERABLE PACKAGES SAP MII 12.2, 14.0, 15.0 Other versions are probably affected too, but they were not checked. 5. SOLUTIONS AND WORKAROUNDS To correct this vulnerability, install SAP Security Note 2240274 6. AUTHOR Mathieu Geli (ERPScan) 7. TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION SAP MII allows Base64 and DES algorithm selection at encryption configuration and export configuration screens. 8. REPORT TIMELINE Send: 05.09.2015 Reported: 05.09.2015 Vendor response: 06.09.2015 Date of Public Advisory: 20.11.2015 9. REFERENCES https://erpscan.com/advisories/erpscan-15-031-using-base64-and-des-in-sap-mii/ 10. ABOUT ERPScan Research The company’s expertise is based on the research subdivision of ERPScan, which is engaged in vulnerability research and analysis of critical enterprise applications. It has achieved multiple acknowledgments from the largest software vendors like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, VMware, HP for discovering more than 400 vulnerabilities in their solutions (200 of them just in SAP!). ERPScan researchers are proud to have exposed new types of vulnerabilities (TOP 10 Web Hacking Techniques 2012) and to be nominated for the best server-side vulnerability at BlackHat 2013. ERPScan experts have been invited to speak, present, and train at 60+ prime international security conferences in 25+ countries across the continents. These include BlackHat, RSA, HITB, and private SAP trainings in several Fortune 2000 companies. ERPScan researchers lead the project EAS-SEC, which is focused on enterprise application security research and awareness. They have published 3 exhaustive annual award-winning surveys about SAP security. ERPScan experts have been interviewed by leading media resources and featured in specialized info-sec publications worldwide. These include Reuters, Yahoo, SC Magazine, The Register, CIO, PC World, DarkReading, Heise, and Chinabyte, to name a few. We have highly qualified experts in staff with experience in many different fields of security, from web applications and mobile/embedded to reverse engineering and ICS/SCADA systems, accumulating their experience to conduct the best SAP security research. 11. ABOUT ERPScan ERPScan is the most respected and credible Business Application Security provider. Founded in 2010, the company operates globally and enables large Oil and Gas, Financial and Retail organizations to secure their mission-critical processes. Named as an ‘Emerging Vendor’ in Security by CRN, listed among “TOP 100 SAP Solution providers” and distinguished by 30+ other awards, ERPScan is the leading SAP SE partner in discovering and resolving security vulnerabilities. ERPScan consultants work with SAP SE in Walldorf to assist in improving the security of their latest solutions. ERPScan’s primary mission is to close the gap between technical and business security, and provide solutions to evaluate and secure SAP and Oracle ERP systems and business-critical applications from both, cyber-attacks as well as internal fraud. Usually our clients are large enterprises, Fortune 2000 companies and managed service providers whose requirements are to actively monitor and manage security of vast SAP landscapes on a global scale. We ‘follow the sun’ and function in two hubs, located in the Palo Alto and Amsterdam to provide threat intelligence services, agile support and operate local offices and partner network spanning 20+ countries around the globe. Adress USA: 228 Hamilton Avenue, Fl. 3, Palo Alto, CA. 94301 Phone: 650.798.5255 Twitter: @erpscan Scoop-it: Business Application Security _______________________________________________ Sent through the Full Disclosure mailing list https://nmap.org/mailman/listinfo/fulldisclosure Web Archives & RSS: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/ By Date By Thread Current thread: [ERPSCAN-15-031] SAP MII – Encryption Downgrade vulnerability ERPScan inc (Feb 12)A pod of “heroic” humpback whales came to the rescue of a desperate sea lion under attack from four cunning and hungry orcas off the coast of Sooke, a phenomenon never before seen by whale-watching operators in the Salish Sea.
The waters were glass calm on Sept. 11 when whale-watchers witnessed four humpbacks huddle around a Steller’s sea lion, slapping their pectoral fins and their flukes, “taking shots essentially, taking swings at these transient orcas,” said Michael Harris, executive director of the Pacific Whale Watch Association, which represents 38 companies operating out of B.C. and Washington.
article continues below
Whale-watchers in the area could clearly hear the humpbacks “trumpeting like we have never heard” with a ferocity that Harris said resembled a wild elephant.
Capt. Russ Nicks of Victoria-based B.C. Whale Tours, was one of the first on scene. He said it was fascinating to watch the show of aggression.
He and his guests marvelled at the strategy of one of the planet’s most sophisticated hunters as the orcas split into two groups — one to try to draw the humpbacks away while the other group went in for the kill on the sea lion.
“This is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this,” Nicks said.
“I explained to the guests how rare this kind of interaction is.”
The humpbacks took turns diving and slashing at the orcas for about 40 minutes, until the orcas, known as the T100 family, finally retreated.
“[The humpbacks’] predator is the orca and they didn’t run away. They actually came to the aid of another mammal,” Nicks said.
Despite the handicap of lacking sharp teeth, the humpbacks used their size — between 40 and 50 tons — to their advantage.
“This was a heavyweight division going against a lightweight and the heavyweights won,” Harris said.
The humpbacks then escorted the sea lion to safety.
“So they all went to their neutral corners, if you will,” said Harris, in keeping with the boxing analogies.
The interaction confirms a study published by the Journal of Marine Mammal Science that found humpback whales will defend other marine species such as seals, sea lions and grey whale calves from orca attacks.
Harris said those in the whale-watching industry are careful not to impart human values onto marine mammals but he said it’s hard to deny the altruistic behaviour of the humpbacks, putting themselves in harm’s way to protect another species from predators.
Two researchers from Cascadia Research Collective based in Olympia, Washington, had a ringside seat from aboard a boat operated by Port Angeles Whale Watch Co., said owner Capt. Shane Aggergaard.
“I probably wouldn’t have believed the story if I wasn’t there,” Aggergaard said.
Two of the humpbacks were familiar to whale-watch operators.
A dramatic resurgence of humpbacks in waters off B.C. and Washington state has been dubbed the “humpback comeback” and has given environmentalists, researchers and marine mammal scientists ample opportunity to study a species that was on the verge of extinction a half century ago.
There are more than 21,000 humpbacks in the eastern north Pacific, up from about 1,600 when whale hunting was banned in 1966.
On Monday, whale-watching crews reported a huge congregation of about 60 humpbacks off Sooke.
In August, whale-watchers witnessed a dramatic clash between a pod of transient killer whales and two adult humpback whales and a calf near Jordan River.
The Pacific Whale Watch Association described “an epic tussle never seen before by most whale-watchers in this region.”
“We’ve got all of these whales recolonizing the Salish Sea after a half century not being here and we’ve got record numbers of transient killer whales,” Harris said. “So we’ve got two species that are recolonizing an area, and this might be a turf war.”
Aggergaard said he’s excited by the emerging science around this type of defence mechanism on the part of humpbacks.
“To know that they have this territorial, instinctual personality … maybe they’re not just great big eating machines out there,” he said.
kderosa@timescolonist.com
Two whales found dead off Island
A transient orca and a humpback whale were found dead in the waters off Vancouver Island in recent days, which has Department of Fisheries and Oceans investigating how they died.
The orca, a mature male, was found dead in Grappler Inlet near Bamfield on Thursday. A necropsy was performed Saturday, but there was no visible trauma or obvious cause of death.
The humpback was spotted last week in Quatsino Sound and is awaiting a necropsy.About
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Video music: "Playmate" by Podington Bear (http://podingtonbear.com/)
Video hand-lettering: Stephen Nixon (http://thundernixon.com/)
How notenook Started
We are a small group of graphic designers, product designers, and architects from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
We love using traditional bound notebooks (You know, the ones with the leather and fancy elastic bands), but we hated dropping $20 on a notebook that would only last us a month. Finally, after spending way too much money on our beautiful new notebooks for the semester, we decided to design something cheaper. notenook is our solution.
Our first handmade prototype!
What began as a tiny personal project for ourselves soon turned into a small production. We were making each notenook individually, and before we knew it, the demand for notenoooks was too much for our small team. We started looking for local bookbinders that could produce notenook, and we worked with Midwest Editions in Minneapolis, MN to develop a solid, beautiful prototype. However, we need money to fund the first run of notenooks, which is why we are now turning to Kickstarter for help!
About notenook
Available in 5 different colors, notenook transforms any standard 8" by 10.5" spiral notebook into a beautiful, premium, hardcover notebook. Just slide the spiral notebook in, and slide it out when the notebook is full.
Consciously Created
notenook is handmade using locally sourced, pH balanced, archival quality materials. Right here in the USA. It's built to last. And we work with sustainable paper companies that are members of the World Wildlife Fund, and Rainforest Alliance certified.
We Need Your Support
We've made our notenook prototypes and have found a local manufacturer, but we need initial funds to finalize our prototype, expand our product customization options, and pay for our first manufacturing run. Help us by making a pledge and reserving your notenook today!
Production Timeline
Development
October: First notenook prototype completed.
November: Prototype revised, begin producing as a small team to meet demand.
December: Meetings with local bookbinders to develop a prototype for larger-scale production.
January-February: Prototype developed with Midwest Editions in Minneapolis, MN.
March: Prototype finished and Kickstarter planned.
Production
Mid-April: Kickstarter finished. Orders are processed, and the first run of notenooks in 5 different colors begins.
Mid-May: The first run of notenooks is completed at Midwest Editions.
Beginning of June: notenooks are packaged and sent out for delivery!
Note: If the demand is too high, notenooks will be shipped out in phases, with phases shipping out as late as July.I probably spend too much time thinking about rowing.
Last year I set my gym-sights on (and barely managed) a 7-minute 2k row, which is considered the minimum acceptable standard among the fine men and women of Gym Jones. This year I’ve been hitting different distances, and managed a borderline-acceptable 10k time (39:46), and an actually-pretty-decent-for-my-weight 500m PB (1:28.6). I’m currently signed up to Concept 2’s Million-Metre Club, and I’m about twenty percent of the way through. I also talk to my wife, half of the trainers at my gym, a few of the people at work, and a bunch of people on Twitter, about stroke rates and damper settings and pacing strategies and split times, basically all the time.
Like I say, I think about it a lot.
The plus side of this is that I also acquire a lot of rowing workouts: whenever someone sends me a new one, I feel honour-bound to try it out, but trying a slightly new ‘thing’ is more fun than doing a 2k/5k/10k every time you crank up the flywheel. With a decent selection of different distances and times to improve on, there’s always something to beat.
So: here’s a selection. The good thing about rowing, as opposed to running, is that there’s basically no adaptation period needed: you aren’t going to get shinsplints or impact injuries by doing too much, too soon. That said, the pacing strategies suggested here are mostly on the ‘hard’ side of things, so if you’re new to rowing/the gym/exercise, downscale them to something that lets you get a decent amount of metres in without blowing yourself out of the water in the first 60 seconds. Real unpleasantness takes time.
#1 Dean Martin
“I feel sorry for people who don’t drink.’ Dean Martin once said. ‘When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.” Well, Deano, I drink: and I like doing this workout first thing in the morning, because – unless you get fired or hit by a car or something – it is definitely the worst thing that will happen to you all day. Thanks to the guys of Gym Jones for this: the stupid name is all me, though.
Row 150m in 30 seconds.
‘Rest’ for 90 seconds, but do 10 press-ups and 5 goblet squats (I’d suggest a 24kg dumbbell) during the rest.
Row 151m in 30 seconds. Rest/pressup/squat again, then row 152m, and so on…until you can’t get the required metres.
The ‘strict’ version of this requires that you just do more metres in each interval, which takes concentration and gets bad quickly if you accidentally hit a 156 early thanks to overzealous pulling. If you’re unused to pacing, just aim to hit the required, and gut it out through at least 15 rounds – if you’re very light or deconditioned, start at 140.
#2 Tabatas
Most people, as previously discussed, get Tabatas completely wrong: doing 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off, for 8 rounds, is not a Tabata, however much you might wish it was. However, they work pretty well in any format where you can thrash yourself to death for 20 seconds and then barely recover. Advantage: rowing.
Row all-out for 20 seconds.
‘Rest’ for 10 seconds.
Repeat 8 times.
There are two ways to do this: either ‘pace’ it by aiming for a minimum distance per interval (100m is sensible), or just go all-out, every single time. They’re both pretty bad.
#3 The Descent
This comes via the excellent George Mayhew, who is almost definitely a better rower than me. I’ve called it The Descent because, much like the 2005 film, it starts out pleasantly enough, gets very nasty surprisingly quickly and ends in absolute horror. Here goes:
Row 500m in 2:00m
Rest for 2 minutes.
Row 500m in 1:58. Rest 2 min. Keep going, dropping by 2 seconds each interval: 1:56, 1:54…until you can’t make the cutoff. Getting into the 1:40s is a good target – the round of 1:34 is impressive stuff.
#4 The Descent 2
Michael Blevins suggested this one: it’s very much like The Descent, except that it turns bad faster and leaves you more broken.
Row 500m in 2:00m
‘Rest’ for 2 minutes – including 5 pressups.
Row 500m in 1:58. Rest 2 min, including 10 pressups.
Keep going, dropping by 2 seconds each interval: 1:56 + 15 pressups, 1:54 + 20 pressups…until you can’t make the cutoff. If you make it to round 7, you’ll have done 105 pressups. Keep going.
This is also a good test of balance: if you’re struggling to finish the pressups before the rowing gets hard, you probably need to do more pressups – and vice versa.
#5 Death by 500
Over to George again: ‘This is a rowing workout the Scarletts rugby squad have used. I managed 12 rounds at sub 1:42, but I had that horrid feeling for about three hours afterwards.’ Hoorah!
Row 500m in under 1:42
Rest 2 minutes
Do as many rounds as possible. #6 The 2K Predictor ‘Here’s the secret,’ says Pieter Vodden, who sent this my way. ‘The average pace you can hold for these intervals will be what you can hang onto for a 2k. Translation: if you want to hit a sub-7 2k, you need to hold a 1:45. It’s no fun. Row 500m
Rest 1 minute
Repeat 10 times #7 Stairway To Heaven George again: ‘This is a great one. You go at your 2000m row PB pace. Crossfit do a version of this but they peak at 1000m. This peaks at 1250m and that makes all the difference. I believe this is a proper session for rowers, rather than a rugby one. The toughest rounds mentally are 6 and 7.’ Solid. 1: Row 250M (3 min. rest);
2: Row 500M (3 min rests);
3: Row 750M (3 min rest);
4: Row 1000M (3 min rest);
5: Row 1250M (3 min rest);
6: Row 1000M (3 min rest);
7: Row 750M (3 min rest);
8: Row 500M (3 min rests);
9: Row 250M (3 min. rest);
Do it all at your target 2k pace.
#8 The Count
If you want a nice long session that’s not boring and forces you concentrate on pacing, this is the answer. ‘This is a proper rowing workout,’ says George. ‘By which I mean: one by those who actually row in a boat.’ If it’s good enough for them…
10 min row to warm up
Then:
6000m row completed in 500m continuous blocks. Pacing is done by strokes per minute (s/m). Start @ 18s/m for 1st 500m. Then increase pace by 2s/m every 500m to 28s/m, then go back down to 18s/m. Last 500 is done @ 20s/m. Pace stays between 2:00 and 1:50.
0-500m @ 18s/m
500m-1000m @ 20s/m
1000m-1500m @ 22s/m
1500m-2000m @ 24s/m
2000m-2500m @ 26s/m
2500m-3000m @ 28s/m
3000m-3500m @ 26s/m
3500m-4000m @ 24s/m
4000m-4500m @ 22s/m
4500m-5000m @ 20s/m
5000m-5500m @ 18s/m
5500m-6000m @ 20s/m
Cool down row
‘It’s a different experience rowing to strokes per minute rather than the 500m pace indicator,’ says George. ‘You end up pulling a lot harder. The key is to stick rigidly to the given pace.’
#8 Up To Eleven
Okay, best-for-last time. George again: ‘I really like this as you get a sense of how good you are on the rower. This is a proper rowing workout and there’s quite a lot of talk about it on the rowing forums. I did 10:54. My advice is to sit down with a pen and paper first and work out pacing. To get under 11 mins you have to be going quicker than 1:45 for all of it.’
1000m followed by 3min rest +
750m followed by 2:30min rest +
500m followed by 2min rest +
250m followed by 2min rest +
750m finish. Record total row time. Total Time World Class <10.00 Excellent 10.00 – 10.30 Very Good 10.30 – 11.00
BANG. Add those to your regular rows, and you’ll be hitting new PBs in no time. Hit me up on Twitter: I’ll be happy to congratulate you.A Fort Worth police officer has been indicted on a manslaughter charge after a 77-year-old man died as a result of a car collision with the officer in 2012.
A grand jury alleges officer Christopher Bolling was responsible for the death of 77-year-old Billie Joe Addington, a retired Baptist minister, following the collision on Aug. 20, 2012.
According to the indictment, Bolling was recklessly operating his police cruiser while on duty by driving at an excessive speed at night with his lights and siren turned off. He was rushing to aid another officer in a traffic stop shortly after 11:00 p.m., according to court documents, when he struck Addington.
Addington was driving his car outside his home on the 5600 block of Azle Avenue. He died months later on Nov. 1, 2012, from complications resulting from injuries he sustained in the collision.
Bolling turned himself in on Friday and was released from Tarrant County jail on a $7,500 bond.The actor in me started to realize that there was something very funny about the whole experience. This kid was handing me a script: “Here are your lines tonight. Please perform for my enjoyment.” I thought the funniest thing in that situation would be for me to have to say things I don’t want to say—things that the kid is making me say.
So it came from there. If the adult had to say silly things, I knew the kid would feel very powerful and would feel that books are very powerful. Working backwards, I realized that if there were no pictures, it would be an even more delightful trick: The kid is taking a grown-up style book and using it against the grown-up.
Rothenberg Gritz: Some of the best children’s book writers never had kids themselves. Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak...
Novak: Yeah, and H.A. Rey. I’ve noticed that, too. I hope I do have kids one of these days. But for now, maybe I’m more interested in having all kids as my audience.
Rothenberg Gritz: Maybe you also feel like you can be more irreverent than a parent might be.
Novak: That’s true! The books I loved as a child all had one thing in common: They were very fundamentally on the side of the kid. They represented mischief. That’s what really got me interested in reading. For all Dr. Seuss’s educational accolades, every kid sees what he’s doing and knows, “This guy is Team Kid. This guy isn’t trying to teach me anything. It’s a rebellious, joyous book just for me.”
Rothenberg Gritz: How much editing do you go through for a book like this? Did you have to try out lots of different nonsense sounds before you came up with phrases like boo-boo butt and ba-doongy-face?
Novak: Those came pretty naturally on day one. I don’t know why, but b sounds came out as the music of the book. Boo-boo butt, blork, bluurf. There seemed to be something explosive and innocent at the same time about silly words that started with a b.
I did take a few pages out from the beginning for rhythm. Some of the early versions of the book were a little slow to start. When you have a book with no pictures, the kid is immediately intrigued. But if it’s not funny soon, the kid says, “No, I don’t think so.”
Rothenberg Gritz: A lot of the writing you’ve done has been for professional comedians like Steve Carell to perform. How did you make sure ordinary parents reading this book out loud would get the timing and delivery just right?
Novak: I did a million different tweaks in the design |
the independent candidate argued: “We can no longer dismiss mistrust of migrants.”
Proposing “stronger urban regeneration” for troubled, migrant-dominated suburbs in France, Macron touted the forcing of a more diverse “social mix” in neighbourhoods and dividing problem students amongst a wider range of schools as his preferred solutions.
“Positive discrimination in the field of employment must be encouraged,” he added.
“I want to help each person to integrate and to fight discriminatory practices in companies.”
Proclaiming “the real challenge lies in the return to [national borders]”, the presidential frontrunner attacked candidates in past and present elections who “promised to enforce immigration law and to deport irregular aliens” by claiming it’s almost impossible to send illegal migrants back to their homelands.
The sociologist and writer Mathieu Bock-Côté warned last week that Macron embodies “all that France wants to extricate itself from”.
“Excessive globalism and cultural leftism are in contradiction with the aspirations that seem to come from the depths of the country,” he wrote in Le Figaro.
Wikileaks revealed Macron was working on an alliance with Hillary Clinton last year before her shock defeat in the U.S. presidential election.
The globalist candidate had requested the Democratic presidential candidate’s presence at a private roundtable dinner in October with several European politicians, according to an email published on Wikileaks.
At this, a discussion “to evaluate how progressives develop a successful political and economic narrative to counter the right and populists to the left” was due to take place.It is a history of coded race-baiting combined with myopia and cowardice that puts the Republican establishment in lock step now with the alt-right, the Ku Klux Klan, the racists and misogynists and nut jobs, the guy who shouts “Jew-S.A.,” the crowds that scream, “Lock her up.” For some it is taxes, abortion or immigration, for many it is simply Clinton hatred that allows them to justify supporting a candidate who also stands for torture, reckless war, unchecked greed, hatred of women, immigrants, refugees, people of color, people with disabilities. A sexual predator, a business fraud, a liar who runs on a promise to destroy millions of immigrant families and to jail his political opponent.
If Mr. Trump is rejected on Tuesday, the nation will have a momentary breather. And some good news to build on. The Republicans who have spent the last weeks and months jumping on, then off, then on the Trump bus will have been discredited, and some may be unseated. Those in the Trump inner circle will be freshly disgraced, and perhaps go away — like Rudy Giuliani, former New York mayor, now Mr. Trump’s conspiracy ghoul, and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who has been separately brought low in an unrelated courtroom drama. And the electorate will have demonstrated its decency.
The rejection of Trump is the simple part. Win or lose, the harder job will be confronting the conditions that spawned him. This country’s problems will still be deep and complex, and the Republicans in Congress show no signs of giving Mrs. Clinton any more respect than they gave President Obama, or of abandoning their jihad against responsible governing. If she wins, Mrs. Clinton will have the burden of managing the jihadis, while governing for the benefit not only of her supporters but also of the tens of millions who will have voted for Mr. Trump expecting — against all evidence — that he will make everything better. It won’t be easy.
“Winter Is Coming” is the title Garry Kasparov gave his book about Vladimir Putin. Autumn is here in the United States, too. It’s time to focus. To confront what Trump represents, the better to end it. Let this election have the salutary effect of reminding Americans as a nation of who we are, and the good we can do, when we are put to the test.Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, walks with his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in Dubuque, Iowa, August 25, 2015.
Conservative journalist Ben Shapiro is resigning from Breitbart over the news site’s handling of an alleged assault by Donald Trump’s campaign manager on a Breitbart reporter.
Shapiro and Michelle Fields, who claims a Trump staffer forcefully pushed her away from the Republican presidential candidate at a news conference in Florida, both resigned Sunday night, according to Buzzfeed News.
Four others, including national security correspondent Jordan Schachtel and editor Jarrett Stepman, left the news site since the incident. Schachtel wrote that Breitbart is "no longer a jornalistic enterprise," claiming it resembles a "media super-PAC for the Trump campaign."
Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew and syndicated columnist, was an editor at large for the right-wing site founded by the late Andrew Breitbart.
“Andrew [Breitbart’s] life mission has been betrayed,” Shapiro wrote in a statement he submitted to Buzzfeed. “Indeed, Breitbart News, under the chairmanship of Steve Bannon, has put a stake through the heart of Andrew’s legacy. In my opinion, Steve Bannon is a bully, and has sold out Andrew’s mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump; he has shaped the company into Trump’s personal Pravda, to the extent that he abandoned and undercut his own reporter, Breitbart News’ Michelle Fields, in order to protect Trump’s bully campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who allegedly assaulted Michelle.”
Breitbart News’ editor at large, Joel Pollak, published a satirical article on the site Monday morning mocking Shapiro for resigning and suggesting he was looking for a post at Fox News.
“Former Breitbart News editor-at-large Ben Shapiro announced Sunday evening via left-wing Buzzfeed that he is abandoning Andrew Breitbart’s lifelong best friend, widow, hand-picked management team and friends in pursuit of an elusive contributorship at the Fox News Channel,” the post read.
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It was posted under the name William Bigelow — the name Shapiro’s father, David, used while writing for the site, Politico reported.
The article has since been deleted but can be read in full here. According to Politico, David Shapiro also resigned from Breitbart on Sunday night.
The Trump campaign has denied Fields’ allegations. She and Washington Post reporter Ben Terris, who was standing next to Fields at the time, both wrote accounts of the incident.
“Both Lewandowski and Trump maligned Michelle in the most repulsive fashion,” Shapiro wrote in his statement. “Meanwhile, Breitbart News not only stood by and did nothing outside of tepidly asking for an apology, they then attempted to abandon Michelle by silencing staff from tweeting or talking about the issue. Finally, in the ultimate indignity, they undermined Michelle completely by running a poorly-evidenced conspiracy theory as their lead story in which Michelle and Terris had somehow misidentified Lewandowski.”There are plenty of reasons to give up being a professional racing driver. The threat of death or serious injury are just a couple of obvious ones. Beyond that, it seems unfathomable why a pro-driver would jack it all in when in the prime of life and at the zenith of his career, especially if he still had a contract with the best team in F1 safely stashed away in his sock draw. But I suppose, by the standards of 2016, an F1 World Champion quitting five days after being crowned was small beer next to the geo-political summersaults and mass extinctions of much loved musicians and performers. Perhaps we should have been expecting it? But it certainly threw me and a host of other so called 'expert analysts'.
Racing drivers usually quit because they would look idiotic turning up to a race clutching their helmets without a drive. The writing is on the wall when you can no longer get anything to race, or all that's left is the total no hope shit-box on the back of the grid, assuming the team even get that far. And if you've tasted the lukewarm, sweet, sticky Champagne enough times on the podium, whatever they serve up at the other end of the paddock is unlikely to be sufficiently tempting. So you bow out ignominiously. No. The way to do it is to leave them wanting more, to exit stage left and not milk the applause. This way its the audience who are left feeling hungry. But it takes enormous strength to push the plate away with a few more tasty morsels still to go. The skill is not knowing when you're full, but knowing when you've had sufficient nourishment to last a lifetime.
For a guy who spent nine years struggling up the rickety ladder to F1 and didn't get a full time drive until he was 32, the idea of bowing out before I'd even started is somewhat confusing. But then, most of my career was confusing and atypical. So we'll not draw that comparison any further. Actually, looking at the notable others in the pantheon, stopping in one's early 30's is not so unusual. Sir JYS did it at 34, Scheckter, Hunt, Hakkinen, Raikkonen, and even Lauda all quit completely or temporarily even earlier than that, whilst Hawthorn retired at 29, albeit possibly for medical reasons. Clearly, being a professional racing driver takes its toll somewhere. It can't be the fab glittery high life the magazines would have us believe all the time, or they'd keep going till they needed to come into the pits for an afternoon kip. So at this point I will invoke insight from personal experience, if I may.
I know it looks like anyone could do it on the television, but driving an F1 car requires an extraordinary amount of commitment, concentration and preparation. Especially these days when the cars are the equivalent of an electronic Rubric Cube. The steering wheel doesn't just steer anymore. It controls almost all aspects of the car's performance. There are controls upon controls that do stuff that most people couldn't even imagine anyone wanting, let alone remembering what they did. What this means is that the days of just turning up and checking that the belts still fit and reminding yourself which team you're driving for this weekend, have long gone, never to return. Mentally, and physically its a lot of work. There are a lot of calculations to make under extreme pressure, exhaustion and dehydration. A race weekend is a highly condensed, intense, emotional pressure cooker, often with jet lag. And if that is not enough, remembering to avoid crashing, either on your own or with someone, else will up the ante. OK. Its fun, too. But after a few thousand laps of some anodyne circuit, it can get un-fun, believe it or not.
In addition to that there is all the PR work. Diddums, I hear you say. Well, admittedly, its not the most difficult part of the job but after the ten thousandth time you've been asked the same testing question in five different languages (Nico has several first languages) it can get a little tedious. We are talking a relentless amount of appearances all over the world during the racing season as well as the off season. No wonder Lewis has a limit in his contract. Its a competitive advantage to cut that work load out of your life. After a decade of this, drivers start to wilt visibly in interviews. Jenson Button was almost running out of the paddock in Abu Dhabi. And that was before the race!
And it can get personal, too. Remember, for quite a few races after Spa 2014, Nico was booed on the podium, quite unfairly, in my view. That can hurt. And there was acrimony within the team, the team that Nico had served faithfully for many seasons. Nico is a very hard worker. I have never heard any suggestion that he ever swung the lead. He was always stoic and totally professional in the face of some humiliating defeats and incidents, too. These things take their toll. The massive retainer could be seen as fair compensation, though, for a relatively little bit of agro. No doubt it tempts you to endure more suffering... until you reach the point that a few million more wont make much difference. Imagine that!
But perhaps the most rational reason for quitting at the top is that you stay there. Forever. If I had stopped after my Championship in 1996 I would have one of the best winning averages of all time; 21 wins from 66 starts. But I didn't. Never mind. I thought there was one more Championship in me, in the right car. All I would have had to do was beat Mika Hakkinen in his home team, McLaren. On second thoughts, just as well I put the phone down on Ron. Ah well. History. But Nico? All he'd have to do is beat Lewis again. And here is the biggest reason for a racing driver calling it a day; having to turn your guts inside out to win and then thinking of having to go though all that again. Remember Sir Steve Redgrave?
I remember watching a tennis match once. Roger Federer had made it through to yet another final. He would be up against Andy Murray (now Sir Andy. Congratulations). After Roger had publicly gutted his semi-final opponent the interviewer asked him how he felt about the coming final against Andy. "Its not easy for Andy" he sympathetically commented, before adding, "He's up against me". Huge applause and laughter ensued. Andy was beaten already.
To beat a guy like Lewis Hamilton is not easy. He's the quickest, for one. Also, he's frighteningly competitive. I know he comes from Stevenage, but he might as well come from a favela in Sao Paulo. He's a street fighting man. He'll use gamesmanship to get the edge. His default mindset is, 'I am the best' and nothing really dents that. Mercedes was Nico's home before Lewis turned up. There was something of the fairy tale about the pairing. The two of them had a dream, back when they karted together, that one day they'd both become World Champions. Nice. Sweet. But now they were grown up. Lewis made the team dance to his tunes. Nico politely stood back and watched the leaders acquiesce to the star's demands. He was, after all, demonstrably quicker and already a World Champion. But occasionally he had his off days. Nico made sure he was ready for those moments. He worked hard and dedicated himself to not being totally overturned by this interloper.
Inevitably, Lewis bagged the most swag which rather put Nico in the shade. It didn't help that Lewis rubbed it in somewhat by making the odd comment that also put Nico in a bad light as well as the shade. Nico could hardly be blamed for being born well off and living in Monaco. Still, these were all little psychological tests Lewis was dishing out. Like the cap tossing episode in Austin after Lewis had just captured his third World Crown to Nico's nil. Tellingly, Nico immediately returned the runner up cap to Lewis in the same offhand way. 'No', he was saying. 'I won't be defeated'. Something was eating him. Something was telling him not to give up. Not just yet.
He could have just given up there and then, called it a day, retired hurt and beaten and licked his wounds on his boat in Ibiza with his wife and their new child. But he didn't. He could have decided to be a good number two to Lewis. That would not the be end of the world, after all. He could have taken the money and had a cushy life. But he didn't. Perhaps a little fortuitously, after claiming his third title, Lewis got off the gas a bit and onto the Champagne before the 2015 season was actually over. This gave Nico a little window of opportunity as he reeled off three impressive wins in a row and brought his Lewis beating pole position tally to six consecutive poles by the close of play in 2015. This put a bit of a spring in his step and after four races into 2016, Nico had extended this winning streak to seven!
Admittedly, Lewis had back luck on the mechanical side and this, sadly, would herald the beginning of the end for the Nico-Lewis buddy tale. Lewis raised the question as to why Mercedes would have transferred his faithful team of mechanics onto Nico's car. What's that all about, eh? The seeds of suspicion were duly planted and started to germinate nicely. Maybe one day we'll get the whole story but on the face of it Nico had pulled off a bit of a coup. But it was Nico, after all, who had typically had the worst of the reliability issues in previous seasons. Now it was Lewis' turn. And boy, did that not go down well. But if Nico was going to beat Lewis he had to fight fire with fire and if its not in your nature to scrap, it can be a difficult transition.
The 2016 Nico was necessarily a different beast. He hired a sports psychologist, which Lewis turned into a point of criticism of his opponent. What self respecting sport's person resorts to psychology? Well, Nico, I guess. But he went further than that. In Japan, whilst Lewis was SnapChatting bunny rabbit ears onto himself in the press conference, Nico was mulling over what he had learned from a Japanese Zen master. It was after this weekend, after beating Lewis, when he decided to call it a day if he won the Championship. He didn't tell us. He didn't tell Mercedes. He didn't even tell his dad. He just thought it to himself, as far as we know.
In Abu Dhabi I was in the Mercedes garage throughout the race. The atmosphere was extremely tense. The possibility of calamity hung over the entire team like a hungry vulture. Although the mechanics showed no sign of it. One of them even fell asleep as if he didn't have a care in the world. Remember what is riding on these guys shoulders; fumble a wheel gun and you have changed the course of F1 history. Bemused celebrities were ushered in and out of the garage at various stages of the race. Perhaps significantly one of them was Roger Federer, used to the hype and the fizz of a title fight he looked cool as a cucumber. I wonder if he was thinking, "I can't be easy for Nico. He's up against Lewis"? Sure enough, Lewis had one more trick up his sleeve. You could almost see the sweat squirting out of Nico's helmet as Lewis backed him into the drooling fangs of the Ferrari, helpfully, perhaps, steered by fellow German, Sebastian Vettel. But he was out of laps and out of ideas. Short of doing a Dick Dastardly, Lewis was stymied. The 'lesser man' had won the title, if not the last race, so no cap tossing this time.
Almost immediately he got out of the car Nico was a changed man. Brought up a'son of...' (I can relate to that) he had finally earned his right to be called Mr. Rosberg. No more being the low value card in racing driver Top Trumps. He'd fulfilled his life long ambition, to become World Champion. But more important than anything else - it seemed to me - was that he had beaten Lewis. It was virtually all he talked about. "It feels I've been racing Lewis all my life" he explained, as if Lewis was a kind of illness he'd been suffering from. That and how 'horrible' the tension was in driving with the World Championship only inches away from his grasp and how the whole season had been like a long nightmare, a torture. It was this experience that had done it for him. He knew what it had taken to beat Lewis. He had to give everything he had, totally and to the exclusion of all else. Yes, he had won. But do it again? Not right this minute, if you don't mind. Of course, he had yet to reveal his final career move.
I could understand him wanting a break. But I think Nico could see the truth. He was no Lewis Hamilton. He had to push himself to the very edges of himself to beat him and in that process you learn where your limits lie, where you fit in the hierarchy of talent. The 'Information' comes to you through the experience. You find out what you always needed to know and knowing that, what more is there to learn?
The GOATS, the greatest drivers of all time, can be beaten. I've done it. I know. But they can't be beaten over and over again. They are simply too good. In the toughest race of my career in Suzuka 1994, I had to push myself out of my own body to beat Michael Schumacher. I can remember thinking, 'God! I can't breath!' There is only so many times you can do that to yourself. But also, you no longer feel the need. You know how good they are, and you know how good you are. There is no shame in accepting that. You can at least say you've visited that high place where the Gods live.
A few years back I was having breakfast at an event with Franz Klammer, the downhill skiing God, as you do. We talked about whether a British skier would ever win a World Cup Downhill. 'Not possible', he bluntly replied. 'Too many good skiers in Austria already. They only take the very best. And the air is very thin at that level'. I knew exactly what he was saying and he wasn't talking about the geographical altitude. He was talking about the physiological and psychological altitude; the stratosphere of human limits.
After Austin 2015 Nico vowed that he 'didn't ever want to experience that again'. Well, he'll never get that Austin feeling ever again. He'll never get that Abu Dhabi feeling again, either. But maybe its like a painting? There comes a point where more paint doesn't make it any better. And he's achieved a kind of eternal victory over Lewis. He's left the table with all his winnings. Smart kid, is Nico. I admire this about him; he's fulfilled all his promises to himself. There's just one more he has to keep, but I don't doubt for a second that he'll keep it.By Rob Moseley
Editor, GoDucks.com
Assessing where things stand for the Oregon football team entering the start of preseason camp Aug. 10.
DEFENSIVE LINE
Who's back: It's very reasonable to think that the Oregon defensive line could move on without a first-round NFL draft pick this season, and yet be more disruptive than a year ago. Arik Armstead is now in the pro ranks, but the first reason to think the Ducks could be even better up front this season is the return and continued development of seniors DeForest Buckner and Alex Balducci. Buckner is a potential all-American and future first-round draft pick himself, while Balducci will look to make the jump from steady contributor to chaos-inducing force after playing much of last season on a bum ankle.
The other reason to think Oregon's D line could be even better than a year ago is a group of players lower on the depth chart who are poised to have breakout seasons. That includes veterans Tui Talia and T.J. Daniel, both candidates to replace Armstead with the first unit, and sophomores Henry Mondeaux and Austin Maloata, who got their first taste of college ball last season and are on track to mature into reliable rotation players in 2015 — if not more.
Who's new: The Ducks relied heavily on the trio of Armstead, Balducci and Buckner a year ago in part due to their talent, and in part because the rest of the depth chart was a bit raw. The rotation figures to be much deeper this season, thanks to the development of Mondeaux and company, and also the presence of some talented new faces. Jalen Jelks is coming off a redshirt year in which he regularly battled Jake Fisher, a second-round NFL draft pick. And the class of incoming freshmen includes five-star recruit Canton Kaumatule, a couple of other long linemen in Drayton Carlberg and Gus Cumberlander, and two massive space-eaters in Rex Manu and Gary Baker. It might be a stretch to think all the new guys are ready to contribute immediately, but the Ducks only need one or two to fill out their rotation for this season.
ESPN's take: Good shape: “Buckner is the undisputed veteran leader of this group, but the Ducks are also fortunate to have a proven returner at nose tackle in Alex Balducci.”
ROB'S TAKE
Projected depth chart
DE: DeForest Buckner, Sr.; T.J. Daniel, Jr.; Jalen Jelks, RFr.; Drayton Carlberg, Fr.; Jordan Kurahara, RFr.
NT: Alex Balducci, Sr.; Austin Maloata, So.; Rex Manu, Fr.; Gary Baker, Fr.; Spencer Stark, RFr.
DE: Tui Talia, Sr.; Henry Mondeaux, So.; Canton Kaumatule, Fr.; Gus Cumberlander, Fr.; Jason Sloan, So.
What to Watch: The obvious big storyline in August will be identifying the starter to replace Armstead. Talia and Daniel have seniority, but Mondeaux was a breakout star of spring drills, and all eyes will be on Kaumatule to see how close he can come to meeting the expectations heaped on him in the recruiting process. Sorting out the depth at nose tackle also should be intriguing. Manu showed off his power each week doing the "truck push" that UO strength coach Jim Radcliffe organized, and could potentially challenge Maloata, who has slimmed down a bit to help his conditioning but still can plug up the middle at 300 pounds.It's like a "greatest hits" tour of Russian imperialism -- Budapest, 1956; Prague, 1968; Kabul, 1979; Tbilisi, 1989, and Vilnius in 1991 -- and it's coming to a theater (of war) near you!
In what is shaping up to be a battle of occupation videos, a new two-minute parody has emerged on social media that counters many of the purported benefits of Russian imperialism laid out in the original I'm A Russian Occupier.
Whereas the original video claimed Moscow brought wealth and development to the Baltic states, Central Asia, and Ukraine, the new clip exposes the uglier side of Russian intervention.
The clip has been posted on the Internet by several sources, including Stepan Demura, a prominent Russian financial analyst, who published it on his YouTube account on March 6.
"I invaded prospering Afghanistan...and left behind the worst hotspot on the planet ruled by arms, violence, and drugs," the parody claims in its stated effort to offer the Russian people a glimpse of how the world "REALLY" perceives the Russians.
Filled with imagery contrasting war and poverty to modernity and happiness, the video says the average Pole is four times richer than the average Russian and that the Finns are producing telephones, clothing, and foodstuffs that the Russians can only dream of.
All of this was achieved only after "we were asked to leave and left" those countries, the video explains.
In an effort to show the consequences of Russian intervention, the video claims that the "Russian occupier" took the Kurile Islands from Japan, leaving people to "still catch fish and live with natural technology" while Japan operates with cutting-edge "future technology."
To the background images of distressed children and corpses lying in streets, the voice representing the Russian occupier claims, "it was me who arranged the Great Famine, the Holodomor, in Ukraine, where millions of people died of hunger."
Anti-Soviet demonstrations in Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968, Tbilisi in 1989, and Vilnius in 1991 were left "drowning in blood" at the hands of Russian occupiers, the video says.
"Yet I haven't learnt how to build roads, make household appliances and proper clothes," the video claims, adding, "All I can do is bring pain and hatred."
"Today I'm coming to you," it warns, "Because I'm an occupier."
-- Farangis NajibullahDear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman on Tuesday called for the government to deny residency to those living in east Jerusalem who are involved in terrorist activity, ahead of an emergency meeting called by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the recent escalation of terrorist attacks.
Liberman said in a statement that he expects several particular decisions to be clearly made by the security cabinet. He said that no terrorist should survive a terrorist attack, Israel should adopt the United States' open-fire regulations and deny residency to those in east Jerusalem involved in terrorism.
Israel should also "begin using emergency law and institute a military government everywhere it is necessary to eradicate terrorism," he said."I remind the prime minister and cabinet members: words do not stop terrorists. Security is gained through an iron fist."Liberman's comments came in the aftermath of four terrorist attacks that struck the streets of Israel in under two hours on Tuesday morning.Two terror attacks took place at two separate locations in Jerusalem, resulting in the deaths of three Israelis and causing injuries to several others.In the first attack, two Jewish men were stabbed to death, and three others seriously wounded in a gun and knife attack on an Egged bus in the capital’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood, located next to the flashpoint Arab neighborhood Jabel Mukaber.In a separate attack on Malkei Israel Street In the haredi neighborhood of Geula in the capital, a Palestinian terrorist drove his vehicle into a group of several people waiting at a bus stop. He then exited his car with a meat cleaver and began attacking the wounded and others with the implement.Rabbi Yeshayahu Krishevsky, 60, was killed, apparently both from the vehicular attack and the axe wounds while two other people were seriously injured.In addition, there were two stabbing attacks in the city of Ra'anana on Tuesday morning.The first stabbing attack took place on Tuesday morning in Ra'anana at a bus stop outside of city hall.According to police reports, a 22-year-old male terrorist from east Jerusalem approached the bus stop outside of city hall and stabbed a 32-year-old man in his neck and stomach. Civilians in the area subdued the terrorist until police forces arrived on the scene.MDA paramedics transported the lightly wounded victim to Meir Medical Center in Kfar Saba. The terrorist was also transported to the hospital with light-to-moderate wounds he received when civilians subdued him.A second stabbing attack took place an hour and a half later on Jerusalem Street in Ra'anana. A terrorist from east Jerusalem pulled out a knife and began stabbing civilians in front of a cafe. According to reports by MDA, three victims were lightly injured and one was in critical condition after sustaining stab wounds to his upper body.A passing driver saw what was happening and rammed his car into the terrorist. The driver, with the assistance of another man, subdued the attacker until police forces arrived on the scene.These incidents are the latest in a spate of stabbing attacks to hit Israel in the past two weeks.
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>There's a reason we consider our best friends to be family; sometimes a friend can support you in ways your family just can't.
That's the case with Jace Hyduchak and Jackson Dupps. The 6 year olds go to the same school, are in the same class and the same boy scout troop. Additionally, they both love to play with Legos and are passionate about any and all things superhero-related — it's no wonder they had an instant connection.
"They've been through the same struggle, they just understand each other in a way others can't," Jace's dad, George Hyduchak, said.
Over the holidays in 2015, George and his wife, Ann, started to notice bruises on Jace's body that rough-housing couldn't explain. He was tired all the time and finally, one morning, they found blood on his pillow.
A trip to the pediatrician and a blood test revealed Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia and he was rushed to Phoenix Children's Hospital for an emergency transfusion.
"It literally was the worst day of our lives, but we're all good now and we're kicking cancer's [butt]." George said.
The Hyduchak's would soon learn of another family in their son's same school who had been through the same battle just one year before.
"One of my girlfriends called and said 'Kelli, there's another one,'" explained Kelli Dupps, whose son Jackson is also recovering from cancer.
"My heart just broke for them because we knew exactly what they were about to go through," Kelli said. "But we're here to show them there is light at the end of the tunnel; there is life on the other side."
Their sons immediately bonded over bald heads and have been buddies ever since.
After 65 days and 58 nights at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, seven trips to the emergency room and 43 (and counting) trips to a treatment center, Jace is strong enough to blow the horn as the official race starter at the Run to Fight Children’s Cancer, Saturday March 11 at Grand Canyon University.
Sign up for the 10K run, 5K run/walk or donate here.by Ann Garrison
If you watched it on TV, the Women’s March on Washington seemed to be a Democratic Party, Hillary-Is-My-President affair. “It was all about protection and equal opportunity for women and all racial and religious minorities, but that didn’t include protection from predatory financial institutions, from all intrusive spying, or from sacrifice to foreign wars for resources and global hegemony.”
The Women’s March in Washington, as Broadcast
by Ann Garrison
“Michael Moore urged everyone to start calling their congressional reps every single day, and run, at the very least, for Democratic Party precinct delegate.”
I didn’t show up for the Women's’ March on the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. I didn’t go to D.C. or join the local Oakland and San Francisco manifestations. I was way too sick to go anywhere, but I hadn’t been planning to anyway. What were we going to protest? That Donald Trump won the election? That Hillary lost? That Trump’s in Putin’s pocket? That Trump is a pussy grabbing, wall building, climate change denying, health care abolishing, tax dodging, shit spewing demagogue? That his campaign nevertheless struck a chord in the heartland that Hillary’s did not and enabled him to win the electoral college? That he promised to withdraw the U.S. from the Trans Pacific Partnership? (As he did within his first few days in office.)
Were we to protest because Trump wants to create a Muslim registry? That’s not good, but Bush did that. It was called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) or INS Special Registration. Obama maintained it until December 22, 2016, when he dismantled it, so Trump would have to start over.
Were we to protest because Trump might withdraw U.S. troops from Europe’s borders with Russia? During the week of the inauguration, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reassured us that President Obama had greatly reduced the risk of that by deploying thousands more troops to Norway and Poland on his last two days in office, meaning that there are now more troops deployed in Europe than at any time since World War II. “Here’s the question,” Maddow said, “Is the new president gonna take those troops out? After all the speculation, after all the worry, we are actually about to find out if Russia maybe has something on the new president. We’re about to find out if the new president of our country is going to do what Russia wants once he’s commander-in-chief of the U.S. military starting noon on Friday. What is he gonna do with those deployments? Watch this space. Seriously.”
“Chris Hedges described the march as ‘tepid,’ but said that this is how movements start and that it might grow into something larger.”
Even if I hadn’t been sick, I was disinclined to march, but I switched on the broadcast reporting, alternating between CNN, MSNBC, Democracy Now, and a raw video livestream, so this is my response to the broadcast spectacle, not to the event as experienced in the streets. A number of my friends who were in the streets were elated by the size and energy of the crowds and say they had a more radical, more promising experience than what I saw broadcast. Chris Hedges, speaking to TruthDig, described the march as “tepid,” but said that this is how movements start and that it might grow into a more radical challenge. Not necessarily, but it might.
I hadn’t expected to be much interested in the broadcasts for the same reasons I was disinclined to go, but I was immediately mesmerized by what a carefully staged and confined spectacle it was, by what it accepted and what it didn't, at least as broadcast. The most glaring exclusions were opposition to U.S. wars, to NSA spying on our every phone call and our daily lives, and to Wall Street financialization schemes that led to the 2008 crash, the bank bailout, the foreclosures and the destruction of middle class wealth, including half that of the Black population.
CNN and MSNBC had one overriding concern: whether or not the Democratic Party could harness all this energy into wins in 2018 and 2020, or whether it would simply dissipate like Occupy and the Tea Party. Democracy Now made no attempt to force that framework on it, but included no alternate analysis either.
“The most glaring exclusions were opposition to U.S. wars, to the NSA’s spying on our every phone call and our daily lives, and to the Wall Street financialization schemes.”
The speakers who came to the podium all appeared to assume that the half million or more people present were all registered Democrats, and no one was more excited about that than filmmaker Michael Moore. He urged everyone to start calling their Congressional reps every single day, to make it a part of their morning routine, as soon as they’d made the coffee. He urged them to run for local office, city council, school board or, at the very least, Democratic Party precinct delegate.
However, something happened as Michael Moore was putting the finishing touches on his exhortation to push the old Democratic leadership aside - despite all the |
of the prison, Zihuatanejo, Mexico is a real place. It's on the southwestern coast of the country. Here it is on Google Maps. Also, the King short story is titled "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption." It's part of the collection titled "Different Seasons" which was released in 1982. The story also includes the subtitle "Hope Strings Eternal." Incidentally, the collection of novellas also includes "Apt Pupil" which was turned into the 1998 film Shawshank was Darabont's first feature film. The Green Mile was his second. The auteur joked at the time that he had the narrowest niche in all of film-history: Stephen King prison films. Darabont also adapted King's The Mist for a 2007 film.Still want more? Check out ShawshankRedemption.net and ShawshankRedemption.org, two fan sites dedicated to this great movie.MEXICO CITY - Fighting among the Zetas gang and other vicious drug cartels led to the deaths of more than 40 people whose bodies were found in three Mexican cities over a 24-hour span, a government official said Saturday.
At least 20 people were killed and five injured when gunmen opened fire in a bar late Friday in the northern city of Monterrey, where the gang is fighting its former ally, the Gulf Cartel, said federal security spokesman Alejandro Poire.
Eleven bodies shot with high-powered rifles were found earlier Friday, piled near a water well on the outskirts of Mexico City, where the gang is fighting the Knights Templar, Poire said. That is an offshoot of the La Familia gang that has terrorized its home state of Michoacan.
Poire said an additional 10 people were found dead early Saturday in various parts of the northern city of Torreon, where the Zetas are fighting the Sinaloa cartel headed by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.
"The violence is a product of this criminal rivalry... surrounding the intent to control illegal activities in a community, and not the only the earnings that come with it, but also with transporting drugs to the United States," Poire said in a news conference.
Poire provided no more details on the killings in Torreon in the border state of Coahuila.
Coahuila state officials said the 10 bodies in Torreon had been mutilated and left in a sports-utility vehicle. Seven of the victims were men and three were women, and all had been killed several days earlier, said Fernando Olivas, a state prosecutor's representative in Torreon.
In Monterrey, 16 people died at the Sabino Gordo bar in the worst mass killing in memory in the northern industrial city, where violence has spiked since the Gulf and Zetas broke their alliance early last year. Four others died later at the hospital and five were injured, said Jorge Domene, security spokesman for the state of Nuevo Leon, where Monterrey is located.
Other downtown businesses closed earlier than usual after news of the massacre broke.
In Valle de Chalco, a working class suburb southeast of Mexico City, a man was found alive among the dumped bodies and was taken to a hospital, said Antonio Ortega, a spokesman for the Mexico State police.
He said some of the bodies were blindfolded and had their hands tied. Poire said one woman was found seriously injured.
State officials said police found another body nearby a few hours later but could not confirm it was related to the mass attack.
Ortega said he didn't know if the victims were shot at the scene or were taken to site.
The capital region has been largely spared the widespread drug violence that grips parts of Mexico.
But some poorer areas of the sprawling metropolis of 20 million people have begun to see killings and decapitations committed by street gangs that are remnants of splintered drug cartels.
In another incident allegedly involving Zetas, the Mexican Navy said Friday it rescued a former mayor of Reynosa, across from McAllen, Texas, who had been kidnapped along with his son. Four alleged Zeta members were arrested at the scene after an anonymous tip informed the navy of former Mayor Humberto Valdez's abduction Thursday, according to the Navy statement.
Poire repeated the government insistence that criminals, not the government's crackdown on organized crime, are causing the violence. More than 35,000 people have died since President Felipe Calderon stepped up the attack on organized crime in 2006, according to official figures. Some groups put the number at more than 40,000.
"The violence won't stop if we stop battling criminals," Poire said. "The violence will diminish as we accelerate our capacity to debilitate the gangs that produce it."
Federal authorities apprehended La Familia's alleged leader in late June, claiming the arrest was a debilitating blow to the gang. Jose de Jesus Mendez Vargas was alleged to be the last remaining head of the cartel, whose splinter group, the Knights Templar, continues to fight for control of areas La Familia once dominated.
Mexican authorities also arrested Jesus Enrique Rejon Aguilar, a co-founder of the Zetas drug cartel who is suspected of involvement in the February killing of a U.S. customs agent.The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) Launch an Arrest Campaign within its Ranks and Send Reinforcements to Ras Al-‘Ain in Al-Hasakah
The SDF are in a state of confusion and anxiety resulted by the defection of a number of Arab members especially after the announcement of the formation of a new faction from the people of Al-Jazeera and Al-Raqqa countryside under the name of Al-Qadisiya Brigades.
As a result, the SDF launched a wide arrests campaign against the Arab members in Ain Issa, Tal Abyad, and Al-Raqqa countryside.
In a related context, late at yesterday evening, YPG convoy headed from Tal Abyad in Al-Raqqa towards the nearby Ras city of Al-Ain in Al-Hasakah including a number of carriers loaded with recruits and four vehicles equipped with four DSHK machineguns. This move comes from the leadership of the Kurdish forces to strengthen their presence in these areas due to the news about the entry of a Syrian faction to Ras Al-Ain city from the Turkish side by the support of the Turkish government to liberate the city from the Kurdish Forces.
On the other hand, ISIL launched an attack from Al-Hibsawi village, in the northern countryside, on locations for Al-Raqqa revolutionaries and Al-Tahrir Brigade that is affiliated with the SDF. Heavy clashes took place between both sides for few hours.
In Al-Raqqa western countryside, three people from Tal Othman village, Al-Jirniyeah area, were killed by the bullets of a YPG sniper when the units entered the village expelling its Arab population under the pretext of cleaning it from ISIL within three days. The three men were elder people and their names are Ibrahim Jaj Hilal, 50 years old, Abdullatif Khlif Thahir, 50 years old, and Ibrahim Qar’an, 75 years old.
The Media Office of the Forces of the Syrian Revolution: Arab Furati – Al-RaqqaThe water conditions in Rio de Janeiro don't appear as bad as what's being reported, and the Toronto harbour is sometimes "almost worse," according to a Canadian Olympic sailor who is in the Brazilian city for his first Games.
"Most of the stuff in the media, I haven't actually seen it in person," Lee Parkhill told CBC News on Thursday.
Parkhill, of Oakville, Ont., has been training in the waters off Rio for eight weeks, preparing for the men's single-handed Laser dinghy competition.
Most of the "rubbish" only comes after big rainstorms, Parkhill says, and he has mostly seen empty water bottles floating around. He said the race courses in Rio look "like normal, like Toronto harbour," where he trained for four years as a teen.
"I've sailed a lot in Toronto harbour and after a big rainstorm, all the debris come from the Humber River," he said. "It's almost worse than what I see here."
A view of Rio's polluted waterways from a helicopter. (CBC)
Media report filthy waters
Many have expressed concern for athletes' safety, with reports of filthy water, ranging from sightings of animal carcasses to untreated sewage in the Rio waterways.
Parkhill, 27, said he has been training on all of the race courses, and often sees the boats sent to clean up garbage.
"In terms of water quality, you can tell that it's definitely not a perfect, crystal lake," he said. "But it's definitely getting better week after week."
A 16-month study commissioned by The Associated Press of water quality in Rio found athletes competing in the Games there risk becoming violently ill in water competitions. Human sewage contributes to waterways in Rio teeming with dangerous viruses and bacteria.
The AP's survey of aquatic venues part of the Olympic and Paralympic venues revealed consistent and dangerously high levels of viruses stemming from pollution, prompting biomedical expert Valerie Harwood to warn travellers: "Don't put your head under water."
Toronto has four wastewater treatment plants, removing solids, chemicals and other materials before water is released into Lake Ontario.
Brazilian biologist Mario Moscatelli showed CBC News the view from above in a helicopter.
"This is a shame!" Moscatelli said, pointing out the sewage flowing from streams and rivers into Rio's bays. "We have money, we have technology, but we don't have interest," he said.
Moscatelli has monitored the issue in Rio for the past 20 years and has been advocating a cleanup.
The city's poverty is a factor in the water contamination — hygiene and sanitation in the Rio's poorest neighbourhoods are substandard and people habitually throw their waste into the waterways. On radio and television, people are encouraged to stop throwing their garbage in the rivers.
Rio has treated only 17 per cent of its sewage in the past seven years. Games organizers had pledged to boost that figure to 80 per cent by the time the Olympics open, with governments at all levels spending a billion dollars to tackle the issue.
But of the eight planned treatment projects, only one was built.
CBC's David Common reported that the city is now treating 50 per cent of its sewage.
A water-quality survey of the aquatic Olympic and Paralympic venues commissioned by The Associated Press 'has revealed consistent and dangerously high levels of viruses from the pollution.' (CBC)
Parkhill said he doesn't know of anyone who has become sick.
When asked what he thinks about using disposable gloves or suits as a precaution, he chuckled. "[That's] rubbish. For me, no I wouldn't go that far at all," he said. "I wear the same suit every day and don't wash it in between days."
But Parkhill said he uses hand sanitizer before his meals between practice runs, and wears a jacket with a hood to avoid getting splashed too much.
"It's definitely a problem that's bigger than the Olympics and it'll be here when we're gone, but they're keeping it off our race courses for now."
Sailing ahead
Rio marks Parkhill's first time at the Olympics.
He won a bronze medal at the 2015 Pan Am Games and placed fourth in June's World Cup event in Weymouth, England. He finished in fifth place at the Rio 2016 test event and is ranked 11th in the world, according to the Olympics website.
Parkhill, right, with coach Steve Mitchell, posed Thursday in front of the waters where Parkhill will compete. (Sail Canada)
His plan for the upcoming competition is to remain "level-headed" and "just plug away" at the 10 races he has over five days.
"It's pretty cool to make it to the pinnacle of the sport, and to the Olympics, and I tried to explain this to my supporters at the [yacht club in Oakville] and ended up breaking down in tears," he said.
Parkhill said he's excited to represent not only Canada, but also Oakville and the Greater Toronto Area.
"Hopefully my best will be good enough," he said.
The men's Laser one-man dinghy competition begins on Monday. Parkhill is scheduled to race at 11 a.m. ET.On November 10th, 2016 the Pokémon TCG Online game was updated to include the following hotfixes:
Corrected a rare issue that could lead to Versus or Tournament matches ending prematurely.
Addressed a condition that might not allow a player, in rare cases, to re-connect to a tournament in progress if they disconnected between rounds.
Corrected an issue that would have Unfezant's Feather Dance effect be inconsistently applied to multi target attacks.
Corrected an issue with Xerneas-EX (XY #97) where some cards may incorrectly enable the X Blast attack to be used more often than intended.
Fixed an issue with Nidoking (STS #45) where evolution Pokémon put directly into play via another card, such as Archie's Ace in the Hole, did not increase the amount of damage done by the Power Lariat attack.
Halloween bundle deck boxes now correctly display on the Playmat.
Added expansion logo to XY-Evolutions pre-release bundle cards. Note: This correction had the unintended consequence to add the XY-Evolutions set stamp to non pre-release cards. This will be corrected in a future update.
Alex Leary
Pokémon TCG Online
The Pokémon Company International
Need help from the support team? Visit the [url="http://www.pokemon.com/support"]support portal[/url] and submit a ticket!A SEARCH FOR BASH Scripting Alternatives
TOC
1. Introduction
2. Not Meeting Criterias
3. Shells and Shell Languages
4. Scheme Languages
5. Scripting Languages
6. Finalists
7. Conclusion
8. Appendix
Readers note: this blog post did not convert entirely correct to WordPress. Consider reading original edition at: https://github.com/monzool/A-Search-for-BASH-Scripting-Alternatives
1. Introduction
Bash scripting is http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashWeaknesses
It is no secret that bash scripting has its pitfalls and oddities. Subtle mistakes are easy to make given its many quirks and arcane syntax rules. So this documents seek to investigate if a language can be found which embodies the “Bash – the good parts” only.
The idea for this document originated at my place of work. Our products are linux based, and in the development department all local workstations are Ubuntu installations, so bash scripting is a part of the heritage that automatically comes from using a linux system. Most co-workers will use bash for a quick means to and end to automate some build steps or tweaking testing facilities. A minor group use bash for configuring and tweaking an embedded linux platform. Bash scripts can be simple, but most often scripts grow in size and complexity over time and bugs will sneak in. Other times a script is rushed and the implementer is fooled by the, at first sight, simplicity of bash and falls into its many pitfalls and bugs appear in even small scripts.
It is my experience that most bash scripts have bugs or are of low quality. Writing correct and safe bash scripts is hard. Having personally written a rather large umbrella build system in bash for one of our more advanced products, it became clear to me that an alternative to bash needs to be embraced.
Criterias
The language, libraries and syntax should be sane, clean and unambiguous. No gotchas.
Multi arch. Must support Linux on i368, x64, armv7 and armv5te.
Terse. Not much cruft and boilerplate to get things done
Should be interpreted (intermediate compiling allowed) and require no cycle of compile + copy to target. It should be possible to modify a script on target and run it.
Dependencies. Scripts should be self contained, or have easily identifiable dependencies (libraries, modules).
REPL. Interactive shell is not required – but a bonus if available.
System calls. It should allow calling external tools (like make, grep etc.). This might be with a sane DSL or using a call mechanism that allows capturing output from bash syntaxed executions. Direct calls to operating system (or low level libraries) is not a requirement.
Scoping. No dynamic scoping. This eliminates interesting candidates like picolisp and newLISP, but dynamic scope in bash is cause for many confusing errors, so lexical scoped languages only.
Must be production ready, i.e. mature and preferably more that one maintainer.
Must have a license that is permissive of commercial usage and embedding.
A secondary objective is to find an embeddable scripting language. If the language could work as both a native scripting language and an embeddable scripting language, it would be preferable. It must embed into a C/C++ ecosystem.
2. Not Meeting Criterias
Perl
This contender actually has a lot of proven history, and surely would do the task at hand. But the Perl stack is rather large. There are smaller options like microperl[1] and miniperl, tinyperl[2], but generally it seems that the recommendation is to look elsewhere than Perl, if targeting a small embedded platform[3]. There is also the more subjective argument, that perl is a bit dated and “unsexy” language with complex syntax.
What speaks in perls favor, is that its inherently very suited for scripting, and have a long pedigree as a more versatile alternative for bash.
Various techniques known from bash is supported, e.g.: HEREDOC
#!/usr/bin/perl $a = 10; $var = <<"EOF"; Multiline text string in a HEREDOC section. Value of a=$a EOF print "$var
";
File handling is also very similar to the shell. To rename a file:
#!/usr/bin/perl rename ("/usr/test/file1.txt", "/usr/test/file2.txt" );
However perl also have some of the annoying features of bash, e.g. like with passing lists to subroutines:
#!/usr/bin/perl sub PrintList{ my @list = @_; print "Given list is @list
"; } $a = 10; @b = (1, 2, 3, 4); PrintList($a, @b); # => Given list is 10 1 2 3 4
Links:
python
Python is an easy learned language and is very versatile. Good shell script libraries and abstractions exists for python[1,2,3,4]. The best might be xonsh[5] which provides a pythonic interactive shell, as wells as easy access to system programs like grep and find etc.
Given its “batteries included” profile, Python is quite heavy in the install size, and thus not fitting well on an embedded system. Only a few alternatives exists for reduced size python implementations. An old (unmaintained, batteries not included) distribution tinypy[6] and eGenix PyRun[7] which packs a python distribution down to about 11 MiB.
Links:
TCL
This script language is in the kind of Perl being very versatile, having lots of libraries but also suffer from large install size and also having a syntax feels a bit outdated and unfriendly. TCL has two functions for calling system commands: open and exec which provides for system calls [1]. It is not a seamless port from bash as the commands have their own special syntax:
exec ls {*}[glob *.tcl]
First impressions of TCL’s pipelining handling is that it is rather cumbersome[2]
The TCL language is very flexible in its dynamic nature and do enable it to extend itself in a lisp like way. Opinions of TCL is many and contradicting3
Jim[4] is a smaller edition of TCL, so the size impact of a TCL installation could be reduced if using that.
A few other languages target the TCL vm. One such is Little[5] which have a nicer abstraction upon the exec call.
Links:
cash
Requires the node.js stack and is not suited for the targeted embedded platform.
Links:
Ammonite
Sits on top of the JVM as is thus not applicate for the targeted embedded platform. Also, the syntax seems clumsy and verbose.
Links:
Elixir
Elixir uses escript to build an binary with Elixir merged in. Then that binary requires the Erlang vm engine to execute. Have not looked into the size of minimal Erlang installation, as the language itself do not fit the intended purpose.
Links:
shcaml
shcaml reminds a lot of scsh. It provides a wide range of user functions, system call wrappers and bash like functionality
Unix shells provide easy access to Unix functionality such as pipes, signals, file descriptor manipulation, and the file system. Shcaml hopes to excel at these same tasks.
With its _UsrBin_[1] module, often used function like ls, ps etc. are available.
The _Fitting_[2] module emulates common shell behaviors. E.g: redirecting to /dev/null can be done
run (command "echo hello" />/ [ stdout />* `Null ]);;
Links:
Julia
Julia has pretty good interop with shell commands built in[1]. But unfortunately its not that a light weight installation.
Links:
Wren
Wren is a very attractive language with great syntax and excellent C/C++ interop. It is written in C and is very portable. Wren can be used both standalone or embedded.
Unfortunately I could not find any evidence of it being able to do system calls. The system module[1] in its core library seems limited to mainly screen printing.
The documentation is also very incomplete. For example the chapter on how to use it embedded in C:
Calling a C function from Wren #
TODO Calling a Wren method from C #
TODO Storing a reference to a Wren object in C #
TODO Storing C data in a Wren object #
TODO
Links:
Dart
Good support for stdout, stderr, stdin and environment[1] The Process.run [2] provides convenient access to system tools.
Process.run('grep', ['-i','main', 'test.dart']).then((result) { stdout.write(result.stdout); stderr.write(result.stderr); });
Dart also has a solution for handling pipes. Albeit this is not as seamless compared to how bash does it, but it seems to work well.
import 'dart:io'; main() async { var output = new File('output.txt').openWrite(); Process process = await Process.start('ls', ['-l']); process.stdout.pipe(output); process.stderr.drain(); print('exit code: ${await process.exitCode}'); }
Dart looks very appealing and have a wide range of good libraries as well. I could not find clear specs on how much space the vm can be shrinked down to, but as the downloadable dart engine is 11 MB is not likely that it can be shrinked enough. The deal-breaker is however a passage, stating that the targeted cpu only have experimental support:
has experimental support ARMv5TE [4]
Links:
duktape
JavaScript is among the hottest languages right now. Several embeddable JavaScript engines exists, but what appears to be the most used in embedded scenarios, is the duktape engine.
It opens up to an alternative strategy of using one of the many JavaScript transpilers to do scripting in an entirely different language – although the level of indirection would probably be to high ;-)
Although the scripting facilities and embedding in C/C++ works well, there is no solid support of standalone system-near scripting.
License: MIT
Links:
3. Shells and Shell Languages
Shell languages are languages that either extend an existing shell (like bash), or implements their own shell and provide an alternative shell scripting language. Common is that this concept does not provide embedding into C/C++.
modernish
modernish is a library written in POSIX compatible shell script, that augments the shell scripting languages with sane and better functions for most functionality.
Links:
powscript
powscript is a language that transpiles to bash. This makes it very portable – in theory. Unfortunately it targets bash-4 only
written/generated for bash >= 4.x, ‘zero’-dependency solution
A lot of features have been added to bash-4, and the busybox shell (ash) does not support many of the new features and syntax additions.
Apart from the non-portable issue for this particular purpose, its a very appealing concept and it boasts some nice features also[1]:
Links:
NGS
NGS is a bash replacement. The project seems primarily focused towards AWS (Amazon) usage by providing interaction on object level. Also focus is on doing scripting in a custom GUI called small-poc1
Links:
oh
Oh is a bash replacement that describes its scripting language as:
a heavily modified dialect of the Scheme programming language, complete with first-class continuations and proper tail recursion.
The documentation1 is in the better end of “home brewed” shells, but is still pretty sparse.
Oh is written in go and have automated tests for a wide range of architectures.
Compared to bash the features are limited in some areas, improved in others2
I cross compiled oh as follows
env CC=/usr/local/arm-2007q3/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc CGO_ENABLED=1 GOARM=5 GOARCH=arm go build -v github.com/michaelmacinnis/oh
The compiled binary is about 2.8 MB. A bit much perhaps, but acceptable.
Unfortunately when executing oh on the destination target, it would endlessly fail with some futex error:
» strace oh... futex(0x2cab4c, FUTEX_WAIT, 0, NULL) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
Links:
elvish
elvis is a bash replacement with some very interesting ideas about scripting. It have, for example, some very nice concepts like named arguments
~> fn square [x]{ * $x $x } ~> square 4 ▶ 16
The project appears to be very young and implementation seems (for now) to be mainly focusing on the interactive shell part.
Documentation is quite sparse. Some information can be found on the atom-feed1 some on the github2 site and other on the main webpage3
It is hard to get a real indication of the maturity of the project. Documentation is sparse, no test suite seems to exist but the main committer appears reasonable active in the last 4-5 years.
I cross compiled elvish as follows
env CC=/usr/local/arm-2007q3/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc CGO_ENABLED=1 GOARM=5 GOARCH=arm go build -v github.com/elves/elvish
The stripped binary weights in at a hefty 4.6 MB.
Being a read-only filesystem, I had to relocated $HOME to a writable directory
arm-target» env HOME=/var/ elvish
Elvish starts just fine, and seems functional. For the cross-compiled edition, only exception is user input which writes every input key at the same line column. This makes it pretty unusable for a shell replacement, but should still allow to be used for scripting purposes.
Links:
oilshell
An interesting project of a total bash replacement with implementation decisions discussed in detailed blog posts by the author. The level of meticulously documentation, testing and benchmarking done by the author is quite impressive.
Not production ready and not sure if the, build with python technology, disqualifies it for small embedded platforms anyway.
The author of oil maintains an excellent list of shells and shell scripting languages1
Links:
murex
murex is a rather young project (first github commit in April 2017).
Murex is a cross-platform shell like Bash but with greater emphasis on writing safe shell scripts and powerful one-liners while maintaining readability.
What murex really gets right is the terseness and expressiveness with few artifacts. Its very much the power of bash, just better and safer.
As with the other go-lang based shells, the readline functionality is not working in the cross-compiled edition.
4. Scheme Languages
A dedicated section is about Schemes. This is because scheme in general fits perfectly regarding the criterias given for the bash replacement. But at the same time, there are many many variants of scheme, all with their own pros and cons.
Chibi
chibi is the unofficial reference R7RS implementation of scheme. It also have attractive features like a ffi generator and a good package manager (snow). Its small in size and handles both scripts and embedding into C/C++ well.
chibi also supports calling subprocesses:
> (import (chibi) (chibi process)) > (system "ls" "/usr/") bin games include lib local sbin share src
The documentation is quite spares, or practically non-existing. This is from the process documentation page:
(execute cmd args)
(execute-returned cmd)
(system cmd. args)
(system? cmd)
This might (?) be enough for a seasoned schemer, but for the intended target of scheme n00bs, this is not good enough.
As an example, I still have to figure out what the difference between execute and system is. Not to mention, figure out how to run the command
> (execute "/usr/bin/whoami" '()) A NULL argv[0] was passed through an exec system call. [1] 21444 abort (core dumped) LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./lib./bin/chibi-scheme
chibi is accompanied with very few examples and unit-tests. Along with the lack of documentation it is not giving a particular good first impressions about the project. Never the less, it does seem to be a very widespread used and praised scheme.
chez
chez was a commercial closed-source scheme until Cisco open-sourced it. Its a R6RS scheme with the optional capability of generating compiled output. The documentation is excellent1
./chez »./bin/petite Petite Chez Scheme Version 9.4 Copyright 1984-2016 Cisco Systems, Inc. > (system "ls") bin lib share 0
Installation size:
./chez » du -chs bin lib/csv9.4/i3le 316K bin 2.1M lib/csv9.4/i3le 2.4M total
A first glance cross-compiling seems a bit “home grown” and being dependent on having target specific description files2. It is unclear if the one existing arm target could be used.
chez can run as an interpreter, but that eliminates some functionality like foreign calls and others3.
Links:
gauche
I’ve been looking into this version of Scheme before. It is very actively maintained and have a substantial amount of useful libraries. It boasts upstart times matching that of bash, which makes it an interesting alternative – especially in cases where rapid script execution is key.
There is no scsh equivalent for gauche, but instead gauche have a subprocess library[1] that makes process calls somewhat easier. An example of a subprocess call with pipes [2]:
(run-process-pipeline '((ls -l) (grep "\\.[ch]$") (wc)) :wait #t)
From comments in a gauche commit[3], it looks like a scsh alike interface is on the wish list
+;; We might adopt scsh-like process forms eventually, but finding an +;; optimal DSL takes time. Meanwhile, this intermediate-level API +;; would cover typical use case... +(define (run-process-pipeline commands
Such a DSL would be a great asset, because there are gotchas with some scheme vs shell syntax collisions. One such is mentioned in the subprocess documentation
Note that -i is read as an imaginary number, so be careful to pass -i as a command-line argument; you should use a string, or write |-i| to make it a symbol.
(run-process '(ls "-i"))
The above is an example of what scsh eliminates.
Looking at the Ubuntu packaging of gauche, its size bloats a bit
» du -shc /usr/bin/gosh /usr/bin/gauche-cesconv /usr/share/gauche-0.9 /usr/lib/gauche-0.9 24K /usr/bin/gosh 4.0K /usr/bin/gauche-cesconv 2.3M /usr/share/gauche-0.9 5.3M /usr/lib/gauche-0.9 7.5M total
A total of 7.7 MB seems quite too much. It is unclear to me if some or more of the share files and libraries can be excluded from a final target installation
Besides… an often reoccurring issue with Gauche is that it won’t compile. This time around:
»./configure --enable-multibyte=utf-8 --enable-tls=none --with-dbm=no --prefix=/usr make[1]: Entering directory '/home/skv/public/src/Gauche-0.9.5/lib' if test -f /usr/share/slib/require.scm && test i686-pc-linux-gnu = i686-pc-linux-gnu ; then \ /usr/bin/gosh -ftest -uslib -E"require 'new-catalog" -Eexit;\ fi gosh: "error": Compile Error: failed to link../src/srfi-13.so dynamically:../src/srfi-13.so: undefined symbol: Scm_MakeExtendedPair "../lib/slib.scm":8:(define-module slib (use srfi-0) (us...
Links:
5. Scripting Languages
squirrel
Squirrel reminds a lot of Lua. It is tailored for embedding into C/C++ programs, but can be used as a standalone scripting language as well.
squirrel’s syntax is similar to C/C++/Java etc… but the language has a very dynamic nature like Python/Lua etc…
Much effort have been put into shrinking the installation size
both compiler and virtual machine fit together in about 7k lines of C++ code and add only around 100kb-150kb the executable size
The system[1] library provides limited functionality like date, getenv and functions to delete and rename files. Otherwise a system function is the only access to system calls. The I/O[2] library provides basic file streaming operations.
mruby
mruby is a lightweight implementation of the Ruby language. It supports a multitude of execution models[1]. It can run as a script, be embedded in C/C++ or, if to not distribute the source code, it can be compiled to a bytecode format.
A lot of extension libraries[2] exists for mruby. In context of this document, one of the more amusing is an extension that allows mruby to execute Lua[3].
Like Lua, mruby only provides the core of a script language. It appears that many expected features, like e.g. convenient file and directory handling, environment manipulation and errno, are provided by community libraries.
While mruby promises ruby compatibility, a blog post from 20144 complains about the heartaches of porting ruby code to mruby.
An example from the blog:
$ ruby -e "p File.join ['a', 'b', 'c']" "a/b/c
vs.
$ mruby -e "p File.join ['a', 'b', 'c']" ["a", "b", "c"]
The target installation process is a bit unconventional – but actually is quite useful for a static embedded environment. During build of mruby all desired extensions and libraries are set in the build configuration, and the ending build will include only what was enabled. An answer on the arduino forum formulates its like this:
Main advantage of mruby over ruby is size, which can be crucial on embedded systems. The sole mruby executable weights 2.2Mb and it is completely self contained, including most of the standard library, plus commodities like RegExp, IO, Socket, File, and the Yun module. The mruby-gems, rather than being loaded and parsed runtime, are precompiled into byte code at build time, and directly statically linked into the executable. Once you have a cross-build system is rather easy to build a custom mruby interpreter with a custom set of gems. Furthermore, mruby-gems can easily mix methods implemented in C or mruby in the same class/module.
Further there is a comment on the C interface:
Finally, mruby C APIs are much more easy than C interfaces for ruby, and I’d say even marginally easier than python and lua interfaces. Which makes really easy to build C executables that embed an mruby interpreter, or to build C extensions to the standard mruby interpreter.
mruby have its own gem variant mgem[5]. Currently its a tool that is based on a manually maintained list of available mruby gems.
To install mgem:
gem install mgem
A main reason for even looking a mruby, is the reputation of the scripster[6] library that runs on ruby. It is an excellent abstraction to make shell commands seem as first class citizens in the ruby language.
mruby does not inherently support require. This means a lot of scripts wont run out of the box (including scripster). An mgem plugin ‘mgem-require’ however exist to provide this functionality. To use this, it is required that the support is compiled in into mruby[7].
The build system of mruby is a NIH’ed non-standard system. Its simple for a default standard build, but gets a bit confusing when it comes to the cross-compiling. The library edition of mruby cross-compiles simply to a static library. But if wanting it as a shared library you are out of luck8. Following the cross-compile guide does not output a cross-compiled instance of the mruby interpreter. Adding the binaries specifically for generation in build_config.rb takes care of that though:
conf.gem "#{root}/mrbgems/mruby-bin-mruby" conf.gem "#{root}/mrbgems/mruby-bin-mirb"
See appendix A for my example of a cross-compile configuration
License: MIT
Links:
scsh
scsh is written in Scheme48 which originates back in 1986, but is still actively updated. Scheme48 is written in PreScheme which is a statically-typed dialect of Scheme.
By own emission, scsh is not suitable for an interactive shell, as many features for this is not implemented yet. However scsh is a very complete and well thought abstraction over the requirements and needs used in scripting and calling system commands.
Scsh spans a wide range of application, from “script” applications usually handled with perl or sh, to more standard systems applications usually written in C
scsh have very extensive system support, e.g. functions for networking, string manipulations, regex, file manipulations and many more exists. Also more specialized features as creating fifos and file locks are supported. scsh provides its own abstraction over system calls and have parted from traditional error handling, and instead opted for an exception based error mechanism.
System call error exceptions contain the Unix errno code reported by the system call. Unlike C, the errno value is a part of the exception packet, it is not accessed through a global variable.
It is clear that the creators of |
transgender.
(well, if you really really really understood utilitarianism, you might be able to say you should take the highest-utility solution, but no one understands utilitarianism that well)
This seems to be true of my patients’ problem too. Unless we can decide whether wanting to go to a fetish club and have sex with people besides your husband is a reasonable request, we can’t solve Adam and Steve’s disagreement. I mean, Steve’s argument about the contract isn’t bad, but if it were something we disagreed with – let’s say some old-timey marriage contract where the woman vowed to always serve and obey her husband, and now she’s a feminist and wants out – we would probably be pretty sympathetic despite the precise wording of what she’d “agreed” on.
III.
I come to the table with personal baggage. I come from a very permissive subculture. I’ve had some very happy open relationships and wanting to be open seems like a reasonable request. I’ve had some friends who are very kinky, and wanting to be kinky seems like a reasonable request too. I’m not personally very good at feeling jealous, so wanting your husband to never go to a club, even if he doesn’t tell you about it, or make you think about it, or even agrees only to do it when you’re away on a business trip in another city – seems a bit odd. Honestly I would be tempted to take Steve aside and ask him whether he’s sure that he couldn’t deal with Adam going to this club, and whether maybe he wants to give it a chance, and whether maybe he just wants what’s best for Adam even if that makes him a little uncomfortable.
But go back two hundred years and ask the people of that culture, and this choice is a no-brainer. Fetish clubs (or the closest 19th century equivalent) are weird, vile, sinful things, and Adam’s desire to go to one is totally beyond the pale. He should never even have made the request. But since he did, we can strongly and clearly tell him that this is morally wrong, that he should apologize to Steve for the trouble he put him in, that he should realize there’s more to life than kinky sex, and that he should want what’s best for Steve even if that means he can’t satisfy his libido quite so much.
If Adam and Steve were in the traditional culture of the 1800s there would be no debate. If they were in some ultra-permissive sexually-open subculture of the 2100s, there would also be no debate. The culture would tell one of them that they were wrong, just like someone who wants to make the other live in a 10 degree frozen house is wrong, that person would grudgingly agree, they would stay together, and that would be that. The problem only comes when they’re in a culture with a lot of different subcultures that haven’t made up their minds yet. Like ours.
We all hear the stories of the economists who start by assuming perfect rationality, and then add in deviations from that assumption when they come to them. I kind of like to start from a liberal assumption of perfect atomic individualism and add in deviations when I encounter them. And, well, this is the latest one I encountered.
Adam and Steve’s individual personalities and situations will help resolve their conflict, but the tiebreaker vote is always going to be cast by the culture around them. Realizing this has made me more open to activists who are trying to change the culture – and, symmetrically, to conservatives who are trying to prevent the culture from being changed. People with unusual sex lives like to say that what they do in the privacy of their own bedroom doesn’t hurt anyone else – neither breaks their nose nor picks their pocket – but the fact is that the partial social acceptance of fetish clubs and of open relationships is what gives Adam a leg to stand on. And some religious conservatives like to talk about how they only want to defend their own right to practice and express their beliefs instead of being forced into the broader cultural revolution all around them, but the fact is that their beliefs are what’s supporting Steve. My sympathies will always be with the atomic individualists who want to come up with some clever Adam-Steve contract that solves their problem on the meta-level as long as all actors are rational, but I am starting to worry the culture warriors have a point here.
UR said that “the sovereign is the one who sets the null hypothesis”. Once you’ve let the culture set a default – going to fetish clubs is a reasonable request, going to fetish clubs is an unreasonable request – then given sufficiently good liberal norms people who want to deviate from the default can absolutely do so, but as soon as a conflict springs up the identity of the default option still matters a lot.
I’m not suggesting a total war of all against all, and there’s always the Archipelago option, but I guess sometimes culture wars do need to be fought beyond the point where you just leave people alone, if only to shift the default in your direction.
Speaking of culture wars, an apology to gay people. I always obfuscate details about my patients to disguise their identities, but I feel particularly bad about making this couple gay because it reinforces the stereotype of gay people as hypersexual and bad at committment. I made them gay anyway, because when I tried to write them hetero, their gender seemed to skew the problem too much to one side or another – for example, when Steve was a woman, he was the poor innocent wife wronged by a horny husband who insisted on thinking with his crotch. I worried that if I made the couple hetero, my readers for one reason or another would bring their own baggage and wouldn’t be able to see it as the difficult and evenly-balanced problem it seemed like when I was in the office with them.
Which itself says something about how our culture sets default hypotheses.This year marks the 50-year anniversary of the popular notion of Asian-Americans as an exceptionally successful bunch. On January 9, 1966, sociology professor William Petersen published the highly influential essay, “Success Story, Japanese-American Style,” in which he proclaimed that Japanese-Americans, rather than being a “problem minority,” had within a short timespan emerged as a “model minority.”
Today, the model minority label is as alive and well as ever, the only difference being that the high praise now extends to every American of Asian descent. By both the political left and right, Asian-Americans are frequently lauded for high educational attainment and household incomes. Implicit in this stereotype is the belief that America would be better off if other ethnic groups tried to emulate those of us who have Asian roots.
Given my Taiwanese origin and Asian-American identity, I should perhaps be flattered by the model minority account and accept it as a compliment. But, in fact, I find it deeply problematic.
By looking at the group as a whole, it is clear that Asian-Americans are actually not the model citizens that we are often portrayed to be. Like any other ethnic group in this country, we do well by some measures and poorly by others, which makes us neither a success story, nor a cause for concern.
Start with income and education. It is well-known that Asian-Americans on average have high incomes, and it is repeatedly pointed out that our median household income exceeds even that of whites. But this statistic does not take into account the basic fact that Asian-Americans live in significantly larger households. Indeed, the Census Bureau reported last year that, in per capita terms, Asian-Americans actually earned less than whites.
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The public debate also tends to overlook the reality that Asian-Americans have less wealth than whites and are, at the same time, more likely to live in poverty. Similarly, those who cite the proportion of Asian-Americans that hold college or advanced degrees usually fail to mention that, nonetheless, Asian-Americans 25 years and older are, in fact, less likely than the average American to have graduated from high school.
Looking beyond earnings and schooling, another indicator of well-being is the proportion of people who have health insurance. By this gauge, too, Asian-Americans lag behind whites. There is also a significant gap in homeownership; during the period 2009-2013, the rate was only 58 percent for Asian-Americans, compared with 70 percent for whites.
In addition, vast numbers of Asian-Americans suffer from poor mental health, have low civic engagement, and lack access to social services and the judicial system—which do not seem like attributes that one would want to ascribe to model citizens.
On many counts, the average Asian-American does worse than the typical African-American or Hispanic person. According to some estimates, young Asian-Americans have a higher suicide rate than both African-Americans and Hispanics, and gambling addiction is a much more widespread problem among Asian-Americans than other ethnic groups. Asian-Americans are, on average, less likely to do volunteer work than African-Americans, and less likely to be proficient in English than Hispanics.
Proponents of the term model minority suggest that others should emulate Asian-Americans because there is supposedly something desirable about the group’s typical behavior and life outcomes. So, what would the United States look like if that were true?
America already has an embarrassingly low voter turnout compared with most wealthy countries. Yet if African-Americans would have had the same low voter turnout as Asian-Americans in the 2012 presidential election, five million fewer African-Americans would have cast their ballots. And in a country where we deeply value military service, it is worth noting that if Hispanics had served to the same lesser extent as Asian-Americans, the number of Hispanic veterans would be only about two-thirds of what it is today.
To sum up, if one looks at statistical averages, Asian-Americans as a whole do better than other ethnic groups on some metrics and do worse on others. Overall, many Asian-Americans are college-educated and have high incomes. But a large number have not graduated from high school and live below the poverty line.
Asian-Americans are often commended for starting businesses, creating jobs, and having a low crime rate—which obviously are great contributions. However, at the same time, a worryingly large proportion of Asian-Americans do not vote, volunteer, or serve in the armed forces. If the Asian-American experience teaches us anything at all, perhaps it is merely the fact that there are trade-offs in life.
It is apparent that Asian-Americans are like any other ethnic group in the United States: diverse and hard to generalize, and faced with stereotypes and discrimination. To use William Petersen’s terminology, we are not a “problem minority.” But neither are we a “model minority.”
Simon Hedlin, a student at Harvard Law School and a contributor to The Economist, is originally from Taiwan. Follow him on Twitter @simonhedlin.The country’s largest wireless provider is seeing a “re-acceleration” of growth as it converts more subscribers to bandwidth-hungry smartphones while pressure from smaller competitors loses steam, the chief executive of Rogers Communications Inc. said Tuesday.
“Clearly, the business has had an inflection, if you want to frame it that way, or stabilized,” Nadir Mohamed, CEO for the Toronto-based telecom and media giant said at an investor conference.
Not long ago, Rogers was seeing steady revenue erosion and customer losses to a host of startup carriers, chief among them Wind Mobile. Double-digit declines in voice revenues — which still account for upwards of 60% of a Rogers cellphone bill — had become routine up until a quarter or so ago as new low-cost responses, like the Chatr service, attempted to keep market share intact at the expense of the top line.
Voice declines continue but have been brought under 10% and are continuing to level off, the executive said. Meanwhile, more users are buying higher bandwidth-consuming devices, many of which tap a new 4G LTE network, priming higher growth of data revenue.
Mr. Mohamed said 65% of Rogers’ subscriber base under multiyear contracts are users of devices like the iPhone, which typically generates twice the revenue of feature phones. The segment has “lots of room to grow,” he said.
Rogers reported a 1% gain in mobile revenues in the third quarter to $1.9-billion, a better performance for the company’s biggest and most important division than was seen in the previous period, when sales were flat.
Total wireless revenues actually declined 1% in the first quarter of the year, which, when combined with the last three months of 2011 may be viewed as the apex of competitive tensions between newcomers like Wind and Mobilicity and established incumbents Rogers, Bell Mobility and Telus Corp.
“It seems like the worst of the pressure is behind” Rogers and the bigger operators, UBS analyst Phillip Huang said. The better outlook at Rogers in recent months has seen the company’s share price rise 24.6% since early June.
Wind, Mobilicity and a third new carrier, Public Mobile, launched separate services to much fanfare between late 2009 and mid-2010. Quebecor cable subsidiary Videotron also launched its own service in Quebec (including Ottawa). All but Quebecor have struggled to hit ambitious operating targets. Wind, for example, has won about 500,000 customers with inexpensive flat-rate data-and-voice plans — a third of the number of subscribers the carrier estimated it would have by the end of 2012.
Analysts have predicted from almost the outset of the group’s entrance into the $19.1-billion mobile market that some form of consolidation or co-operation is essential if any are to remain viable. To date, there’s been minimal cooperation between the new entrants beyond periodic discussions.
Mr. Mohamed, addressing big institutional investors at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York, did say the all-important holiday selling season has so far been “very competitive” between carriers big and small.
An emerging risk for the executive and others atop rival incumbents is a regulatory response to prevent the market from reverting to an environment of declining competitive intensity and unjustifiably higher prices for consumers. It appears Rogers and Telus are shifting tack in response to appease regulators and customers alike.
Rogers recently introduced simplified pricing plans while Telus has axed additional fees which could have become targets of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission during hearings into cellphone contracts, which are scheduled for early next year.
“The consumer is what we need to be focused on,” Mr. Mohamed said. “And if we get that right, the regulation will work for us.”Image caption Only 30 of the channel's staff are currently based outside London
Proposals on whether to move Channel 4 out of London will be considered as part of a government consultation.
Plans to privatise the TV company have been shelved, but where it spends its money is also under review, Culture Secretary Karen Bradley has announced.
She said the government wants "the benefits of this national asset to be spread far and wide, not just in London".
Channel 4 said a "substantial relocation would be highly damaging".
The government carried out an 18-month review of the publicly-owned channel, which has more than 800 staff but fewer than 30 based outside central London.
Ms Bradley will outline the consultation plans at the Nations and Regions Media Conference in Salford on Wednesday.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Karen Bradley will say: 'There is a great deal of talent outside London and too much of it is being overlooked'
Channel 4 is "precious public asset", she will say, but it must "provide a platform for unheard voices and untold stories from right across the United Kingdom".
The consultation will look at whether the company should relocate all or some of its staff outside London, including the possibility of moving its headquarters.
It will also review whether the amount of money spent on productions outside the M25, which is set at 35% of original British commissions, should increase to 50%.
"I am unsympathetic towards those who recoil in horror at the very idea of media jobs being based outside the capital," Ms Bradley will say.
"Or for those who insist that people with ideas in the West Midlands, west country or west Wales must travel to Westminster to get their programmes made."
Too much talent outside London was being overlooked, she will add.
TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp, who fronts the Channel 4 programme Location, Location, Location, said moving the broadcaster would be "idiotic".
Image copyright Kirstie Allsopp
Shadow culture secretary Tom Watson said ruling out privatisation was the "right decision" but it had taken the government "far too long" to reach the decision.
"Moving some or all of Channel 4 outside London is an idea worth considering, but the most important thing is not where it is based but where it makes its programmes, creates jobs and spends money," he added.
Channel 4 welcomed the decision not to privatise the company but said a substantial relocation would hit investment in the creative industries.
A spokesman added: "The most important factor in supporting the nations and regions is where we spend our money rather than where Channel 4 is headquartered."
Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.A few months back I signed up for the C++ grandmaster certification course with the idea that not only would it be educational, it'd be productive and a good resume piece. The Grandmaster Certification course consists of writing a complete, bootstrapped, C++11 compiler (sans optimizer) targeting Linux AMD64 from the ground up, using no 3rd party libraries. This is an interesting feat, as it seems there's no better way to show that you completely understand a programming language than to write a complete, standards-compliant, bootstrapped compiler for that language. I disagree, and despite how wonderfully ambitious this idea is, I'm quitting.
Huge undertaking
I think it goes without saying, but I'll say it. Writing a C++ compiler is a monumentally huge undertaking. The latest publicly available working draft of the C++11 standard is a whopping 1314 pages long. Compare that to the R5RS Scheme standard which, in its entirety, is only 50 pages, including a table of contents, a few title and acknowledgement pages, and an index. I feel that I can say, with some degree of certainty, that the C++ standard is one of the largest programming language compiler specifications ever written.
Toolchain
The course defines the target platform and OS to be a vanilla Ubuntu AMD64 installation, meaning all compilers submitted for grading must compile under GCC 4.7.3 with (more importantly) stdlibc++ 4.7 which doesn't have C++11 regex support. I feel like writing a compiler without some form of regular expressions or pattern matching libraries is like, to borrow a wonderful quote from James Hague's blog, "the equivalent of writing a novel without using the letter 'e'." This wouldn't be so much of an issue if external libraries were allowed, or if we could use clang and libc++, however the former is expressly forbidden and the latter isn't available on the grading server.
'Grandmaster'
What exactly does it mean to be a 'grandmaster' at C++? Is really just knowing the standard back to front with all of its caveats and cobwebs? Is it having a deep understanding of register assignment or aliasing detection algorithms working in the bowels of GCC's code generator? I think this is important knowledge, but it doesn't really have much to do with being a great C++ programmer. F1 drivers are surely aware of how their car works, and what their inputs are translated into when driving. However, to be the F1 world champion, you don't have to understand the dynamics of compression ratios or know the tolerances and bevel angles on the pistons. You just have to understand how to drive fast, and how to make your car go as fast as it can. Maybe some of this very-deep knowledge helps or is interesting, but it changes frequently, and is extremely context-specific. The best thing you can do is adjust your driving inputs, benchmark the results, and repeat.
Results
Given the formidableness of the task at hand, it'd be nice to have something useful to show for your efforts. While the course is centered around building a compiler, course-takers are required to agree that they will not release the source code for their projects, during or after the course. Given that the end result will be a non-optimizing, single-platform, heavily special-cased and restrictive C++ compiler, it's hard to see what makes it worthwhile. If half of all the effort spent towards this course was directed at improving clang's documentation, or writing desperately-needed modern C++ development tools, we might be able to make a difference in the industry, instead of writing a bunch of crappy compilers for the sake of passing a few unit tests and getting a pat on the back that ultimately means nothing.
Update (6/24):
Since there seem to be a few themes that have cropped up in the discussion of this post (stemming from my poor explanation) I thought it'd be good to clarify a few things and state my opinion regarding them.
Regex
I admit to over-stressing the lack of regex when talking about toolchain deficiencies. It happened to be an annoying caveat of using a mac with clang and libc++ for development and gcc with libstdc++ for testing. I was using regex for decomposing literal tokens into their respective components. For example, "1.53e-2_asd" is split into its mantissa "1.53", exponent "-2," and user-defined literal suffix "_asd". Rewriting this without regex was simple, but frankly it's just busy work. I ended up writing what essentially became an incomplete, buggy, slow, verbose regular expression engine because of a deficiency in the grading server toolchain. Indeed, preventing people from having to write code like this is the whole point of having <regex> in the standard library. The point I was trying to make with this was that prohibiting 3rd party libraries is just making things difficult for the sake of being difficult.
Difficulty:
When I first started this course, I knew it would be difficult. In fact, the challenge of it was one of the things that really drove me to it initially. I actually really enjoyed working on it. It wasn't that I couldn't understand the standard's langauge, or that writing a lexer and parser is really difficult at all. The process of writing the initial steps to a front-end were trivial, albeit very precise and detailed. Coupled with writing everything from scratch, including parts of the standard library that libc++ hasn't implemented, it amounted to just busy work for the sake of busy work.
It was also mentioned that while the C++ standard is over 1300 pages, 'only' 400 or so deal with compilation, while the rest specify the standard library. This is absolutely true, however implementing a full standard library is also part of the course.
C++ Competency:
Being able to recite the standard by heart is not necessarily what makes a good C++ programmer, nor is a complete understanding of every dusty corner of the 40 years of backwards-compatibility built into the front-end. If you're using C++ seriously in 2013, you're using it because it compiles to fast, small executables. Therefore it's imperative that you understand how to structure your code such that it's robust, easy to use correctly, and most importantly, as friendly as possible to the optimizer. Given that this course only goes as far as basic code generation, you're missing out on the knowledge you need to be a 'grandmaster' C++ programmer anyway. It's more valuable to know how to structure code so as to avoid inhibiting SSA decomposition than to know all the trigraph sequences and valid unicode ranges by heart.
The point:
The whole point of this post is that there's just a million better things to spend your time on that ultimately give back to the community and progress the industry forward.Are you ready to transform into the best possible version of yourself?
Do you find yourself feeling overworked, fatigued, overwhelmed or stressed?
If so a walk in the woods may be just what you need!
Japanese researchers have found that leaving the civilized world behind for a few hours could be the healthiest thing you do all day.
There is a Japanese practice called shinrin-yoku, which translates as “forest bathing,” that Oprah did an article on. During the practice individuals focus on what they are seeing, hearing and smelling and it helps take their mind off of work or other stresses
When you combine mindfulness with spending time in nature you combine two activities that have restorative properties of their own. A study conducted across 24 forests in Japan found that when people strolled in a wooded area, their levels of the stress hormone cortisol plummeted almost 16 percent more than when they walked in an urban environment. And the effects were quickly apparent: Subjects’ blood pressure showed improvement after about 15 minutes of the practice. But one of the biggest benefits may come from breathing in chemicals called phytoncides, emitted by trees and plants. Women who logged two to four hours in a forest on two consecutive days saw a nearly 40 percent surge in the activity of cancer-fighting white blood cells, according to one study. “Phytoncide exposure reduces stress hormones, indirectly increasing the immune system’s ability to kill tumor cells,” says Tokyo-based researcher Qing Li, MD, PhD, who has studied shinrin-yoku. Even if you don’t live near a forest, studies suggest that just looking at green space—say, the trees outside your office window—helps reduce muscle tension and blood pressure.
Read more: http://www.oprah.com/spirit/shinrin-yoku-health-benefits-of-walking-outside/all#ixzz4r4KumiL2
Here are some of the health benefits of walking outside:
Increase in energy levels A 2013 study published in Diabetes Care found that three 15-minute post-meal walks each day were more effective at regulating blood-sugar levels than was a single 45-minute walk midmorning or in the afternoon.
Increases your mood Just a 10 minute walk can boost your mood for two hours,” says Robert Thayer, Ph.D., the author of Calm Energy: How People Regulate Mood with Food and Exercise
Builds and strengthens memory function According to a 2011 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, elderly subjects who walked for 40 minutes three times a week for a year experienced a 2 percent average increase in size of the hippocampus, the part of the brain that controls memory and emotion.
Protects you from heart disease Any movement that raises your heart rate is great for your cardiovascular system
Read more about health benefits at: https://www.realsimple.com/health/fitness-exercise/benefits-walking#walking-7
Come with me as I walk on some easily accessible trails in Alaska. In the future I would like to film some beautiful hikes in my wondrous state for you all. Let’s get moving!
Thank you for watching(San Diego,CA) – Alpine Beer Company has been allowed to brew some of our beers on a much larger scale at a world class brewery right here in San Diego. Green Flash Brewing will be making three of our beers on draft on a once a month rotation basis. Under our supervision they will first be making “Nelson,” then next month “Duet” and the third month “Hoppy Birthday.” Then we start over again. The first batch of “Nelson” is in the markets we have chosen and is already being distributed. Only available in 1/6 barrel and ½ barrel kegs.
All of our distribution will be handled by four companies in California. For local distribution requests: San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties please contact:
Artisan Ales 396 W Washington Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91103
(626) 798-2537
For the San Francisco Bay area: San Mateo and San Francisco Counties
DBI Beverage San Francisco 245 S. Spruce Street, South San Francisco, CA 94080
(415) 935-2100
For the Sacramento and surrounding area: Sacramento, El Dorado, Placer, Nevada, Yuba, Sutter and Yolo Counties:
DBI Beverage Sacramento 3500 Carlin Drive, West Sacramento, CA 95691
(916) 373-5700
A note to our friends we have been delivering beer to for the past 12 years. It is with a fair amount of sadness that we can no longer bring you our yummy goodness straight from the brewery. The distribution agreements, and in all fairness to the distributors, having them handle deliveries is just the right thing to do. We selected these distributors because of their stellar reputation and ability to respond to your needs. Placing orders through them is easy, numbers listed above. And, if you have an issue you can’t resolve with them please don’t hesitate to contact me for assistance.
Thank you,
Patrick McIlhenneyDamage is evident to a wing of the Cessna, which crash landed in Colehill, not far from Abbeyshrule airfield.
by Eilís Ryan
Air accident investigators are expected to attend at the scene of a light aircraft crash that happened close to Abbeyshrule airfield eariler today.
No-one was injured in the crash, which involved what is believed to be a single-engined Cessna 206 with a number of skydivers on board.
The accident happened at around 1.30 pm, just minutes after the plane had taken off from the airfield in Abbeyshrule.
The plane - believed to be a UK-registered craft - is understood to have suffered engine trouble, but the pilot managed to glide it a safe landing in a field at Colehill, about 3km from Abbeyshrule. The plane suffered some damage in the landing process.
It is understood a number of people were to make charity jumps today in Abbeyshrule, and that there was a film crew present to film their experience.A Website in a Minute Using Dancer, the Effortless Web Framework
While Perl has a few heavy hitters in the web framework world (Catalyst, Jifty, CGI::App), sometimes they can seem like overkill. When writing a light web service or a high-end but not-as-complex website, you might want something smaller and simpler. This is where Dancer comes in.
Dancer is a web framework whose purpose is to let you get a website up and running within a minute, if not sooner. It started as a port of Ruby’s Sinatra but has since took its own path.
Dancer supports Plack/PSGI from an early version and has a built-in scaffolding script to help you get up and running within seconds. It creates deployment scripts for you, includes a guide for deployment situations to help you configure your webserver (whether Perlbal, Apache, Lighttpd or anything else you might care to use) and has a default clean design to help you prototype your website faster.
Dancing
The best way to learn, understand, and fall in love with Dancer is to get on the dance floor:
$ cpan Dancer # or cpanp, or cpanm $ dancer -a MyApp +./MyApp + MyApp/views + MyApp/views/index.tt + MyApp/views/layouts + MyApp/views/layouts/main.tt + MyApp/environments + MyApp/environments/development.yml + MyApp/environments/production.yml + MyApp/config.yml + MyApp/app.psgi + MyApp/MyApp.pm + MyApp/MyApp.pl + MyApp/public + MyApp/public/css + MyApp/public/css/style.css + MyApp/public/css/error.css + MyApp/public/images + MyApp/public/404.html + MyApp/public/dispatch.fcgi + MyApp/public/dispatch.cgi + MyApp/public/500.html
The dancer application creates a views folder, which contains layout and templates. It contains sane defaults you can use to start. It also creates a config.yaml file and an environments folder for environment-specific configurations. MyApp.pm and MyApp.pl are the main application files. MyApp.pl includes a built-in webserver for the development (or even deployment!) of your application. The public folder contains default CSS and images.
This directory tree includes a few other interesting files; these are dispatchers for various backends. The PSGI dispatcher is app.psgi. The CGI and FCGI dispatchers are public/dispatch.cgi and public/dispatch.fcgi, respectively.
Look in MyApp/MyApp.pm. Dancing really is this simple!
package MyApp; use Dancer; get '/' => sub { template 'index'; }; true;
What does this all mean?
Routes
Dancer uses the notion of routes to specify the paths your users might take in your website. All you need in order to write a Dancer application is to define routes. Routes are not only simple, but concise and versatile. They support variables (named matching, wildcard matching), regular expressions and even conditional matching.
Here are a few examples:
get '/' => sub { return 'hello world!'; };
This route defines the root path of the application. If someone reaches http://example.com/, it will match this route.
The word get signifies the HTTP method (GET) for which the path exists. If you use a web form, you need a route for a POST method:
post '/user/add/' => sub { # create a user using the data from the form };
There are a few more methods (del for DELETE, put for PUT). You can also use any to provide a single route for all HTTP methods or for several specific methods:
any ['get', 'post'] => sub { # both post and get will reach here! };
Variables are clean and simple:
get '/user/view/:username/' => sub { my $username = params->{username}; template 'users' => { username => $username }; };
This route matches http://example.com/user/view/variable/, while variable can be of any type.
Of course, you can write a more complex wildcard matching:
get '/download/*.*' => sub { # we extract the wild card matching using splat my ( $file, $ext ) = splat; };
If you feel rambunctious, you can define a regular expression:
get r( '/hello/([\w]+)' ) => sub { my ($name) = splat; };
Note that in these examples, the splat keyword returns the values that the wildcards (the * used in routes) or regular expressions (declared with r() ) match. As a convenience, note also that you do not have to escape the forward slash regex delimiters used in r() ; Dancer escapes them for you.
Multiple Routes
When writing many routes, you might find it easier to separate them to different files according to their prefixes. Dancer provides prefix and load to help you with that.
# in main Dancer application: load 'UserRoutes.pm'; # in UserRoutes.pm: use Dancer ':syntax'; # importing just the syntax to create routes prefix '/user'; get '/view/' => sub {... }; get '/edit/' => sub {... }; get '/delete/' => sub {... };
These will match http://example.com/user/view/, http://example.com/user/edit/ and http://example.com/user/delete/, respectively.
Built for scalability
Dancer has a built-in route caching mechanism, making sure that even when you have a lot of routes, it will be able to serve them at almost the same speed as though you had only a few routes. This means that even if you have 600 routes, you do not have to worry about your application being slow!
Variables
Dancer supports internal variables. Declare them with var, and you can later fetch them inside your routes:
var waiter =>'sawyer'; get '/welcome/' => sub { my $name = vars->{waiter}; return "Hi, I'm $name and I'll be your waiter this evening."; };
Filters
Sometimes you want to be able to specify code to run before any route. KiokuDB, for example, requires you to make a scope whenever you want to work with the database. This is easy to automate with the before filter:
before sub { var scope => $dir->new_scope; };
Another common technique is to verify a session:
before sub { if (!session('user') && request->path_info!~ m{^/login} ) { # Pass the original path requested along to the handler: var requested_path => request->path_info; request->path_info('/login'); } };
Templates
Dancer will return to the user agent whatever you return from a route, just like PSGI does. “Hello, world!” in Dancer is:
get '/' => sub { 'Hello, world!' };
Plain text isn’t always what you want, so Dancer has powerful support for templates. There are various template engines available (Template::Toolkit, Template::Tiny, Tenjin, Text::Haml, and Mason, to name a few). Dancer also provides a default simple template engine called Dancer::Template::Simple. This gives you a simple self-contained template engine at no additional cost!
The template keyword allows you to specify which template to process and which variables to pass to the template:
get '/user/view/:name' => sub { my $name = params->{name}; # Dancer adds.tt automatically, but this is configurable template'show_user' => { name => $name, user => get_user($name), }; };
Dancer automatically supplies you an encompassing layout for your templates, much like Template’s WRAPPER option. This built-in template means you can use the layout with other template engines, such as Template::Tiny.
Dancer accomplishes this by rendering two templates: the one you provided and a (configurable) layout template. The layout template gets the output of rendering your template as a content variable, then embeds that content in the general page layout.
The default templates that come with Dancer demonstrate this point very well. Here’s main.tt, the default layout:
<html><head><!-- some default css --></head> <body> <% content %> </body> </html>
Serializers make RESTing easier
Serializers are a new feature in Dancer (available since version 1.170). They allow automatic serialization for your output in various forms (Data::Dumper, YAML, or JSON) to shorten the amount of code you have to write in your application.
When programming a RESTful service, the JSON serializer cuts down much of your code by automatically serializing your output. This makes your server-side AJAX code much more efficient and less boilerplate code for you to write.
File uploads are fun
File uploads exist since version 1.170. Within a route, write:
# several files my @files = request->upload(); # single file my $file = request->upload(); # then you can do several things with that file $file->copy_to('/my/upload/folder'); my $fh = $file->file_handle; my $content = $file->content; my $filename = $file->filename;
Easy configuration
You can configure everything (logging, session handling, template layout, file locations) in Dancer using the main configuration file (appdir/config.yml). There are configuration files for your specific environment (production and development) and you can provide environment-specific configurations in the corresponding file (appdir/environments/development.yml, for example).
Summary
While Dancer is still evolving, it is already a production-ready simple-yet-powerful web framework lets you get from zero to web in record |
Colo. — Sept. 4, 2014 — NASA’s Alice ultraviolet (UV) spectrograph aboard the European Space Agency’s Rosetta comet orbiter has delivered its first scientific discoveries. Rosetta, in orbit around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, is the first spacecraft to study a comet up close.
As Alice began mapping the comet’s surface last month, it made the first far ultraviolet spectra of a cometary surface. From these data, the Alice team discovered that the comet is unusually dark at ultraviolet wavelengths and that the comet’s surface — so far — shows no large water-ice patches. Alice is also already detecting both hydrogen and oxygen in the comet’s coma, or atmosphere.
“We’re a bit surprised at both just how very unreflective the comet’s surface is, and what little evidence of exposed water-ice it shows,” says Dr. Alan Stern, Alice principal investigator and an associate vice president of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Space Science and Engineering Division.
Developed by SwRI, Alice is probing the origin, composition and workings of the comet, gaining sensitive, high-resolution compositional insights that cannot be obtained by either ground-based or Earth-orbital observations. The ultraviolet wavelengths Alice observes contain unique information about the composition of the comet’s atmosphere and the properties of its surface.
“As the mission progresses, we will continue to search for surface ice patches and ultraviolet color and composition variations across the surface of the comet,” says Dr. Lori Feaga, Alice co-investigator at the University of Maryland.
Alice is one of three instruments funded by NASA flying aboard Rosetta. Alice has more than 1,000 times the data-gathering capability of instruments flown a generation ago, yet it weighs less than 4 kilograms and draws just 4 watts of power. A sister Alice instrument was developed by SwRI and was launched aboard the New Horizons spacecraft to Pluto in January 2006 to study that distant world’s atmosphere. It will reach Pluto in July 2015. SwRI also built and operates Rosetta’s Ion and Electron Spectrograph (IES), another instrument with miniaturized electronic systems. With a mass of 1.04 kilograms, IES achieves sensitivity comparable to instruments weighing five times more.
To reach its comet target, the Rosetta spacecraft executed four gravity assists (three from Earth, one from Mars) and a nearly three-year period of deep space hibernation, waking up in January 2014 in time to prepare for its rendezvous with Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta also carries a lander, Philae, that will drop to the comet’s surface in November 2014, attempting the first-ever direct observations of a comet surface.
Rosetta is an ESA mission with contributions from its member states and NASA. Rosetta’s Philae lander is provided by a consortium led by DLR, MPS, CNES and ASI. Airbus Defense and Space built the Rosetta spacecraft. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) manages the U.S. contribution of the Rosetta mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, under a contract with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). JPL also built the Microwave Instrument for the Rosetta Orbiter and hosts its principal investigator, Dr. Samuel Gulkis. SwRI (San Antonio and Boulder, Colo.) developed the Rosetta orbiter’s Ion and Electron Sensor and Alice instrument and hosts their principal investigators, Dr. James Burch (IES) and Dr. Alan Stern (Alice).
For more information, contact Maria Stothoff, (210) 522-3305, Communications Department, Southwest Research Institute, PO Drawer 28510, San Antonio, TX 78228-0510.In fact, he is privately employed by a marketing company, Cornucopia Consultancy. And for each person he signs on to give to charity, Cornucopia takes a cut - a big cut, up to 95 per cent of the total donation collected in the first year. But the longer a donor stays on, the greater the return to the charity. Cornucopia is the industry leader in what is known as face-to-face fund-raising, and over the past decade has been engaged by many of Australia's best-known overseas aid organisations and charities. The outsourcing of labour is just one way that charities have become more like mainstream business. ''The reality is that 21st century development agencies are not-for-profit, but they are run on business principles,'' says Marc Purcell from the Australian Council for International Development, the body that represents major aid groups in Australia. Cornucopia, aid groups argue, offers a service as specialist fund-raisers that volunteers alone cannot provide. It recruits enthusiastic backpackers on working-holiday visas, or students looking for casual work, and the operations technique is familiar to people who have run across these so-called ''charity muggers'' in streets or shopping centres - convince a person to allow a monthly debit from their bank account each month to fund good works. They don't want spare change; they want to hook people in a lasting relationship. Cornucopia's street marketers are not allowed to collect cash, only credit card or bank details.
They are paid a base wage of $15 to $20 dollars per hour, with those who choose to sacrifice part of their hourly rate and work for commission standing to earn far more. Despite Cornucopia's cut, aid organisations insist this type of fund-raising has delivered them an economic boom. Oxfam Australia executive director Andrew Hewett describes the technique as the ''backbone'' of his organisation's growth. Fund-raising in the foreign aid sector last year raked in over $812 million dollars. ''What we find is most people who join up stay around for at least three to four years, in many instances considerably longer,'' Mr Hewett says. ''It has given us assured income, which means that we are in a much stronger position.'' Over the course of the sector-average four-year pledge, it leaves Cornucopia with a cut of about 24 per cent.
But less clear is the extent donors understand that a large portion of their money actually goes to a private company - and whether charities do enough to disclose the costs, or choose to play on a level of public ignorance to secure fresh contributions. A survey by Choice last year found that four in five Australians had little idea what proportion of their donation actually reached their favoured charity's beneficiaries. Cornucopia director Paul Tavatgis says in a typical deal his company is contracted to go out and harvest pledges. Once a donor is signed up, Cornucopia then passes these details to the charity. Should the donor decide to pull out of the relationship inside the first 100 days, Cornucopia receives no fee and the street marketer forfeits any commission. But if the donor stays on beyond the honeymoon period Cornucopia charges the charity between 80 to 95 per cent of the total pledged for the first year, regardless of when the donor then withdraws. For Oxfam, the relationship with Cornucopia is disclosed in fine print on the sign-up form. Street marketers also have a note stating ''paid collector'' on a badge also displaying the Oxfam logo.
''We've taken what I think is reasonable precaution to ensure people understand they are not volunteers, there is a financial relationship there,'' Mr Hewett says. ''I think there has been an acceptance that we have to go down this road if we are going to find effective ways to involve people in our work.'' Yet disquiet remains. How can a street marketer understand all of the challenges facing one aid group one day, and then a completely different one the next, one collector - who asks not to be identified - asks. ''People are definitely looking at contracts, not causes.'' With DELLARAM JAMALI, HARI RAJPeople often find tantric practice to be very exotic with the elaborate visualizations and different mantras, but eventually get confused and bored when they don’t understand the symbolism behind them.
In this interesting video, Ven. Thubten Chodron of Sravasti Abbey responds to a letter sent to her, which begins with
Being a Westerner, I find some of the Tibetan Buddhist symbolism and visualizations strange.
Ven Chodron responds and explains, in an informative and humorous way, the purpose and meaning of symbolism in tantric Buddhism and why it’s important not to constantly create new visualizations.
Related Posts:
More Thubten Chodron & Sravasti Abbey Videos…
HH Dalai Lama to Confer Kalachakra in Bodhgaya, India 2012
Dalai Lama bestowing the Kalachakra in Washington DC, July 2011
Lama Zopa Rinpoche Teaches on Kalachakra 6 Session Guru Yoga in Washington DC, July 211
Keeping Tantric Commitments After an Initiation
AdvertisementsBody found, deputies hurt, after Oakland blast during eviction
A fire in a residential building on the corner of 14th and Peralta, in West Oakland, on August 11 A fire in a residential building on the corner of 14th and Peralta, in West Oakland, on August 11 Photo: Nathan Weyland Photo: Nathan Weyland Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Body found, deputies hurt, after Oakland blast during eviction 1 / 7 Back to Gallery
A pair of Alameda County sheriff’s deputies were lucky to be alive after their job of serving an eviction notice took a frightening turn at an Oakland home Tuesday.
The deputies were at a rear door of a two-story West Oakland residence, serving the eviction notice around 11 a.m. at a lower unit, when a massive explosion blew out the wall on them and a locksmith, and sparked a fire that ripped through the building, authorities said.
Once firefighters extinguished the blaze at 14th and Peralta streets at about 11:30 a.m., they made the grim discovery of a body inside, officials said. An investigation was under way to determine whether the man died as the result of the fire or perished earlier.
It appears the fire was caused by a natural gas explosion, said Oakland Fire Chief Teresa Deloach Reed. A gas line from the water heater appeared to be disconnected, she added.
The two Alameda County sheriff’s deputies were taken to Highland Hospital with moderate injuries, said Sgt. J.D. Nelson, a spokesman for the office. They were being kept overnight to undergo tests for concussions.
Other residents of the home, which was separated into three units, were not injured, Nelson said.
Video: Explosion at 1411 Peralta in Oakland
Neighbors described the man who died as being in his early 30s and reclusive. Ike Forrest, 68, who rents the upstairs unit with his wife — his son lives in the second downstairs unit — said he was out serving breakfast to the poor when the explosion happened.
“I feel blessed,” he said, standing by the charred wreck of what had been his family’s home for three years.” He said the man who died “knew the landlord was coming to evict him. He knew, and it looks like he wanted to take everyone with him.”
He said the man had “broken a key off in the lock, so they had to drill it out. That might have sparked the explosion.”
His wife, Janice Forrest, said she had smelled gas earlier in the morning and had gotten up to check the stove, but couldn’t find anything wrong.
Hamed Aleaziz and Nanette Asimov are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. E-mail: haleaziz@sfchronicle.com, nasimov@sfchronicle.comStory highlights Jury deliberations began Friday
William Lynn is the highest-ranking cleric to be charged with child endangerment
Also on trial is the Rev. James Brennan, who is accused of the attempted rape of a 14-year-old
Jurors started to deliberate Friday in Philadelphia in the landmark trial of Monsignor William Lynn, the highest-ranking cleric charged with endangering children by allegedly helping cover up sexual abuse.
Lynn, a defendant with another Philadelphia priest, is accused of knowingly allowing dangerous priests to continue in the ministry in roles in which they had access to children.
Also on trial is the Rev. James Brennan, who is accused of the attempted rape of a 14-year-old. Both Brennan and Lynn have pleaded not guilty.
Closing arguments in the case concluded Thursday.
Lynn's defense team argues that the monsignor repeatedly sent word of child sex abuse up the chain of command.
He operated under strict orders from the late Archbishop Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, and never had the power to remove a priest from ministry, the defense team argues.
JUST WATCHED Catholic Church official to stand trial Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Catholic Church official to stand trial 02:39
JUST WATCHED Philly priest sex abuse case cover-up? Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Philly priest sex abuse case cover-up? 02:18
It said Lynn was never formally trained to handle child sex abuse allegations and learned on the job.
"The allegation is that he did nothing, but he didn't do nothing," said Thomas Bergstrom, Lynn's defense attorney
"They want you to convict him for their sins. He held more than a candle to their shame, he put a spotlight on their shame," Bergstrom told jurors.
Lynn donned his clerical garb, surrounded by numerous family members, priest friends and parishioners inside the courtroom.
Lynn is the first high-ranking church figure charged with child endangerment for allegedly shuffling predator priests from parish to parish.
If convicted, he faces up to 21 years in prison.
Now-defrocked priest Edward Avery was due to go on trial with Brennan and Lynn, but he pleaded guilty in March after admitting to sexually assaulting a 10-year-old altar boy during the 1998-1999 school year.
Avery, 69, was sentenced to two-and-a-half to five years in prison.
More than 60 witnesses and alleged victims of clergy abuse have testified since the criminal trial began March 26.
Accusers for Brennan and Avery have claims that fall within the statute of limitations.
Brennan's accuser, now in his 30s, was a former altar boy who cried on the stand weeks earlier as he described the incident. The man, a former Marine, was discharged because of mental health issues.
"He will say anything at all to get what he wants," Brennan's attorney, William Brennan, no relation to the defendant, told jurors about the accuser. "Plug that into your credibility meter."
Brennan was removed from active ministry in 2006 after his accuser first came forward. He admitted in 2008 that he allowed the then-14-year-old to view pornography and sleep in the same bed with him during an overnight visit in 1996, according to testimony given to church investigators.
Brennan did not testify at the trial.
His attorney urged jurors to use their "common sense" once they begin deliberations.
"It's a mistake, it's poor judgment," Brennan told jurors of the sleepover. "I can't believe a jury would destroy this man's life over that."
A 2011 grand jury report led the Philadelphia district attorney's office to criminally charge four Philadelphia priests and a parochial school teacher with raping and assaulting boys in their care, while Lynn was accused of allowing the abusive priests to have access to children.
The trial marks the first time U.S. prosecutors have charged not just the priests who allegedly committed the abuses, but an official -- Lynn -- who stands accused of failing to stop the assaults.
A gag order bars all parties involved in the criminal case from talking to the media.Automobiles, today still use the same principles as demonstrated by the 1897 Benz coupe: two hinges on the leading edge, one for opening and integrated with the body structure.
1897 Benz coupe
This disappearing car door changes everything. By using these kinds of doors you can increase access to the rear seats.
If you look at one car with these specifications there is no way to observe any difference between it and a “normal†car.
The floor and seats remains in exactly the same location. The exterior mirrors stay in position when the door is open.
It can be amazing when you want to open the door in a small parking space.
This uses a unique technology and now you can use it to make your vehicle very special.
Disappearing Car Door
Disappearing Car Door
Disappearing Car Door
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You may be interested in:photo
Another year, and another report naming New York the “Worst State for Doctors.” Time and time again, our state ranks dead last as a place for physicians to practice.
The primary reason for the Empire State’s strained relationship with the medical profession is the staggering cost of medical liability insurance. New York has the highest per capita medical liability payouts in the country. These payouts are 35 times higher, per capita, than they are in the lowest state. Nearly 20 percent of all the medical liability payouts in the U.S. are paid in New York, more than all of the medical liability payouts for the entire Midwest.
These costs drive doctors out of our state and weaken New Yorkers’ access to care. Since 2003, 16 hospitals in New York City have closed. To keep their doors open, some of the state’s remaining hospitals have opted to “go naked,” and not carry any medical liability insurance at all.
While it is tempting to blame the insurers for this cost crisis, many medical liability insurers are operating at a loss. The real culprit for New York’s runaway medical insurance costs is New York’s broken liability laws – laws that are bought and paid for by the state’s powerful trial lawyer special interest lobby.
The trial lawyer’s dominance over state government has created a disturbingly one-sided legal environment. For example, New York has no standards for expert witnesses, leading to “junk science” in the courtroom. Worse, there is no timeline for disclosure of experts, which allows personal injury lawyers to mask the merits of their case prior to trial. If doctors and their counsel do not know if the expert testifying in court is a world-class surgeon or a disbarred hack, they cannot adequately assess the evidence against them. This often leads to quick settlements, and an easy payday for plaintiffs’ lawyers.
Another boon for New York’s trial lawyers at the expense of our medical professionals is the state’s interest on judgments: the rate is currently fixed at an astonishing 9 percent. For doctors and their lawyers, running up 9 percent in interest is a major deterrent to filing an appeal. Whether cases are appealed or settled, resulting costs get passed on to patients.
New York’s spiraling medical insurance costs are not only endured by doctors and patients, they are put on the back of the taxpayer. Each year the state subsidizes the medical liability system with hundreds of millions of dollars in a desperate attempt to keep our doctors practicing here.
Many of the costs incurred by New York’s broken liability system are indirect. With the looming threat of lawsuits, many doctors practice “defensive medicine,” ordering more tests than needed. While these costs are not direct, each unnecessary procedure significantly raises the price of medical care.
But the crisis in our state’s medical liability system is not just an issue of cost and access, it is also an issue that impacts the doctor-patient relationship. New York’s current liability climate is so adversarial that physicians are dissuaded from making any statements of sympathy or apology for fear it will be used against them in court. Such statements are not only humane, but they have shown to reduce the time it takes to resolve medical liability cases. Thirty-six states have passed laws exempting statements of apology as an admission of guilt and liability. Not surprisingly, New York is not one of those states.
If the plaintiffs’ lawyers continue to get their way, lawmakers in Albany may actually make the situation worse, instead of addressing the issues discussed above. At the behest of the trial lawyers lobby, legislators are considering extending the statute of limitations on filing a medical liability claim. Enacting this proposal would undoubtedly lead to more lawsuits and even higher medical liability insurance costs. New York cannot continue to reign in last place; the Legislature needs to reject proposals that force talented medical professionals out of our state and focus on fixing the crisis at hand.
***
Thomas Stebbins is executive director of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York. On Twitter @ThomasStebbins and @LawsuitReformNY.LAS VEGAS — The Celtics are making a deeper plunge into the sports science realm, parting ways with longtime trainer Ed Lacerte, while strength coach Bryan Doo has chosen to move on.
The work the latter began with rookies Jayson Tatum and Ante Zizic will continue to have an effect.
“The team was making some changes and looking at some new and different things, and I think it’s really good that they’re doing that,” Doo said. “But when I looked at what was going to be needed from me, I had to make some decisions. They gave me options, but when I looked at everything, I decided to make a clean break. I’ve got five little kids at home. I don’t want to miss them growing up, and I’ve already missed too many things. My wife’s been a single parent for a long time. And I don’t get to see my parents enough.
“I love the Celtics, and I can’t tell you how much of a dream job this has been. I am so grateful to the team and all the great people I’ve worked with and how they were willing to work with me on this, but then you start thinking about things. This seemed like the right decision.”
Doo also has a private company that he founded, Optimal Fitness, and he may be getting some additional clients. A number of former and current Celtics have already asked if they can still work with him.
According to Doo, the game plan for Tatum and Zizic this offseason has already been set.
“Jayson is special, and not just in the basketball sense,” he said. “And Ante is one of the hardest-working people I’ve met. He will do what it takes to get better.
“He’s a Perk-like hard worker,” he added, referencing Kendrick Perkins.
As what Tatum, the No. 3 overall draft pick, needs to work on, Doo said, “I think strength’s the most important thing for Jayson and just also understanding his body.”
The age-old question with hoop players and weight training is what it will do to their more delicate shooting skills. But Doo dismisses the issue.
“I think people who have touch, have touch,” he said. “It’s not like we’re putting body builder’s muscles on them. We’re just trying to make them stronger. But I think it’s a misnomer that getting stronger gets in the way of touch. People that know how to shoot can shoot whether they lift or not. Steph Curry lifts all the time, and that guy can shoot. No one’s worried about him.”
When it was pointed out that Michael Jordan followed his lifting schedule religiously, even hitting the weight room on game days in the playoffs, Doo nodded.
“So I’m not worried about that,” he said. “For us, it’s more body control and core strength. The nice thing about Jayson for me is that he’s very relaxed. I’m not worried about the basketball stuff. I leave that to the coaches. I just need to get him stronger and teach him how to be stronger in a defensive stance and also just how to move better. He moves well, but we have to teach him how to move better.”
Zizic is a different project, though strength training will also factor into his plan. The 7-footer from Croatia is a willing combatant, but he has to get ready for the speed of the NBA, as well as the much longer schedule.
“With Ante, I talked to one of our scouts and gone through all his programming and what he’s done the last two years,” Doo said. “I wanted to see where he needs to get his breaks and where he needs to go harder.
“It’s a faster game than in Europe. At practices, we’ve talked about the differences, and right now it may be a little overwhelming at times. But he’ll get there. He works extremely hard. He’s hard-nosed, and I think he’s got great work ethic, so he’ll have no problem getting better.”
Added Doo: “I really think the Celtics are in a great position. You’ve got so many guys on that team that are committed to working hard and getting better. Guys like Isaiah (Thomas) and Marcus (Smart) and Al (Horford) and so many others really put in the time in the offseason. I can’t wait to see how good all these guys are going to be this year.
“I’ve been so lucky to work for an organization like the Celtics. I can’t begin to tell you how great it’s been to be with these guys for the last 14 years.”This article is from the archive of our partner.
Imagine having all the downsides of Big Brother and none of the benefits: That's what you get with the Department of Homeland Security's vast network of "fusion" centers, according to a damning new report by the Senate's bipartisan Subcommittee on Investigations.
The fusion centers, described by Janet Napolitano as "one of the centerpieces of our counterterrorism strategy," allegedly invade the privacy of Americans while producing "shoddy" reports that are typically "irrelevant" and "useless." It's the sort of report that will find a home on every Ron Paul fan forum and, according to reporters, with good reason: The 77 centers, which have cost an estimated $289 million to $1.4 billion, have a pretty questionable track record. Here are some of the more surprising elements journalists have dug up from the report:
Invasions of privacy. NBC News investigative reporter Michael Isikoff found some especially embarrassing reports about seemingly pointless surveillance of U.S. Muslims:
One fusion center drafted a report on a list of reading suggestions prepared by a Muslim community group, titled “Ten Book Recommendations for Every Muslim.” The report noted that four of the authors were listed in a terrorism database, but a Homeland Security reviewer in Washington chastised the fusion center, saying, “We cannot report on books and other writings” simply because the authors are in a terrorism database. “The writings themselves are protected by the First Amendment unless you can establish that something in the writing indicates planning or advocates violent or other criminal activity.”
Nothing to show for it. The centers are basically a home base for state, local and federal law enforcement officers to share data and coordinate, but the report found that the centers haven't uncovered a single terrorist threat between April 2009 and April 2010. Meanwhile, a lot was going on in the country, as Wired's Spencer Ackerman notes. "During that time, the FBI discovered would-be New York subway attacker Najibullah Zazi; U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people at Fort Hood; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airplane; and, in early May 2010, Faisal Shahzad attempted to detonate an SUV in Times Square. DHS has praised the fusion centers’ work in helping on the Zazi and Shahzad cases. The Senate found fusion centers played little, if any, role in either case." In the report, an unnamed DHS official says the centers produce “predominantly useless information” that are “a bunch of crap.”At SXSW, AMC previewed the pilot episode of “Halt and Catch Fire,” an upcoming drama about a group of programmers trying to clone the IBM PC in Texas during the early 1980s. We definitely liked what we saw, but the show feels like the slow burn kind of drama that draws you in over the course of a few episodes.
The first season of Halt and Catch Fire will run for 10 episodes beginning with its June 1, 2014 premiere.
With Breaking Bad and Mad Men, AMC has proved that it can make extraordinary TV shows out of unexpected topics. The network is taking another such risk with Halt and Catch Fire by setting it in the so-called Silicon Prairie.
“We thought there was this great opportunity to tell the story you don’t know about computers,” show creators Chris Cantwell and Chris Rogers said during a post-screening panel.
Texas also gives the writers a chance to overlay a Wild West theme onto an origin story for personal computing. If the show’s title strikes you as a bit odd, it’s a reference to a computing command that stops a CPU’s operations, though you can expect that it will take on multiple layers of meaning as the show progresses.
Halt and Catch Fire quickly establishes a compelling dynamic between the two lead characters: Joe MacMillan, a fast-talking sales guy played by Lee Pace (Pushing Daisies) who comes up with the idea to reverse engineer his former employer’s PC, and Gordon Clark, an engineer Scoot McNairy (Argo, 12 Years a Slave) who believes in his own greatness but is held back by alcohol and the demands of his family.
It’s hardly a direct comparison, but there are echoes of the working relationship between Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. As Pace put it, “Joe Macmillan is absolutely aware of Steve Jobs and thinking of what he’s cooking up on the West Coast.”
Wozniak himself hosted Halt and Catch Fire’s post-screening panel at SXSW and praised the show for both its accuracy and production values.
“I give this show a 10 and that’s so rare for me,” he said.
Coming from The Woz, that’s quite the compliment, and AMC is undoubtedly proud to have such a breathless endorsement from one of the PC’s original pioneers. Incidentally, Wozniak added that he only watches two TV shows at the moment, one of which is The Big Bang Theory.
Period pieces have a way of commenting more on the time that we live in than their original settings, and Halt and Catch Fire is no exception. The main thread of the story could just as easily be one from today: a group of hackers with daddy issues disrupt an existing technology monopoly while walking the narrow path between cloning and innovation.
We’re interested to see how the show develops its two main female leads, both of which have technical backgrounds. In researching her role, actress Mackenzie Davis (That Awkward Moment, Breathe In), who plays a confident programmer on the show, found that the role of women coders has regressed from the 1980s until now.
Both of Halt and Catch Fire’s women leads show depth in the first episode, but there were a couple cliche interactions that, for spoilers’ sake, I’ll leave unmentioned. AMC can hardly change history, but we’ll still be watching whether it can handle the topic with more finesse than previous series like Breaking Bad and Mad Men.
The inspiration for the show comes from one of the show’s creators, whose father moved the family down to Dallas to work for a computer company in the 1980s.
“That really stuck with me on an emotional level. That was at the emotional core for me,” Chris Cantwell said.
While the show’s arc is fictional, enough of the real-life participants of the birth of the PC are around that AMC turned to them for help in making the show technically accurate. Geeks will find that the show has a number of easter eggs relating to a number of early computing pioneers like Charles Babbage. The Clark family, for instance, is inspired in part by Gary and Dorothy Kildall.
If anything, Halt and Catch Fire will be too technical for most viewers, but that isn’t any more of a problem than Walter White’s explanations of the complex chemistry behind a P2P cook.
In explaining how the show treats the process of building new technology, showrunner Jonathan Lisco (Southland, K-Ville) noted that “in some ways society becomes the recipient of whatever psychopathology they put into their creations.”
That same principle applies for art and filmmaking. These last 30 years of tumultuous progress have caused our relationship with technology to become a mixture of fear, awe and obsession.
Halt and Catch Fire tries to express the psychopathology of our connected, mobile world by looking back at the genesis of the personal computer movement. One episode isn’t enough to judge by, but my first impression is that, while the show won’t grab us by the throat like Breaking Bad, it will slowly reel us in the way Mad Men did.
Read next: Tencent takes a 15% stake in Chinese online retailer JD.com to take on AlibabaHi lego fans! This is my new lego ideas project : Old Sorcerer Tower. This set is composed of the tower with two floors with the sorcerer lego figures, some of accessories and the base with a natural aspect(trees,etc.). This set is build with exactly 670 lego bricks. The set is based on several pictures I found on Internet.
Which softwares did I used for creating and rendering all my projects?
I use several softwares like LDD, Leocad, LDraw and Mecabricks for creating the lego set. And then I use Blender for rendering my lego project, adding material on lego pieces and creating the background!
The goal of this set is to create a realistic Sorcerer Tower (medieval building), with lego figures, in order to complete a medieval building collection!
Please support my other projects like the Disneyland microscale and the Medieval Christmas Chalet!
Please show your support and share the project with your friends and family! If you like this, please support this project!
Thanks,
CARLIERTIClimate change one of the most serious threats we face, says David Cameron
David Cameron has issued his strongest declaration that climate change is man-made when he said it was one of the most serious threats facing Britain and the rest of the world.
The prime minister, who appeared to be wary in recent weeks of drawing a direct link between the effects of industrialisation and climate change, issued his unequivocal statement after Ed Miliband suggested he was unwilling to take tough action.
Cameron replied: "I believe man-made climate change is one of the most serious threats that this country and this world faces. That is why we have the world's first green investment bank here in Britain.
"That is why, unlike 13 wasted years of Labour, we are building the first nuclear power station for 30 years in our country. That is why we have cut carbon emissions emitted by the government by 14% since we came to office.
"That is why we have set out, year after year, carbon budgets in this country. They talk a good game about it but it actually takes people to come in, govern effectively and deal with it."
Cameron's remarks were immediately welcomed by green Tories, some of whom had feared the government was losing interest in combating climate change. Greg Barker, the climate change minister, tweeted Cameron's remarks and added: "Great to hear PM lauding the coalition's real achievements on climate change at #PMQs #RealGreenDelivery."
Recently, the prime minister privately reassured green Tories he was still committed to tackling climate change after being quoted by a minister as saying he wanted to get rid of the "green crap" on energy bills. But he said the government had to act cautiously as Britain recovers from the downturn.
George Osborne, who was criticised by green Tories in 2011 when he said Britain should not cut its carbon emissions at a faster rate than its EU partners, prepared the ground for the PM's remarks when he said last week he accepted climate change was man-made. But the chancellor told business leaders in Hong Kong it should be tackled in "as cheap a possible way".
Miliband said the PM's remarks were "excellent" but named a number of ministers who had questioned the need to tackle environmental change. The Labour leader quoted the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, as saying: "People get very emotional about this. People should just accept the climate's been changing for centuries."
Miliband quoted the energy minister Michael Fallon answering a question about climate change: "You are not going to draw me on that. I haven't had time to get into the climate change debate."
The Labour leader asked Cameron: "Is he happy to have climate change deniers in his government?"
Cameron said: "The most serious form of denial we have today in Britain's politics is the reality deniers of the party opposite. What is their plan for their deficit? Nothing. What is their plan for welfare reform? Nothing.
"What is their plan for long-term investment because that is what climate change requires? Long-term investment like high-speed rail, long-term investment like nuclear power, long-term investment like fixing our economy. That is what this government is doing. All he does is get up and deliver a lot of hot air."Progress continues on the construction of Jacksonville's next interstate. Here's an update on the project's status.
State Road 9B (SR 9B) is a planned four lane divided highway that will eventually connect Duval and St. Johns County from the I-295 East Beltway to County Road 2209 (St. Johns Parkway).The corridor is divided into three phases. Construction on Phase 1 began in summer 2010 and the $75 million phase opened to traffic in September 2013.
Construction began on Phase 2, from Interstate 95 to US 1/Philips Highway, in April 2013. As a part of this $95 million phase, a massive interchange with Interstate 95 is being constructed. Beam setting over Interstate 95 is currently in progress. Phase 2 is expected to open to traffic in mid 2016.
The last phase of SR 9B will begin west of I-95 and extend approximately 1.5 miles south, where it will connect with County Road 2209 (St. Johns Parkway). Phase 3 is anticipated to cost $79.8 million, construction will begin fall 2015, and it is expected to be completed by Mid 2018.
It is anticipated that the completion of SR 9B will result in a major real estate development boom along the Duval County/St. Johns County border. A brief description of major developments lining up along the SR 9B corridor can be found HERE.
When complete, SR 9B is anticipated to become I-795. I-795 will be Jacksonville's fourth and St. Johns County's second interstate highway.
For more information: http://www.sr9b.com/Pages/Home.aspx
Next Page: Images of the SR 9B construction projectTOMS RIVER, NJ — An employee of the Toms River Regional Schools has accused Superintendent David Healy of sexually harassing her over the course of the last year, and the matter is now under investigation.
Details of the claim are contained in a June 22 letter sent to the Toms River Regional Board of Education, asking the board to investigate the claim, in which the employee says Healy made remarks to her on repeated occasions praising her legs in a way that made her uncomfortable.
Steven R. Cohen, an attorney who represents the Toms River Education Association, the teachers' union in the district, sent the letter |
property. The owner of the land allows hikers to pass through, but accessing the trail requires driving along endless logging roads and paying for access at checkpoints. Claire went alone to check in at our final checkpoint and returned with news that made me a little uneasy.
“He was wrong,” she said, upset.
“Who?” we asked?
“The guy whose blog I got this trip from. He said we go in here,” she said, referring to the map, “but we actually have to go in here.”
Let me pause here to say this: If you’re considering planning your upcoming hike based solely on this blog post, you are an idiot. Look at maps, get a published trail guide. DO NOT TAKE MY VAGUE ESTIMATES AND DESCRIPTIONS AS FACT!
But we were in it now. I would have to trust the ease of following the Appalachian Trail and the shoddy research that Claire had done.
Soon we were parked, out of the car with our packs on and ready to go. Miraculously, the weather forecast was so far proving wrong and the rain was holding off. We were cheerful as we started, moving along the well-worn trail through dense, fairy tale like forest. The weight of my pack felt lighter than I expected, and the cold temperatures kept us comfortable as we moved at a decent pace. It felt like homecoming, being back in the wilderness of the northeast, and with each mile put between us and civilization, the cares of the outside world seemed to fade away.
After six or seven uneventful miles, we came to a campsite straight out of a painting. We had planned to get at least ten miles in that first day, and we still had several hours of daylight left, but Sarah wanted to stay and take advantage of this perfect spot, and it didn’t take much to convince Claire and me.
Watching Claire as we assembled camp, I started to get a more accurate sense of her previous outdoor experience. Now, I don’t claim to be an expert, but I at least know how to assemble a tent, I know that using live plants to start a fire won’t get results, and I know hanging the bear bags directly over the tents isn’t exactly the wisest course of action. I could tell that Claire has a prideful streak and I was worried about coming off as a know-it-all, so I said nothing as she struggled with her tent, and I let Sarah step in to help with the fire. But I wasn’t going to let the bear bags slide.
I freely admit that I can be a bit over-cautious when it comes to keeping bears out of a campsite. Most of my backwoods experience has been in the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks, where regulations of all kinds are strict and strictly enforced, and where bear precautions are taken seriously. In that area, bear canisters are required for all campers. The canisters are bulky, heavy, and awkward, and I’ve heard many people complaining about them. I used to complain about them too until I watched a large black bear try to get into mine for about 20 minutes before getting frustrated and roaming away. I have claw marks on my canister, proving its effectiveness. Because of this, I’ve always been a bit wary of bear bags. I’ve almost always used my canister even in regions where they aren’t required, leading to mocking from many, I assure you. But for this trip, I decided to give in and use a bear bag. Because of the length of the hike, I was eager to shave weight off my pack, and this seemed like the best way to do it. Even though I don’t have much experience hanging them, I knew the general rules: Hang them at least 200 feet from your campsite, at least 12 feet up and 8 feet from the trunk. I had also learned a neat method for hanging them from a very helpful employee at REI in SoHo the week before. His method only required one branch, one person, and a minimal amount of rope. Claire’s method required three trees, three people, and took a little over an hour. But again, I sensed that I’d be stepping on her toes if I tried to suggest a different method, especially since I hadn’t actually done it before. I had already insisted that we not hang them directly over the tents, despite her plea that those were the perfect bear bag trees. We had compromised and decided to hang them about 15 feet from our tents. Her method of hanging them only brought them about 8 feet off the ground, but I figured that we were only 6 miles in, and we could always hike back out in the morning if a bear did get our food. I would just make sure I offered to hang them first thing when we got to camp the next night.
I should mention that, despite Claire’s lack of backpacking expertise, she did have one skill that made up for all of her faults: Camp food. She was an amazing cook who also happened to have a food dehydrator and vacuum sealer. She had prepared a week’s worth of meals for each of us. Instead of my usual boring camp fare of oatmeal for breakfast, peanut butter and jelly for lunch, and Pasta Sides for dinner, I would be eating food like pho, pad Thai, red beans and rice, savory quinoa, and chili cheese grits. It was definitely a welcome change.
So after a long afternoon of setting up camp, we settled in around our warm, inviting fire, relishing in the unexpectedly dry weather, and sharing stories as the forest grew dark around us. Claire, it turned out was a remarkably funny and warm person, and it was great to catch up with Sarah after several years spent living in different states. And there’s something to be said for the camaraderie that develops between girls alone in the wilderness, girls who don’t mind getting muddy and fending for themselves in the woods. If this night was the high point of the trip, I found myself thinking, then it was going to be worth whatever lay ahead.
Day Two
My thoughts were a bit different as I was slowly roused from sleep the next morning by the sound of rain violently lashing against my tent. I decided that if I stayed perfectly silent, the girls in the other tent wouldn’t know I was awake, and they wouldn’t want to get up yet either. I only got about another twenty minutes in my warm, dry tent, before Sarah decided it was time for us all to get up. Despite nearly 15 years of close friendship, despite the fact that she’s seen me through the worst times in my life, and despite the fact that I toasted her at her wedding, I’m still not sure I can forgive her for making me get up that morning. It was going to be a long, wet, miserable day.
It was the kind of cold that not even savory quinoa and coffee could alleviate. We quickly and quietly took down camp and packed our bags with barely a word to one another, trying desperately to keep our gear dry, knowing it was a losing battle.
Day 2 began with the crossing of a large and rickety beaver dam, from which all three of us slipped and got wet up to our knees. Claire’s Vibrams and shorts, which I had up until now been silently mocking as a ridiculous choice for backpacking, proved to be superior in this instance. She would be dry in a mile, while Sarah and I would be suffering in wet boots and socks for at least the rest of the day. At least now we wouldn’t be wasting time by maneuvering around the never-ending mud pit that was now the trail. Already soaked, we didn’t hesitate to just walk right through.
Today’s hike would take us over only one small mountain, Little Boardman, followed by several miles of mercifully flat trail. We were aiming to do about a little over ten miles, which would put us at a lean to right at the base of White Cap, setting us up perfectly for day three. Unfortunately, we only made it about 5 miles before our first river crossing. Though not very wide, the water was incredibly swollen and fast, and there was no way to tell how deep it would be. Not being a very good swimmer, I was tempted to turn back. Sarah and Claire’s determination to push forward kept me from voicing this idea. The first moments of discord between us happened as we discussed the best place to cross. Every time one of them made a suggestion, I began spewing out random facts I had heard about crossing water, trying to dissuade them.
“Let’s cross there,” Sarah would suggest, pointing at the shortest crossing.
“No, it will be shallower where it’s wide.”
“Ok, let’s cross there, where it looks calmer” Claire would say.
“No, the fact that there’s no white water means it’s deeper there,” I’d nervously answer, without offering any suggestions of my own.
Eventually we found a place with a small rope strung across water. It was Claire who realized we could hang our packs from the rope to keep them out of the water, and use them to steady ourselves as we walked them across the river.
Frustrated, impatient, and braver than me, Sarah hung her pack and started to cross without hesitation. Everything looked great for her first few steps. Then she reached the first real current and was pulled in. Now in water up to her chest, she clung to her pack as she struggled to reach the calmer, shallower water. Luckily, those first few feet proved to be the most treacherous, and she made it across without further incident. Claire followed in the same fashion, and then it was my turn.
Now I’m pretty fearless when it comes to most things– I rock climb, I sky dive, I walk through the hood by myself at night—but when it comes to water, I am a complete coward. I hung my pack from the rope and stared at the water, willing myself to take the first step, trying hard not to panic. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of standing at the water’s edge, I stepped off my boulder perch and into the water.
And of course, I immediately fell in.
Regaining my balance and pulling myself back up with my pack (which was now halfway submerged in the water under my weight), I realized how badly I was overdramatizing the situation and finished the crossing.
On the other side, now wet, cold, tired, and a little miserable, we realized we weren’t going to make our goal for the day and decided to stop for the night at the next lean to, half a mile on. It seemed we weren’t the only ones to have this idea.
The lean to site was comparatively quite elaborate, and seemed to have been designed to provide comfort to those who had gotten soaked and discouraged in the river crossing. Clothes lines adorned the site, with an outhouse cleaner than most public bathrooms, several benches surrounding a fire pit, and even a small table. Though we were the first ones to arrive and claim three spots in the lean-to, we were soon joined by many other waterlogged hikers as they dragged themselves into camp.
Because of the time of year we had chosen to do our hike, we happened to be leapfrogging with several Appalachian Trail thru-hikers as they started from the trail’s northern terminus, Mount Katahdin. As I pulled my gear from my soaked pack and assessed the damage (apparently the cheap garbage bags I had waterproofed my sleeping bag and extra clothing with had done absolutely nothing the keep them dry), I listened sympathetically but a little smugly to the other hikers’ river crossing stories. Apparently we were the only ones who had realized what the rope was for. Everyone else had crossed in different places and had far more harrowing crossings with their packs becoming completely submerged. Still, our brilliant crossing hadn’t saved much of our gear, and nearly all of my clothing, including all of my socks but one pair, were completely soaked. There wouldn’t be much chance to dry it out, either, since the rain had made starting a sustainable fire nearly impossible, and it was too cold to dry anything on a line.
Close to dark, as we all huddled next to our smoldering fire, some hikers stumbled into camp from the other direction. We told them about the river crossing they would have to face the next morning and asked them about the trail they had come from. With some trepidation, I asked if there would be any other major river fording on our trail.
It was from these hikers that we first learned of the current state of the west branch of the Pleasant River. It was completely impassable, they said. They had tried, but the water was up to their chests before they were even a quarter of the way across. They had taken a detour that had added over ten miles onto their hike. Claire had said that our second car was parked immediately on the other side of that river. We were due to reach it in two days, and if the water didn’t recede by then (unlikely given the amount of rain we were getting) we would have to find another way around.
Packed into an overcrowded lean-to that night, I fell asleep to thoughts of being swept away by a raging river current, only meters from the car that would have been our salvation.
Day Three
Day 3 again dawned wet and cold. This was going to be our longest day, hiking at least 11 miles over four mountains through the cold and rain, with heavy packs and boots and clothing that were already soaked through. Having decided to save my one remaining pair of dry socks for the night, reluctantly in the early morning cold, I put my feet into freezing, wet wool socks and pulled my heavy pack back onto my sore back. It was one of those moments when I truly question why I do this; why do I choose to put myself into these situations where there is very little positive to counteract the misery I’m facing. Could the good moments really be worth all of this? Would I truly rather be here than home in my warm apartment, enjoying a lazy morning, reading a good book over a delicious breakfast? But there were miles to hike and mountains to climb and I was left with little time to wonder about my chosen recreational pursuits.
I’m hardly a world class hiker, but I’ve hiked some fairly serious peaks. I spent a summer in Colorado, bagging as many fourteeners as I could, climbing the formidable Longs Peaks twice in four days; I’ve nearly finished hiking all of the Adirondacks’ 46 high peaks; I’ve hiked Katahdin in a morning hardly breaking a sweat and done most of the larger peaks in the southeast; I’ve pushed myself to my limits up mountains that most people simply couldn’t conquer, and I’m not exactly a novice hiker. But let me tell you, the stone stairway going up White Cap was a bitch.
There was a long moment, as I forced my tired body up step after endless step, where I truly wondered if I had died, and this was my hell. Every time I came around a switchback, hoping that the stairs would end as I rounded the curve, but seeing that they only went up, up, up, I wondered if I was doomed to spend all eternity rising up this never-ending peak. If there had only been some variety in the terrain, maybe it wouldn’t have seemed so hellish, but there was nothing to break the endless motion, nothing to rest those same tired muscles from lifting my body weight plus my 35 pound pack from rock to unforgiving rock, over and over and over again.
From the ceaseless ascension, I had grown incredibly hot and had progressively stripped down until I was in nothing but a drenched and sweaty tank top and rolled up pants. When I finally, finally broke tree line the temperature immediately dropped what felt like at least 30 degrees. Within moments, I was painfully, dangerously cold. I came across Sarah sitting on a rock eating lunch, with the summit still looming over us. Claire was sitting about 50 feet up the peak.
“Sorry, I had to stop and eat,” she told me as pulled on layer after layer, thankful for the heavy winter coat and gloves I had decided to bring at the last minute. I couldn’t tell if the gloves were still wet or just cold from hanging on the outside of my pack, but I put one on anyway, handing the other to Sarah. I had a moment of sympathy for Claire as I thought about how grossly underprepared she was—she had only brought one pair of shorts, no pants, a rain jacket and, at the last moment, a thin fleece that we had insisted she take. She didn’t even have socks, with the wet material of her Vibrams keeping no heat in her feet. If I was so painfully cold bundled up in my winter gear, she must have been in a different world completely. It was with this thought that I quickly scarfed down a granola bar and pushed on. If we didn’t get her off this peak soon, she might be more than just uncomfortable. I wondered to myself if she knew how much danger she was in.
We crossed the beautiful summit one by one, barely within shouting distance of one another, too cold to stop. I dug my camera from my pack and snapped some pictures without stopping. There was no cheerful celebration and no rest to reflect on the beauty of the view we had worked so hard for. There was no moment to prove wrong all my thoughts from that morning about how miserable backpacking really is.
It was a miserable morning, but as soon as we crossed back under the tree line, our spirits began to improve. With every foot of elevation we lost, our group became a little more giddy. White Cap was undoubtedly the most difficult of the peaks we would summit, so the hardest part of our hike was over. Each of the next three mountains was smaller than the last, and we moved over them quickly and happily. We reached camp only half an hour behind the last group to leave before us that morning, thoroughly and good naturedly shaming them for being slower hikers than us, a group of small girls. With no room left in the lean-to, we pitched our tents, made a delicious dinner, and hung our bear bags (I was too tired to protest and they were hung directly over my tent).
At some point, Claire wandered off to talk to some of the other campers. She returned a little while later with some bad news. Though she had told us we were only four miles from the car, she now said we were actually 12, not including the possible detour we would need to take to bypass the river crossing. I asked to look at the map and she impatiently handed it over. Every time I had asked to look at it, she had taken it as me questioning her navigation skills. I asked her to explain where we were going, since it looked to me like we were only about 4 miles from where the car was parked. Annoyed, she pointed to an area off of the map, several uncountable miles from where she had marked the trail head. When I asked her to explain why the car had suddenly moved, she insisted that it was where we had been heading all along, this despite the fact that she had actually labeled on the map where she had originally said we were parked. I was nervous, but dropped it since she insisted she knew where we were going. I handed the map back, unaware that this would be the last time she’d actually let me see it. I tried to ignore the sense of dread that was settling in around me as I crawled into my tent to sleep. Warm in my abundance of layers, but aware of the dropping temperature, I thought about offering Claire the extra fleece I was using as a pillow. But I convinced myself it was her own fault that she was so underprepared, and hoped that karma wouldn’t catch up with me and punish me for my selfishness. Unfortunately, I think it did.
Day Four
I awoke the next morning to overhear a terrible conversation as it unfolded in Sarah and Claire’s tent.
“Sarah, where are your car keys?” I heard Claire ask, panicked.
“Oh shit,” was Sarah’s only response. It was enough to know we were screwed.
Sarah’s car was parked at the end of the trail, but she had left her keys locked in the glove compartment of Claire’s car, which was parked over 25 miles back along the trail. The keyless car was parked on a logging road 15 miles from the nearest paved road, at least an hour’s drive from any cell phone signal. We were stranded.
Somehow, miraculously, Claire turned on her phone to discover we were at one of the few areas of trail in the Hundred Mile Wilderness where she would get a signal. First she called her still sleeping husband, struggling to explain the situation to him through a broken signal. We were a two and a half hour drive from his house, and he would have to drive there, pick us up, and bring us another hour to our other car, before driving another three and a half hours back. And he would have to miss work. He wasn’t pleased.
We tried calling some of the people who make a living driving Appalachian Trail thru-hikers into town, but they wanted way more money than we could afford. Grudgingly, Claire’s husband agreed to pick us up. We told him to meet us at six, thinking we’d be there well before that but it was better to make our idiotic selves wait than him.
It was as we were packing up camp that a solo thru-hiker we had been sharing campsites with came to us with a problem. A shy kid, about 18 years old, he’d barely said a word to us that week, but now he explained that he had nearly run out of food two days before. He’d been giving what he had left to his dog, and he needed a ride to town to replenish his supply. We told him our unfortunate situation, but that we’d be happy to help him once we figured our own mess out, and he agreed to hike with us. After forcing some of our extra food on him, still not sure how many miles we had left of our hike, we started our uncertain day.
The thru-hiker’s dog, Finn, was an incredibly obedient trail dog. Though he was hiking without a leash and running ahead, he always came when called, and continually circled back when he got too far away from us. That’s why, when about two miles into our day, Finn yelped painfully, fell silent, and refused to come when called, we knew something was seriously wrong. Finn’s owner immediately and somewhat stupidly ran into the forest, calling his name in panicked desperation. With images of a violent bear tearing the dog apart, I drew my knife and went looking, somewhat more cautiously, in another direction. Ten minutes into the search, with still not a sound from Finn, I began to think of how we were ever going to convince this boy to leave his dead dog on the trail when we finally did find him. There was no way the dog was going to be ok.
So, nearly half an hour later, when I heard him shout, “Finn!” and then “You stupid, stupid dog!” I felt more relief than I can possibly explain. I rushed back to Sarah and Claire on the trail to find Finn and his owner emerge from the woods. Apparently he had found Finn sitting calmly in the woods like nothing was wrong. We talked for a while, throwing around ideas of what could have happened, but nothing really made sense. Had he fallen down a ravine and had to spend that time fighting his way back up? Had he maybe met a violent but small animal, fought with it, and won?
With Finn now on his leash, we eventually moved on, coming to a fork in the trail about a mile later. The AT continued straight, and another trail branched off to the right. This was the trail Claire said we needed to take to bypass the river and reach the car. In my memory of the bad, photocopied, road atlas map, it didn’t make sense, but Claire assured me it did. Our thru-hiker tagalong decided that he was going to forge ahead on the AT and try to make it to town on foot. I think he knew how bad of a mistake we were about to make. We gave him as much food as we thought we could spare and said goodbye. As we pulled our packs on and readied to take to side trail that would take us off the map, I asked Claire if she was 100% sure that this would get us back to the car. I really didn’t like leaving the well-worn, populated Appalachian Trail for this unknown, poorly marked one. But she promised it would get us there, and I took her word for it.
After roughly seven miles of difficult trail and a few more miserable water crossings, we reached another junction. The trail was intersecting again with the AT. The sign informed us that, had we stayed on the AT, it would have only taken ¾ of a mile to get to this point. We had gone on a pointless seven mile loop.
We were on our fourth day in the woods, ten miles in today alone, cold and wet, with no idea where the car was parked, but Claire still wouldn’t admit that she didn’t know where we were going.
“Claire,” I said several times, “You don’t know where the car is, and that’s ok. It was an innocent mistake. But we need you to admit it so we can sit down and figure out what we’re going to do together.” But she still insisted we were headed the right way.
It’s an incredibly frustrating thing to know where you are on a map, but not know where you’re supposed to be headed. No amount of skills in navigation can help you if you don’t know where you’re going.
Claire started walking far ahead of Sarah and me, not stopping at junctions, and not giving us a chance to stop and talk about a plan. We passed a junction that said a side trail would lead to a road in two miles. I suggested that we take that trail and flag someone down, and Sarah agreed. Despite my exhausted body, I dropped my pack and ran to catch up with Claire, bringing my idea to her. She refused, screaming at me, telling me we could go if we wanted, but she was going back to the car. Sarah and I decided we should stick together.
After a few more miles, we finally ran into some day hikers with a better map. Claire had been talking to them for a while before we caught up, and had apparently figured out where we needed to go from them. She rushed us on before we could verify what she said. Apparently the river where our car may or may not have been parked was still so flooded that a woman had been swept away trying to cross. The day hikers had been expressly forbidden to park at that trail head and attempt a crossing. But looking at their map, Claire had figured out another way to go. She didn’t give us time to protest.
A few miles later, we left the trail again, Claire still not even pausing to explain her plan. We crossed a body of water and came out onto a gravel logging road. With memories of a Dual Survival episode that stressed how unending and untraveled logging roads are, and how easy it is to become stranded on them, I quickly quashed Sarah’s rejoicing that we had found civilization and again ran to catch up with Claire, this time suggesting that we head back to the AT and find help. I was again greeted with angry insistence that she knew where we were.
“We’re 4 miles from the place that I camp every year. I’ll have a cell signal at the top of a hill in about 3 miles, and I’ll call my husband and tell him to pick us up there instead.”
There was not a single part of me that believed she could possibly know where this strange little logging road that started in a river went. But we couldn’t leave her. I figured we’d follow her for a few more miles, finally get her to admit we were lost, turn around, and at least get back onto the useless map. I was so angry that she had put us in this situation. Over the years I had read so many stories of idiot hikers who didn’t know what they were doing, got lost in the woods, and had to be rescued. As a tiny woman, I’ve struggled so much to prove myself outdoors in the face of those who have underestimated me. I’ve tried so hard not to be the helpless girl in the woods. But here I was, on the verge of needing a rescue because we were three idiot girls too stupid to plan our trip properly.
But I kept putting one pained foot in front of another, taking stock mentally of the supplies we had left, and planning how best to make them last if we were stuck for a few more days. I discovered that I was the only one who had retained some of my food when we gave our leftovers to Finn and his boy. Even then, I had been thinking that we might have to spend another night in the woods. I would have to share the little I had left.
We did eventually come to a hill, and Claire actually did get a signal there. She tried to call her husband, but he had already left to pick us up at our car, and his phone had no signal. I pictured him sitting there in his car, annoyed that he had had to sacrifice his day for us, stewing in his anger. Then, as the sun would set, he’d start to worry. And then what? Would he try to look for us? Would he get them to send out a rescue party? Would anyone ever figure out where we had left the trail?
Claire called the checkpoint and explained our situation. The woman at the checkpoint was alone and couldn’t do anything to help. Claire told her that, if her husband came back through, to “tell him to pick us up where we usually camp.” That was all the information she gave the woman. I still wasn’t convinced that we were anywhere near where Claire thought we were, especially since she couldn’t explain it in any more detail than that, but I was relieved that at least someone knew we were off the trail.
Mile after mile we plodded on, until finally, unbelievably, miraculously, we came to a camp site. She had, at some point, actually figured out where we were. She still didn’t know where the car was, but she had brought us to a place that she knew. But the relief was short lived. Now what? We were at a backwoods campsite on a random logging road. We still were nowhere near where we needed to be.
This was when Claire started to show how guilty she felt for how far astray she had led us.
“You guys wait here,” she said. “I’m not going to make you walk any more on my account. I’ll walk to the road and hope I can find someone to drive me to my husband.”
“How much farther is the road?” I asked.
Seven miles. And then her husband would be parked an unknown distance away from there. It was getting late, and it was incredibly unlikely that anyone would pass her on that road once she finally reached it. It was a bad idea.
I told her that we weren’t separating. That’s rule number one when you’re lost, I explained. She said she was going no matter what. Sarah said she wasn’t going to walk anymore and she was staying, no matter what. I’m not proud of the decision I made, but my body was shutting down. I had run out of water hours ago, and there was a stream right there I could pump from. I hadn’t eaten since our rushed breakfast that morning. I decided to stay with Sarah and let Claire continue on her own. I regretted that decision the moment I made it.
Sarah and I sat at the campsite, eating a little, trying not to talk about what Claire would do if she got stuck out at night. We would be fine. We had food and tents and water and warm clothes. We had each other. She had none of that.
I was on the verge of making the decision to go after her when, unbelievably, Claire and her husband came barreling down the road in his truck. We were going home.
Apparently, the woman at the checkpoint had sent the next hiker who checked in down to let him know where we were. He had found Claire sobbing on the side of the road, clutching her knife to her chest, convinced she was being stalked by a hungry bear. He had saved the day.
We gratefully climbed into the truck, relishing in the manufactured heat, so relieved to be back in this familiar trapping of modern society. We had only been gone four days, but it felt like weeks and weeks. All animosity forgotten, we immediately started talking about all the food we were going to eat when we got back. It was an unspoken agreement between the three of us that we wouldn’t talk about her getting us lost, and she wouldn’t blame us for letting her go on alone. We were safe now. That’s all that mattered.
We even somehow managed to laugh when Claire returned from thanking the woman at the checkpoint for sending someone to her husband and told us what she had said about the uncrossable river.
“Oh that was two tree days ago honey,” she had said in her thick Maine accent. “You coulda crossed it fine today.”
And you know, it wasn’t a stunning mountain vista, it wasn’t a peaceful, warm evening spent camping by a lake, but sitting in that truck, laughing about our miserable hike, was enough to remind me why I chose to do this, why this is how I spend my life. It’s the challenge that makes it worth it. It’s meeting obstacle after obstacle and overcoming them, one by one. Hiking is not what I do, it’s who I am. And even if every trip was as miserable as this one, I would still keep going; I would still keep hiking, putting one tired foot in front of the other, for all of my days.The Economist Intelligence Unit ranked victory for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at 12 on an index where the current top threat is a Chinese economic "hard landing" rated 20 (AFP Photo/Jim Watson)
Most talk about President-elect Donald Trump’s technology policies — or “the cyber,” as he calls them — has revolved around his takes on Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee.
However, there’s another key aspect of Trump tech policy that shouldn’t be overlooked: Net neutrality.
After being appointed as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission by President Obama, Tom Wheeler enacted a set of reforms to United States telecommunications policy that reclassified internet service providers as common carriers, thus allowing him to implement network neutrality restrictions on their activities.
What is net neutrality? It’s basically the principle that all data sent across the web should be delivered on a first-come, first-serve basis.
That means, for instance, that if you’re streaming Netflix and your neighbor is streaming Hulu, there should be no difference in how your local ISP treats video from each service. Presuming that both services are up and running properly, data from Netflix should be sent to your house at the same speed at data from Hulu gets sent to your neighbor’s house.
This is important because it creates a level competitive playing field for businesses on the web. With net neutrality, Comcast isn’t allowed to cut a deal with Netflix to ensure that its videos take priority over Hulu videos during peak traffic hours, which means both services will be treated equally.
ISPs have traditionally opposed this rule because they want to make tiered services in which big-name companies can pay them extra money in exchange for preferential treatment for their data. Major tech companies including Amazon, Netflix and Google have traditionally supported net neutrality, because they don’t want ISPs to be given the power to charge needless tolls to access their customers.
Trump’s incoming administration plans to undo the Obama FCC’s net neutrality restrictions — in fact, Republican commissioner Ajit Pai has even crowed that net neutrality’s days are “numbered” with Trump in charge.
If this happens, ISPs will try to offer established players special high-speed tiers that will help them maintain a permanent advantage over rivals — thus harming any upstart company that doesn’t yet have the deep pockets to pay ISP tolls.
This may not be the only way that the Trump administration will make your service suck even worse, either. By the looks of things, telecom lobbyists are already buttering up the administration to approve massive mergers such as AT&T and Time Warner, as well as Sprint and T-Mobile.
Sprint parent company SoftBank’s Trump-boosting post-election announcement about investing in the United States was widely seen as a bid to get on the president-elect’s good side to make him see a prospective merger with T-Mobile more favorably.
And despite his stated opposition to the proposed AT&T-Time Warner merger on the campaign trail, he’s already appointed Joshua Wright — a longtime proponent of massive corporate mergers — as a key antitrust adviser.
This is important because ISPs would have trouble definitively breaking net neutrality if there were a competitive landscape for internet services. At the moment, competition for high-speed internet in the United States is very weak, and any further mergers will only make it weaker.
The Obama FCC killed potentially disastrous mergers between AT&T and T-Mobile, and between Comcast and Time Warner Cable. If a Trump administration signs off on those mergers with meager promises of “job creation” that Trump can boast about on his Twitter account, the internet in the United States worse off than ever before.Q: What are the hours, days and times of construction activities?
A: Monday through Friday, each night from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. Some on/off-ramp and connector closures start and end later (up to 2 p.m. on Saturdays).
Q: Will Caltrans close consecutive on and off-ramps at the same time?
A: Typically, no consecutive ramps will be closed simultaneously, but consecutive closures may be needed under extenuating circumstances for worker safety.
Q: Will all the ramps be closed at the same time?
A: No. Not all ramps are closed at the same time. The contractor requests closures ahead of time in case certain ramps need to be closed to bring in construction equipment, or for emergencies. At least one lane will be open at all times in both directions. Our traffic management center updates closures regularly on the Caltrans QuickMap when crews call in to open or close a ramp.
Q: Why are certain on/off-ramps closed long-term?
A: The long-term ramp closures are needed to repave the roads across the ramps and repair guard rails.
Q: How many days are certain on/off-ramps closed long-term?
A: 45 days, but the on/off-ramp could reopen in as soon as 30 days.
Q: Will detour and closure signs be posted?
A: Yes. Since the start of construction in April 2015, extended closure signs have been posted at the start and end of the construction zone. Signs alerting drivers that there may be temporarily closures are also at every ramp in the construction zone. Message signs with detour and closure information will be posted at various locations around the construction zone during construction hours.
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ings
Feel free to email the sound files as attachments to anyone you know who lives in a sighting area. Ask them if they have heard any of these sounds before. If they have, please ask them to let us know through the BFRO's sighting report form (click here)
Northwest 911 Call
Download the Northwest 911 Recording (MP3 format; 670KB)
(or right-click on the link and save the file)
This sound file contains excerpts from an authentic 911 call from the Pacific Northwest. The incident happened on the Kitsap Peninsula, Washington State, in the 1990's (not the 1970's).
The sheriffs did show up eventually, but the figure was gone at that point--it didn't stick around for long.
The dispatcher's protocol was to verify man's name and address in the beginning. She does that in the unedited, original version of the 911 call. The original version also has some pauses where only the dispatcher's typing is heard.
In order to make the sound clip as compact as possible, everything extraneous has been removed. The clip only contains the parts of the conversation related to the appearance and behavior of the figure outside. All other dialogue is either irrelevant or personal.
This recording, and several others from the field, were collected over the past four decades by Ron Morehead (California) and Al Berry (California). Their collections of recordings are available on CD We highly recommend them.
The 911 call is available on the Sierra Sounds, Bigfoot Recordings, Volume 2 CD. The CD contains the 911 call along with other historically important clips from Berry-Morehead Expeditions in the 1970's.
Moaning Howls ("Ohio Howls")
Moaning howls are thought to be made by large, male sasquatches.
Click here for the 1994 Ohio Howl This was the first recording ever obtained of a long moaning howl vocalization. It was recorded in Columbiana County, in the hills above Wellsville. These moaning siren-like howls can be heard on occassion late at night in the Fall, echoing off hills on both sides the Ohio River. West Virginia is on the other side of the river.
This was the first recording ever obtained of a long moaning howl vocalization. It was recorded in Columbiana County, in the hills above Wellsville. These moaning siren-like howls can be heard on occassion late at night in the Fall, echoing off hills on both sides the Ohio River. West Virginia is on the other side of the river. The 2004 Mississippi Howl clip
clip A Shorter Segment (MP3 format; 239KB)
The Full Recording (MP3 format; 387KB)
Warning: The recording is soft--you will likely need to turn up your volume quite a bit to hear it well.
Moaning howls are thought to be made by large, male sasquatches.
The Mississippi Howl is the second recording of this type. It was recorded by BFRO Investigator John Callender (an airline pilot from Seattle) in a forested part of Mississippi in December 2004, near a large military reserve. The rural area where the recording was made has had many sightings by local residents.
Whoops and Knocks
The sound file contains a string of sound clips from the Berry-Morehead Expeditions in the 1970's. You may recall the old "In Search Of.." episode about Al Berry and these recordings.
This clip, along with others from a remote section of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, is available on the Sierra Sounds, Bigfoot Recordings CDs, available at www.bigfootsounds.com.
Interaction Vocalizations (aka "Samurai Chatter")
A growing number of people in the BFRO have heard sounds similar to what you hear in the recording below.
This recording was obtained in a remote part of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. Ron Moorehead can be heard in the foreground shouting out to immitate one of the animals. He tries to encourage the animal to continue making sounds.
Class B Incident in Michaux State Forest, Pennsylvania, early November 2005
Download the Michaux Class B incident recording (MP3 format; approx. 3 Megabytes)
(or right-click on the link and save the file)
This is a walkie-talkie exchange during a Class B (compromised visibility) encounter on a BFRO expedition. It was recorded by documentary filmmaker Chris Noel during the 2005 expedition in Michaux State Forest, Pennsylvania. The woman speaking is Lorrie G. - a sheriff deputy from New Jersey.
Lorrie is a keen observer of bodies in motion. Lorrie's day job is transporting felons to courts, and walking unarmed through holding pens of unrestrained jail inmates. She has also worked with surveillance teams for the sheriffs department.
After the incident Lorrie described the figure she observed in greater detail. It was upright and very large. She could see the shape of its head, its shoulder, and clearly observed its large swinging arms as it walked up the road toward her. She watched one figure, but insisted there was more than one nearby.
Not long after the end of the recording the figures departed and didn't return.
During the incident Lorrie is encouraged to "try to talk to it". This should not be misinterpreted to mean she should try have a conversation with one. Rather, it is a short-hand way of signaling her to do certain things, involving voice and gestures, that had been explained to her earlier in the trip. There are several purposes for these actions. One purpose is to encourage the animals to approach closer. Other animals, such a bear, cougars, deer, etc., tend to move away when people approach them and make these kinds of sounds. Sasquatches respond differently.
The act of gesturing and speaking in their direction sometimes provokes "Samurai Chatter" -- the speech-like vocalizations that are occassionally heard when these animals are nearby. It's a rare priviledge, and an intense experience, to hear this class of vocalizations in person (refer to the interaction vocalizations clip). It's also a key scientific observation. Provoking this special class of vocalizations is one priority of every BFRO expedition.
The suggestion of speech-like vocalizations will seem outlandish to some. Speech, as we know it, is something that humans assumed was unique to humans. One of the important things this species (genus?) will demonstrate, is that "human-like" speech is an ability that can arise when an ape species evolves to walk upright (i.e. becomes "bipedal" (pronouced "by-PEH-dull")). Humans are bipedal apes. Sasquatches are also bipedal apes. As bipeds, both humans and sasquatches had the potential to develop the anatomical structures in the neck, face and brain, capable of producing speech-like sounds.
A priority for the BFRO now is to teach good people how to locate the habitats of these animals, and how to provoke these kinds of interactions. Spreading this knowledge to the right individuals in the U.S. and Canada, will inevitably help accumulate more knowledge about these elusive animals. The "discovery" in North America (it may happen in Malaysia first) will likely be a direct by-product of the BFRO's accumulation of knowledge about their habitats and interaction behaviors.
As Jane Goodall pointed out : "One should not have to be killed in order to establish their existence. A combination of DNA evidence and very good video footage should be sufficient."
DNA evidence and very good footage (or photos) will be a direct by-product of identifying their most consistent haunts, and their interaction behaviors.
Click the link below to launch the clip of Lorrie's encounter during the 2005 PA expedition.
Bipedal Walking - Southeast Oklahoma - November 2005
This field recording was obtained in McCurtain County, Oklahoma, a few miles south of Honobia (Le Flore County). It was recorded during the 2005 BFRO Oklahoma Expedition by Investigator Dennis Pfohl from Colorado.
This is a good example of what people describe as the sound of a large, bipedal (not four-legged) animal walking through the woods.
The night this clip was recorded, a search and rescue professional (Rob B.) attending the expedition said a tall massive figure came up to the vehicle he was sleeping in (a 4x4 pickup). The animal pushed up and down on the tailgate with tremendous force. It then walked around to the door of the pickup. It leaned over the hood of the raised 4x4 from the side, to look down through the front windshield. It then it grabbed the door handle and rocked the vehicle a few times. It pounded lightly on the door a few times before walking away. Rob couldn't move while it was happening. He was laying on the seat, in his sleeping bag, looking up through his slighty fogged windows. He could see the figure's size by its silhouette against the starry sky, when it leaned over the hood of the raised vehicle to look through the windshield.
The figure walked in the direction of Dennis Pfohl's vehicle and recorder. Dennis Pfohl was parked a short distance away along the creek. The noise in the background is the wind and creek noise. Dennis was asleep but his digital recorder was running.
Five people were with this group at this very remote spot. No one of them were awake and walking around the vehicles when this happened, shortly after 4am.Edit: (What you are about to read is folk lore handed down generation to generation. No one really knows if this is the truth. But it is treated as such. Perhaps there is truth to this. And if there is. One can only fear when the time comes when God and Man will clash again.)
It was the day of the battle. Summoners circled around their battle stations. At the head of one team was Kireyo the challenger. At the head of the other was Riot Ames the god of 1 rp. Kireyo challenged Ames to a battle. A 5v5. They would gather their strongest allies and fight against each other where summoners proved all their conflicts.
Summoner Rift
It was hot. The sun beat down on the champions the summoners had chosen. On Kireyo's side we had Lee Sin taking top lane, Riven going mid, Braum and Pantheon heading bot, and the wild card Jax taking on the jungle.
Ames gathered the strongest rioters he knew and they took Quinn top, Twisted Fate mid, Graves and Leona bot with Warwick in the jungle after freshly killing poor urf and wearing his skin to strike fear into Kireyo's team.
With the positions set. The battle between gods and men began! There was tons of taunts and jeers as each team danced around the wards placed by the other team. Was it a mating ritual or an intimidation dance? The results were inconclusive as after each team finished their shows, they went to their respective jungle to leash. Afterwards came the laning.
Ames and Baconhawk, a pair known for their immeasurable teamwork took to showing off that Kireyo and Mantheon were unprepared for the likes of them. The riot pair pushed lane and asserted dominance right of the bat as they shot lightning and fire and bullets at Kireyo and Mantheon. It was obvious they were showing off that the challenging pair were fools to pick a fight with GODS. And they showed it. They farmed the minions with impunity as they kept the lanes pushed knowing early game they would be unbeatable.
The rest of their allies proved to do the same. Their Quinn top played by Riot Afic gave no mercy to his opponent. Manstache's Lee Sin. Riot Afic brutally swung his hammer down upon Manstache as the blow was enough to blow Manstache to pieces granting Riot Gods the first blood. But of course as gods do, the cockiness of first blood left him unprepared for the jungler jax summoned by Thatoneguysname to jump in and backstab the victorious god leaving him on the floor to the wolves. But this backstab only made Riot Afic stronger as he came back to lane to dominate Manstache. Quinn had complete overshadowed Lee sin and was able to take the first turret of the game.
In mid lane Ultimate Smurfs Riven proved to be brutal against Riot Tiza. While he may not have gotten first blood. He was aggressive enough to kill her once, twice, Multiple time to assert dominance and win the lane for the men. Riven used this chance to grow in power cause both sides knew there would be a behemoth on each side they would have to conquer.
Bot lane however for the most part was a stalemate. Ames and Baconhawk proved to have tremendous pressure as they forced Kireyo and Mantheon to hold their ground rather than fight back. The pair knew that the lane was in their favor. Although no side had given up a kill or a turret yet. One side was going to crack and Ames and Baconhawk were sure to be the ones doing the cracking. Their pressure so immense though. Baconhawk was able to be in two lanes as one as he struck the first blow against man's behemoth. Riven was shut down by Baconhawk as she absorbed riven's powers to fuel herself against man's tirade. Ames looked on approvingly.
But men are resilient people. They accept their shortcoming and know that they must rely on each other. So they beckoned to their jungler Jax. And in one fell swoop. Baconhawk was downed. Graves was locked in place by three different stuns. He was healed. He flashed. But it was not enough as the first lane kill went to the men.
But this resulted in anger. Ames and Baconhawk knew they would need to step up their game. One blow was more than enough to incite the God's wrath and they came back harder. Their pressure was immense. Their strength infallible. They chipped away the pair and played more decisively. No longer did they push. They played with purpose. With the intent to kill and win. They froze the lane on their turf. They pulled out all the stops. And then came the assault. They locked on mantheon's pantheon. They were ready to destroy the real threat of the lane.
But what are men if not strong hearted. Braum leapt to his partner and raised his shield. Out came the ice cold ram head. They were ulted by Leona who proceeded to stunlock. But that was not enough as Pantheon leapt towards graves and Braum followed suit. They took down the god once more on their own this time, proving they had the power.
As time passed. Riot Afic grew in power. Manstache could no longer quell the beast. Tiza was beaten down by Riven. Bot lane still stood in stalemate but everything would change when a gank from warwick against Riven the behemoth failed as Jax came to her rescue. The death of warwick meant the men could go for Dragon and they did. But the gods weren't one to let that just slide as they started roaming towards the men. Riven stood behind ready to surprise the gods.
And what a plan! Little did Riven know. Braum stood behind her waiting for her to go in. Once she did. Braum leapt to her and ulted. Knocking up three of the enemy team and forcing the kills as the rest of the men's team came to clean up. But the cost of dragon wasn't cheap. Two of the men were killed in battle as Afic came in by surprise and assassinated them. However Kirey was not one to take this kindly as a quick q from braum left Afic unable to escape and get quickly downed.
After this battle, favor swung towards men as they pushed and took towers. But so did the gods and soon both sides had taken an equal amount of towers. But the men had a risky plan. They were not going to bait baron. No that would be far to simple. They would take baron right under the gods noses. The gods knew. They put a ward, but jax cleared it. And the men began. Not caring for their own lives. They needed this risky gambit. It was the only way to put the tides in their favor completely.
The gods panicked. Without vision, they had no idea if the enemies were actually taking baron or baiting it. All they could do was venture forward to place one ward.
Men were actually taking baron and it was almost dead. The gods leapt into action in an attempt to stifle and take baron for themselves. It was inevitable. Men downed baron and took the buffs as they turned on the gods and vanquished them for an ace. The fight wasn't easy. Almost everyone had less than 100 hp. But it proved formidable. With this. Men had proven themselves strong and that they wouldn't give up. Even if their enemies were god.
SO with renewed vigor. Both sides clashed. The men were wiped out sometimes. The gods wiped out sometimes as well. Both sides unrelenting until one of the gods cried out mercy. Tiza was looked down upon by her brethren as another Rioter secretly joined her plea. Their pleas fell on death ears. After all. Gods couldn't lose. THEY WOULDN'T
But what kind of tale would this be if the gods won? A tale of hopelessness? A tale to inspire others to action? Who knows what the answer is. That is because man rose to the situation. They stood up against the gods. And they took them down. In a grueling battle that left both sides tired and exhausted, man stood atop the gods' broken nexus and they screamed. Oh how they screamed. They screamed of their victory and the story will passed down by generation to generation. They are heroes now. Victors!
But do all tales end so happily? Is this really a fairy tail. Did you know if you anger a god. Their anger does not subside when you win. It grows. And at this very moment Riot Ames has not given up. There are murmurs that he will come back even stronger. He will take back his rightful pride. And that my children and followers. Is where the true story will begin. Cause Ames played around knowing he'd win. But now he is angered. And an angered god won't give up. So the question now is...
When does he strike?
And what is that crispy rustling in the distance as bacony goodness caws out?
To be continued..?
Original post: Good evening. This is not like other 0 RP threads. I had an overarching goal behind all this. It is why I needed to get 0 IP too. I have come for you Riot Ames! I have done what was necessary to summon you and your flying baconhawk too. I went and did even more. I HAVE ACHIEVED THE 0 RP STATE AS WELL AS 0 IP!
I have heard of Riot Ames Crusade and I wish to issue Riot Ames a challenge! For are WE NOT MEN? REAL MEN LIKE BRAUM? Why must Riot Ames come along and stealth sneak rp into every victim's account? That is not the way MEN handle this. BRAUM WOULD DISAPPROVE. So tonight AMES. I SUMMON YOU. I SUMMON YOUR BACONHAWK AS WELL. TO A 2V2 BETWEEN MEN!
Let us handle this LIKE REAL MEN AND ENJOY A CUP OF HOT GOAT'S MILK AFTERWARDS! The rules are simple! I challenge Riot Ames and Riot Baconhawk to a MAN-OFF on Howling Abyss. We must use manly champions (Females allowed if they too consider themselves Real MEN). We shall duel and see who can take the other's nexus.
IF WE WIN. Riot Ames must honorably back off my account and instead give the RP he was going to give to me, to my good partner Mantheon Bot. IF WE LOSE, we will lose with dignity like MEN and allow Riot Ames and Riot Baconhawk to make one request from both Mantheon bot and I. As MEN we will follow along with the request.
SO RIOT AMES AND RIOT BACONHAWK. DO YOU ACCEPT OUR CHALLENGE. GO FORTH BACONHAWK AND TELL YOUR LEADER OF THE IMPENDING BATTLE.
Also, Mantheon Bot Himself has a few words he wishes to say. I hope they will not embarrass our plight in any way shape or form. SPEAK MANTHEON BOT.
Now to fish for other rioters to help get this challenge across!
(@ Riot Baconhawk)
(@ Riot Ames)
(@ Riot IronStylus)
(@ Riot Whist)PBS’s American Masters is celebrating their 30th anniversary with its latest documentary, Loretta Lynn: Still a Mountain Girl, airing this Friday during Women’s History Month.
Billboard Women in Music 'Legend' Loretta Lynn: 'Call Me Your No. 1 You-Know-What-Kind-Of Stirrer'
The documentary features exclusive home footage of Loretta Lynn, along with performances and photos, including interviews with her friends and musicians. In the clip below, Sheryl Crow and Jack White speak to her songwriting capability.
“Her lyrics were just really caught your ear and it made you feel like, ‘Oh, she wrote that for me.’” says Crow. “She was so masterful at that: writing really catchy pop songs that were country songs.”
Loretta Lynn's Top 10 Billboard Hits
Jack White adds, “She’s got her own style of writing because she writes backwards. She sort of writes with a double chorus, there isn’t one chorus, per se, when you listen to her songs. There are two choruses, she starts with the second one and then comes back the first part of the chorus and then goes back and starts writing the verses and the story to get to it.”
Reba McEntire chimes in, too, sharing her favorite Loretta Lynn song. McEntire admits that she sings “If You’re Not Gone Too Long” as a warm-up every night before hitting the stage.
Loretta Lynn Talks 'Full Circle,' Plans to Keep Working for 'A Long Time'
Loretta Lynn’s much anticipated album Full Circle will also be released the same day on Legacy Recordings. Loretta Lynn: Still A Mountain Girl premieres on March 4 at 9 p.m. ET on PBS. Watch the clip below."Explosive" Misanthrope
intentionally
anything
And I still prefer Luna and/or Cadence, personal preference and all that. :)
So basically, you think that it’s one of those "so bad it’s good" kind of ideas? It’s a bad idea, but it’s so absurdly hilarious that you can’t help but find it amusing, especially with the fandom’s reaction to it (if it happened).Well, it’s not like it would make much of a difference if the producers did this on purpose to troll the fandom, or if they just did this because Hasbro wanted to "sell more toys". After all, the fandom has an aneurysm left and right anyway whenever something in the show changes and/or changes the status quo (especially with the season finales), so what difference would it make? Unless a character broke the fourth wall and gave a "screw you" to the viewers that don’t approve, or if one of the producers state this themselves (i.e. on their Twitter), it would be impossible to know if this was done for duckery. But yeah, it wouldn’t be good in the long term, as it would be Teen Titans Go all over again (in terms oftrolling their fans).Heh, if Starlicorn happened, I could see raging unlikeI’ve ever seen in the fandom., M. A. Larson sees Starlicorn and has a big smile on his face, and says: "You’ve learned well Haber."XDTo each their own. :)In Tehran, plainclothes police throw demonstrators in vans, beating them. Arrests and clashes affect other cities as well. Thousands of green wave supporters met on 1 March to protest the arrest of opposition leaders Mousavi and Karroubi.
Tehran (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Security forces arrested 200 demonstrators in a number of Iranian cities protesting the house arrest of Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, both opponents of Iranian President Ahmadinejad, Human Rights House of Iran reported.
According to the Iranian human rights group, hundreds of plainclothes agents swarmed protesters in Tehran’s Azadi Square, throwing them into the back of black vans before driving them away. Officers continued beating the men and women they arrested as they put them in the vehicles.
Opposition websites reported another 40 people detained in the city of Isfahan, 340 kilometres south of Tehran.
Like their counterpart in the jasmine revolution, young green wave protesters met in the capital on Tuesday to march from Imam Hossein Square to Azadi Square after the leaders of their movement, Mousavi and Karroubi, were placed under illegal house arrest.
In addition to Tehran, demonstrations took place in Shiraz, Esfahan, Mashhad, Karaj, Semnan, Tabriz and Kermanshah. Anti-riot police, special guards, security forces and pro-government plainclothes agents swarmed protesters. Another demonstration is scheduled for 15 March.
In a press conference today, Mousavi’s lawyer Ardeshir Amir-Arjomand said the government continues to deny that it detains the two opposition leaders. This means that it fears the reaction of the people. No one knows where they are being held. Statements from government officials are contradictory.
In two years, the government has failed to crush the green wave, despite arresting the movement’s leaders as well as journalists and the leaders of political parties and student groups.
Street demonstrations are not the only means to protest. Demonstrators have the means to set up local networks to foster civil disobedience, and organise sit-ins and strikes.
However, Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, continues to say that Mideast unrest is inspired by Iran’s 1979 revolution, not by a desire for democracy.
In fact, the authorities refuse to acknowledge that Mousavi and Karroubi are under arrest and that the green wave movement is still capable of organising protests. Claims to the contrary are just propaganda against the regime, they contend.Music lovers may have long forsaken them, but magnetic tapes still reign supreme when it comes to storing vast amounts of digital data. And new research from IBM and Fujifilm could ensure that tape remains the mass storage medium of choice for years to come for at least a decade.
Tape deck: The read-write machine used to demonstrate a new magnetic tape technology developed by IBM and Fujifilm.
At IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratories in Switzerland, researchers have developed a new tape material and a novel tape-reading technology. In combination, they can store 29.5 billion bits per square inch, which translates to a cartridge capable of holding around 35 terabytes of data–more than 40 times the capacity of cartridges currently available, and several times more than a hard disk of comparable size.
The researchers used a relatively new magnetic medium, called barium ferrite. In cooperation with researchers from Fujifilm’s labs in Japan, they orientated the barium ferrite magnetic particles so that their magnetic fields protrude perpendicularly from the tape, instead of lengthways. This means that more bits can be crammed into a given area, and the magnetic fields are stronger. Furthermore, these particles allow thinner tape to be used, meaning12 percent more tape can be stored on a single spooled cartridge.
Increasing the density of data that can be stored on a tape makes it more difficult to reliably read information. This is already a problem because of electromagnetic interference and because the heads themselves will retain a certain amount of residual magnetism from readings. To overcome this, the IBM group developed new signal processing algorithms that simultaneously process data and predict the effect that electromagnetic noise will have on subsequent readings.
Hard disks can store more data on a given surface area than magnetic tape, and the data on a disk can be read faster. But because hundreds of meters of tape can be spooled on a single cartridge, the overall volumetric data density of tape is higher, says Evangelos Eleftheriou, head of the Storage Technologies group at IBM Zurich.
Crucially, tape storage is also much cheaper. “What’s most important is the cost per gigabyte,” says Eleftheriou. Solid state drives cost between $3 and $20 per gigabyte. In contrast, it costs less than a cent per gigabyte to store information on magnetic tape. In the third quarter of 2009, the global tape market was worth more than half a billion dollars.
Extending the life of magnetic tape technology could delay the arrival of new storage technologies, particularly holographic storage. Experimental holographic discs, which use patterns of light interference to hold multiple pieces of data at a single point, can already hold several hundred gigabytes of data. The technology is expected to eventually allow terabytes of data to be held on a disc.
“Tape still wins, but only at very high data volumes,” says James Hamilton, a vice president and distinguished engineer on Amazon’s Web services team, in Bellevue, WA. Tape is most suitable for “cold storage”–when data is not accessed frequently. But the volume of digital data that needs to be stored is increasing rapidly, so Hamilton says there’s a real need to try to squeeze more out of tape.
It could take another five years before the new tape technology is ready for the market, Eleftheriou admits. “But we have shown that there is still at least another 10 years of life in it,” he says.Columbus Crew defender Lalas Abubakari expressed gratitude to coach Greg Berhalter after making his Major Soccer League debut on Tuesday.
The 22-year-old played full throttle as the Crew recorded a 1-0 win at Minnesota United on Tuesday.
Abubakari joined the Black and Gold this season during the super draft.
“It’s really tough,” Abubakar said. “It’s really hard, all these troubles, not playing. But, I think part of it is the coaches.
''They kept telling me to be patient and that my time is going to come. So, I think that’s what I’ve used to help me keep going. And I take it as payoff today. [Crew SC Sporting Director and Head Coach Gregg Berhalter] finally gave me the opportunity to show it and I was able to do it, so, I’m really happy.”
">July 5, 2017All Mitch McConnell is asking is for the CBO to cook the books.
Senate Republicans don't like the score that they got out of the Congressional Budget Office for Trumpcare. Kicking 23 million people off of health insurance in the next decade just doesn't look good politically, so rather than reworking the actual legislation to try to make it not awful, they're pressuring the CBO to change their methodology and the numbers.
They say the CBO used data from March 2016 in coming up with the analysis that 22 million people would lose health insurance. By using a more recent benchmark from this year, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) argues that number might come down by as much as 6 million. […] CBO acknowledges that it is using the March 2016 data. But it says it is following standard procedure in doing so. […] Deborah Kilroe, the associate director for communications at CBO, said the agency typically uses the same baseline as the congressional budget resolution when scoring a bill that is protected by the reconciliation instructions. Kilroe noted that when Congress passed its budget resolution shortly after New Year’s Day, CBO had not yet issued the January 2017 benchmark that Johnson is now using in his updated analysis.
That's an "extremely unusual, unprecedented probably" ask, former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin told Talking Points Memo. "The whole point of scoring is to make apples to apples comparisons," he said. "If you tweak the methodology in the middle of the process of passing a bill, it defeats the purpose of having a scorekeeper." By the way, Holtz-Eakin is not a liberal or even a Democrat. He's currently president of the conservative think tank American Action Forum. What Republicans want them to do is pretty ridiculous on its face—like Sen. John Barrasso's (R-WY) demand that the CBO come up with a score that shows the effect of "freedom," that shows "that the preponderance of the people who would not be insured were not actually losing insurance. […] Because it’s a free country, they would choose, because we eliminate the individual mandate, to not buy insurance."
Stan Collender, a former senior staffer on the Senate Finance and Budget committees blasted the maneuver. "You can assume that any changes in the methodology they’re demanding are to make their bill look better. Not to be factually correct, but politically salient." Of course that's why they're doing it. They're Republicans.
All we need is three Republican senators to block Trumpcare. If you have a GOP senator, we need you to call their office at (202) 224-3121. Demand that they put their constituents above their party. After the call, tell us how the call went.David Cameron has been operating a secret unit in Whitehall charged with undertaking covert economic operations to choke the Gaddafi regime of the one thing it had in abundance: oil.
The "Libyan oil cell" was run by the international development minister Alan Duncan and helped to strengthen sanctions against the oil-rich country, blocking supplies of crude oil to the dictator's side while allowing petrol and diesel to flow to the rebels.
But the government is likely to face intense scrutiny over the fact that the unit was involved in linking the rebels to a Swiss oil firm, Vitol, which has been credited with keeping the revolutionary engine running through the war. Duncan was previously a consultant with the firm and has close personal ties to its chairman, Ian Taylor. Taylor has also been a Conservative donor in the past.
The unit was backed by Cameron and William Hague, the foreign secretary, and involved half-a-dozen officials with help from MI6. It was tasked with working out how to control the flow of oil in and out of the country. Sources close to the project claim that in the last weeks of the dictatorship, Gaddafi struggled to keep his forces on the move with his refined oil stocks depleted by 90%, while rebels gathered momentum as they began to trade the nation's crude for refined petrol and diesel.
A Whitehall source said: "We have, as a British initiative, driven the entire significance of oil as the most crucial non-lethal weapon in this conflict. The energy noose tightened around Tripoli's neck. It was much more effective and easier to repair than bombs. It is like taking the key of the car away. You can't move. The great thing is you can switch it all back on again if Gaddafi goes. It is not the same as if you have bombed the whole city to bits."
The cell's links with Vitol are likely to trigger controversy, although it is understood that Vitol also had an existing relationship with the rebels and had chosen to back them over Gaddafi early in the conflict. Civil servants raised concerns about the possibility that the government was moving too far into commercial territory, although a Whitehall source told the BBC there was no conflict of interest because the Libya oil cell had no commercial relationship with the company.
Duncan praised the firm for taking the risks in supplying a country at war, and insisted the government played no role in the commercial relations between the two. "We were not awarding contracts or encouraging [the rebels] to take sides. Vitol has always been the supplier, but equally it could have been BP and Shell but they were the only ones prepared to take the risk," he told the Times.
He denied setting up meetings personally. "Very strict procedures were set up. I would never meet anyone from the oil sector without officials there … You can draw a link but it's a very small business, the oil business."
While Libya has crude oil in abundance, it has always relied on imports of refined products. Only one refinery, in Zawiya, was in operation during the conflict. But in April the sanctions regime was failing, with refined oil being smuggled across the Tunisian border. The sanctions also appeared to be to the disadvantage of the rebels more than Gaddafi's regime, which was finding ways to circumvent it.
From June, the oil cell's elaborate schemes involved deploying Nato operations to block ships bringing the dictator refined oil, enforcing sanctions on exports, and a naval chase of the Cartegena, a Libyan-owned ship which attempted to unload thousands of tonnes of fuel in Tripoli and ended up in a stand-off outside Malta. "The fact is that three months ago if we had not intervened on the oil side and made the NSC [national security council] and Nato and coalition partners understand this there would have been a massive reversal of fortune. The east would have run out of fuel and money and Gaddafi would have kept going," a Whitehall source claimed.Apparently, refusing help up off the field is grounds for ejection -- or so says one ref in the Music City Bowl between Kentucky and Northwestern.
During the second quarter of the game, Kentucky running back Benny Snell Jr. was ejected for unsportsmanlike conduct after it was ruled he initiated contact with an official. After he was driven back on a negative run, Snell basically suggested that the official helping him up take his hands off of him.
Here's the play and the ejection.
First, the impact of the ejection can't be overstated. Snell leads the SEC with 18 rushing touchdowns and was just two yards off the lead (1,318) in the SEC. This isn't just losing a player, it's losing one of the top players in the conference.
Second, the ref's explanation afterward of what happened didn't do much to quell any disgruntlement with the officiating.
The ref who tossed Benny Snell from the Music City Bowl gives his "explanation." pic.twitter.com/r2KzfPX3F2 — Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) December 30, 2017
Basically, the referee didn't like the fact that Snell put his hands on him. Chances are Snell was frustrated with the result of the play (and maybe that he was being driven back despite the fact that the play had been blown dead).
Unless Snell said something beyond egregious -- which he did not -- this is a weak penalty. The referee's job is, among other things, to keep games under control. You don't always need to throw a flag for "initiating contact," especially when the player didn't technically initiate contact.
Often times, officials will issue warnings before throwing personal foul penalties later. A simple "relax" would have sufficed. Or letting it roll off his shoulders. Either one.Maxine Rizik is |
was handcuffed the night after the escape, taken by three guards into a broom closet, punched and had a plastic bag placed over his head while questions were shouted at him. One guard had the initials CIU on his jacket, he said. That stands for Crisis Intervention Unit in New York's prison system.
"The officer jumps up and grabs me by my throat, lifts me out of the chair, slams my head into the pipe along the wall," Alexander told the newspaper. "Then he starts punching me in the face. The other two get up and start hitting me also in the ribs and stomach."
(Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)Local musicians, actors and businesses are expected to see a boost in activity as the city rolls out its Acoustic on Main program. Implemented Jan. 1, the initiative removes the administrative and fee burden to many businesses seeking to host musical acts — a two-in-one offering intended to provide artists with more performance space and bring stores greater foot traffic.
Tested in three short pilot runs in 2015, the program allows small businesses operating in designated business districts to host live entertainment with up to five performers, limited to one microphone, between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. without having to obtain an entertainment license. Performances are not limited to music, and may include anything from improvisation to slam poetry.
“We hear a lot about how there are so many amazing artists in Boston that don’t have enough venues for performance,” City Councilor Michelle Wu, sponsor of the new bill, told the Banner. “Our small businesses are the anchors of our neighborhoods. It seemed like a great way to open up more opportunities for everyone.”
Burden lifted
Formerly, the complicated and lengthy process for securing an entertainment license — which includes a hearing and at least one trip to city hall — deterred many smaller businesses, especially those not planning to host shows on a regular basis, Wu said. Joyce Stanley, executive director of Dudley Main Streets, said that the time away from their businesses to handle paperwork or trek to city hall has been a significant obstacle to small stores that may have only two or three people operating them, The licensing process also carries a $100 fee.
Restaurants and bars primarily have been the businesses securing licenses, but simplifying the procedure allows for greater flexibility in the types of performance spaces used, said Abby Furey, Neighborhood Business Manager, Mayor’s Office of Economic Development.
“Ideally I’d love to see little storefronts having poetry readings, or guitars in a local supermarket,” Furey said in a Banner phone interview. “There are all kinds of ways of looking at this. My hope would be that it leads to performances at venues beyond what have been traditional venues in the area.”
Businesses surveyed said the wintertime pilot helped them recoup profits lost to harsh snows, and the summer trial days boosted what is typically a slow season. What are normally low-traffic days such as Mondays and Tuesdays became as active as Thursdays, Friday and Saturdays, Wu said.
Based on feedback from restaurateurs, the program rolling out this month goes beyond the pilot’s 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. window to offer earlier and longer performance opportunities. This version also allows any commercial district, not just designated Main Streets, to participate, Wu said.
The program will be up for renewal in 2017, in order to allow for adjusting policies based on response, such as altering the hours to better suit residents’ noise level requests.
Dudley Square
Dudley Main Streets’ Stanley said the program advances the vision of Dudley as a site of multicultural expression, reflective of the local population’s wide range of countries of origin.
“We wanted to have art and music and food from all over the place all the time, and have that be the draw for Dudley,” Stanley told the Banner. “The population, the employers, people coming through the district and the businesses reflect most other countries of the world, and that’s where we’d like to lead.”
Currently a handful of venues offer events and performances, including Haley House’s open mic nights and Dudley Café’s jazz brunches. The new policy can offer artists greater opportunity, too, as performance spaces are scarce, said Kelley Chunn, whose public relations firm is a consultant on the project to establish a cultural district in Roxbury.
“People want cultural experiences, as opposed to just a place to eat and have a cup of coffee,” Chunn added. “[This program] would bring an added dimension of entertainment and also provide another venue for community artists to reach the public and expand their audiences.”
Stanley said many businesses — especially new ones, which are less set in their ways — are open to hosting performances. She expects Acoustic on Main to draw more customers, including ones from across the city who do not currently frequent the district.
“It can add to the flavor of the area,” Stanley said.
Dudley Square long has strived to bring greater life after 5 p.m. While Stanley did not expect Acoustic on Main to be the key to this, she thought it would help. Night life will be one discussion focus for Dudley Main Street’s retreat in January.
Wu summed up many people’s hopes for a more vibrant artistic and small business scene in the new year.
“There’s no better way to bring people together than over food, music and culture,” she said.The most recent issue of the magazine Guernica features an essay-letter written to “my fellow teachers” by Nell Boeschenstein, who teaches writing at Sweet Briar College. Boeschenstein reports that on the Wednesday morning after the election of Donald Trump she pondered a choice: “Did I walk into class today and say, ‘I know we’re all tired and feeling sensitive today, now let’s turn to page 46 and pick up where we left off’ or did I walk in and say, ‘There’s an elephant in the room that we’ve got to discuss?’”
You pretty much know what she will end up doing when she prefaces option #1 (“let’s turn to page 46”)with a verbal arm around the shoulder: “I know we’re all tired and feeling sensitive today.” With all that sensitivity in the air, how could she justify business as usual? Page 46 will have to wait; discussing the elephant — Donald Trump — is obviously the only way to go. The path to that choice is smoothed by the first person plural “we’re” (“We’re... feeling sensitive”) which creates a fellowship by claiming a knowledge she couldn’t possibly have. She can’t know what her students are feeling unless she was assuming, as she obviously was, that they would be feeling exactly what she felt. After invoking the fellow feeling she has rhetorically manufactured, she announces her decision: “I did the only thing I could do: I was honest... and told my students how I felt... I asked if they wanted to talk about it. They were silent.”
Now I don’t doubt that Boeschenstein was being honest in one way: she was honestly expressing her distress at the result of the election. But she was being dishonest with respect to the performance of her professional responsibilities. I’m willing to bet that when she was interviewed for her position, no one asked, “Can we count on you to set aside the lesson plan of the day and give over your class time to a discussion of your feelings about the political landscape?” Indeed, had she indicated that she would prioritize her political convictions over and against a consideration of a scheduled class’s subject matter, the hiring committee would have had second thoughts. After all, what she is trained and paid to do is teach writing. The only “honest” choice — it shouldn’t even have been a question — was to say “Let’s turn to page 46 and pick up where we left off.” Had she said that she would have reaffirmed her students’ understanding of what it means to participate in an academic conversation: it means mastering academic materials and learning academic skills. Distress (or, for that matter, happiness) at the outcome of an election is not an appropriate driver of classroom discussion, although of course one can imagine other contexts — town hall meetings, noon-time rallies, late-night bull sessions ― in which the expression of political sentiments would be expected and exactly on point.
Once Boeschenstein decided on the direction she would take, things got worse. It turned out that all of her students were not feeling what she was feeling because some of them were Trump supporters. Not allowing the silence that followed her question “Do you want to talk about it?” to stand, she subjected the wayward students to a barrage of questions: “Why did you give Trump a pass on the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, and the environment? Why do you forgive this man’s rejection of the fundamental values on which we agree? Please explain this to me.” Or, in other words, justify to me what you did in the ballot-box (supposedly a private place protected in its privacy by the laws of the land); make me understand why you acted so badly.
“I could not get a straight answer,” Boeschenstein complains. How about that? A bunch of 18-year-olds find themselves harangued by the authority figure from whom they expect instruction and are unable to respond to her hectoring with calmly reasoned replies. What’s wrong with them? Boeschenstein knows what’s wrong. They’re just not thinking clearly — she calls their Trump support “inexplicable” — and so, after 75 minutes of asking and re-asking the same question “in as many different rhetorical iterations as I could invent,” she sends them out with marching orders: “If you don’t want Trump to speak for you, don’t let him. It is imperative that you stand up against his language of bigotry.” Not only is she putting her students on the spot when they thought they had come to learn something; she is also telling them how they should act when they exit the classroom and move into spaces supposedly not under her authority.
Boeschenstein knows that her performance that day goes against the “general rule of thumb for us teachers... not to say what is right or what is wrong, but to teach our students to think critically.” But she invokes the “these-are-not-ordinary-times” rationale and regrets only that she hadn’t set aside “test preparation and dates to memorize and topic sentences to hone” earlier: “Had I been brave enough to start this conversation in September, I wonder whether some of my Trump-supporting students might have chosen otherwise at the ballot box on Tuesday.” That is to say, had I engaged in political indoctrination from the beginning of the semester instead of merely doing my job, my students might have done the right thing on November 8. The rest of us, however, can learn from her failure to act in time and take up the real work ― of saving the world from Donald Trump — right away: “Don’t defer the conversation any longer. If we do, more bucks will be bound for our desks that we cannot afford to watch pile up”.CHILLIWACK (NEWS1130) – Highway 1 has been re-opened to traffic after a serious crash at the Vedder Canal Bridge this morning.
RCMP say smoke from a bonfire under the bridge caused a distraction, resulting in a rapid slowdown of traffic and an “accordion effect,” as vehicles slammed into one another.
Investigator Tim Shields says people need to drive cautiously. “This appears to have been caused by driver error, and most likely, following too close[ly] or a lack of attention.”
“It’s miraculous that nobody was killed. There were some very significant levels of damage to some of these vehicles and it’s very fortunate that the injuries weren’t more significant than they actually were,” adds Shields, who does not blame the fishermen believed to have started the fire.
Seventeen vehicles, including a Greyhound bus, were involved. Fourteen people have been taken to various hospitals with non life-threatening injuries.
“We don’t have any reports of fatalities,” says Inspector Tim Shields.
One of the bus passengers, Sean, tells us it felt like the bus hit something hard and they suddenly stopped.
“I didn’t even notice the vehicles behind us crashing,” he says. “It was strange, we didn’t hear anything. It must have happened really quickly because we saw the vehicles in front of us and then we looked behind us and realized there’s about 10 cars behind us.”
Greyhound says the bus that was involved in the crash was on its way to Vancouver from Kamloops.
“There were 36 passengers on-board, plus one driver. I can confirm that there were five minor injuries,” says Alex Pedrini with Greyhound.
The company says it is cooperating with police, as well as doing its own independent investigation.
At one point, traffic was closed on Highway 1 in both directions, but the route has been re-opened both ways.
For up to the minute traffic updates, you can follow us on Twitter @News1130Traffic or subscribe to breaking news alerts sent directly to your inbox. You can also listen live to traffic reports every 10 minutes on the ones.Is Encryption Effective Against Snooping? German Government Says No, Snowden Says Yes
from the maybe-not-the-real-problem dept
The revelations of Edward Snowden about the NSA's snooping of citizens both inside and outside the US are posing more questions than they answer at the moment. One key area is whether the use of encryption -- for example for email -- is effective against the techniques and raw power available to the NSA (and equivalents in other countries). That's something that has come up before in the context of the UK's Snooper's Charter. When a top official there was asked whether the proposed surveillance technology would be able to cope with encrypted streams, he replied: "it will." Snowden's claims about massive, global spying makes the issue even more pertinent.
Here's one view, from Germany. Politicians from the Die Linke party posed a number of questions to their government on the subject of the latter's use of surveillance techniques (original PDF in German). Most of the answers were the kind of thing you might expect -- "we can't possibly go into details" etc. etc. -- but one was surprising. To the question:
Is the technology used also capable of decrypting at least partially, or evaluating, encrypted communications (eg via SSH or PGP)?
Yes, the technology used is generally able to do that, depending on the type and quality of the encryption.
Is encrypting my email any good at defeating the NSA survelielance? Id my data protected by standard encryption?
Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.
Back came the answer:But Edward Snowden doesn't agree. When he was asked in an online Q&A session on the Guardian Web site the following question:He replied:In discussions about the German government's claim that it can crack encryption in certain circumstances, some suggested that maybe it could -- not directly, but using the malware that Techdirt has written about before. So even if the question as to the efficacy of encryption itself is still rather up in the air, there seems to be a consensus that the real weakness lies in letting people gain access to your system.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+
Filed Under: cracking, ed snowden, encryption, germany, nsa surveillance, security, surveillanceYay, finally got my Star Wars exchange gift! It was definitelly worth the wait! It came from the UK. I got a YOYO, passed on from the dark side most likely, because of the insignia :D I haven't played with one for a while, so I'm completely hooked on it! Also I got a lightsaber lip-balm! :D The force shall protect my lips from all the... dryness... and cracky'ness...! An epic "activity pad" with lots of pictures to colour, puzzles to solve and drawings to draw! I love it! Lastly, I got Yoda earbuds! My giftee is obviously a gifted jedi, as they managed to read my mind and see that I have been wanting new ear buds for a long time! :))
Thank you Santa! I absolutelly love the gift!
May the force be with you.SINCE the dawn of civilisation, people have used yeast to leaven bread, ferment wine and brew beer. In the modern era, such fermentation has extended its range. Carefully selected moulds churn out antibiotics. Specially engineered bacteria, living in high-tech bioreactors, pump out proteinaceous drugs such as insulin. Some brave souls even talk of taking on the petroleum industry by designing yeast or algae that will synthesise alternatives to aviation fuel and the like.
But fermentation remains a messy process, and one prone to spoilage and waste. Whatever the product, the reaction must generally be shut down after a matter of days to clean out the detritus of biological activity—both cells that have died and the surplus of living ones which growth and reproduction inevitably yield. Alshakim Nelson, a chemist at the University of Washington, in Seattle, and his team, propose to change all that. They have developed a bioreactor that not only keeps bugs alive and active for months at a time, but can also be made in minutes, using low-cost chemicals and a 3D printer.
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Dr Nelson’s bioreactors are composed of a substance called a hydrogel, which is about 70% water. The remaining 30% is a special polymer, infused with yeast. Unlike edible jelly, which, as parents of small children will know, breaks into tiny lumps when squeezed, Dr Nelson’s hydrogel has a consistency resembling peanut butter. That permits it to be extruded smoothly through the nozzle of a 3D printer.
Dr Nelson’s team have built a printer specifically designed to do this. Their device lays down thin strips of hydrogel in a cubic lattice structure (see picture) intended to maximise the amount of surface area for a given volume of material. The cube, which has sides 1cm long in the current design, is then cured by a burst of ultraviolet light, to increase its rigidity. Turning one out takes about five minutes.
The fun starts when such a cube is plopped into a solution of glucose. The hydrogel is permeable to this solution, so the yeast is able to get to work on the glucose, converting it into ethanol as if it were the sugar in the wort of a brewery.
This, Dr Nelson had predicted. The surprise was that it keeps on doing so, day after day, week after week, as long as the fermented solution is regularly replaced with fresh. The team’s bioreactors have continued to produce ethanol in this way for over four months now, with no signs of slowing down. The cause of this desirable phenomenon is not yet clear. Dr Nelson believes that immobilising the yeast cells in the hydrogel somehow stops them both ageing and reproducing, without affecting their ability to ferment. Somehow, the cells’ confinement is signalling to them to stop growing without affecting their normal metabolism.
That discovery has enormous potential. If it could be industrialised, it would pave the way for continuous fermentation to replace today’s batch-processing approach, with all the advantages such continuity of production would bring. To this end, Dr Nelson now plans to scale up the size of the cubes. He also proposes to experiment with yeast cells engineered to turn out more complex molecules than ethanol—proteins, for example—that might have purposes other than getting people drunk. This may require tweaking the hydrogel, the current structure of which is likely to be too dense to permit the passage of a large protein molecule.
In the longer term, it is possible to imagine a chain of bioreactors, each specialised for a single step in the synthetic pathway that leads to a desirable product such as a drug. Dr Nelson’s first task, though, will be to increase the concentration of glucose in the bioreactor design that he knows, without question, works, in the hope of brewing up something stronger in his laboratory. “Can we take our yeast,” he wonders, “embed it in hydrogel, print it as a cube, put it in fruit juice and convert it to alcohol?” That thought, of a cheap, domestic hooch plant which works for months on end, will have brewers around the world wanting to pour themselves a stiff drink.Swansea Producer, Alan Carter, has been left feeling disenfranchised as he has come to the hard realisation that his target audience doesn’t care about the effort he puts into making tracks.
“It’s almost like no one even notices the amount of effort I’ve put in, they just hear a ‘banging beat’ and continue to flop about like demented lemmings.”
Carter, who claims to make all his sounds “from a sine wave” and “never uses sample packs”, is left with the feeling that “literally no one gives a shit”.
“I’m not even sure why I do it”, claims Carter, “the only people who notice any level of artistry is other producers, so it’s basically one massive circle jerk”.
Carter recalls showing his latest track to his girlfriend for feedback, a track he had spent weeks ensuring he had the correct level of attack on the envelope of the mid bass oscillator, to which her response was “That sounds cool, what are we having for dinner tonight?”.
Alan, quite rightly outraged by the response, was left scratching his head as to why she didn’t even pick up on the dynamic shift around bar 64.
In response to this, Mr Carter claims to have started “wapping” tracks together, using noises from various household implements and old Skrillex basslines, “just to show the fuckers”.
However, his plan backfired as interest in his music went up after this change.
Mr Carter is now pursuing a career in accountancy.
If you or someone you know has been affected by producer unappreciation, please call the fan negligence hotline 020 FAT BASSGigapixel cameras aren't exactly hot-off-the-presses, but a few wizards at Duke and the University of Arizona may be close to getting that sort of technology into your future point-and-shoot. Reportedly, electrical engineers with gobs of free time and an imagination the size of Coach K's ego have managed to synchronize 98 minuscule cameras -- each with a 14-megapixel sensor -- "grouped around a shared spherical lens". The real kicker here is the hope for the future: these same researchers feel that "within five years, as the electronic components of the cameras become miniaturized and more efficient, the next generation of gigapixel cameras should be available to the general public." The prototype itself measures a whopping 2.5-feet square and 20 inches deep, but only around 3 percent of it is made of optical elements; the vast majority is circuitry needed to calculate the stupefying amount of information captured with such a device.Part 3: Sperm Motility and Progression
The ability of sperm to transverse both the uterus and fallopian tube, to ultimately fertilize an ovulated egg, is dependent upon the sample’s motility and progression.
During intercourse, sperm are deposited into the vagina. The sperm must swim through the cervix and move into the uterus. From one end of the uterus to the other, the sperm must swim to finally reach the awaiting egg in the fallopian tube. While the total distance necessary for the sperm to travel may only be 10 centimeters, given the relatively small size of a human sperm, it is equivalent to the sperm running a marathon and a vast majority of the sperm fail to reach their destination. During the journey, some sperm will run out of energy or swim off in the wrong direction while others may swim in circles or travel to the wrong fallopian tube. Less than 1% of the total ejaculated sperm ultimately reach the egg.
Motility and progression can be assessed in the following manner:
Motility – Motility refers to the percentage of moving sperm in the raw ejaculate. Samples are considered normal if they have greater than 40% motility.
Progression –Progression refers to the forward movement of sperm and is recorded as:
Grade 4: Fast and forward progression where sperm move in a straight direction.
Grade 3: Sperm move forward but at a slower speed and/or in a curved direction.
Grade 2: Sperm move slowly and in a poorly defined direction
Grade 1: Sperm move but fail to progress forward.
Grade 0: Sperm show no signs of movement.
The total number of sperm cells produced on a daily basis varies with the size of the testicles, but averages 85 million sperm per day per testicle, and decreases with age. Of all sperm produced daily, only a fraction will be motile. Having an adequate percentage of motile sperm with good progression in the ejaculate will help unsure that sperm are capable of arriving at the site of fertilization.Fannin Focus Publisher Mark Thomason, who was arrested June 24 on charges of identity fraud, attempted identity fraud and making false statements. Thomason was trying to get access to Judge Brenda Weaver's operating account. Fannin Focus Publisher Mark Thomason, who was arrested... Photo by Contributed Photo /Times Free Press.
Appalachian Judicial Circuit District Attorney Alison Sosebee dropped charges against Mark Thomason and his lawyer, Russell Stookey, on Thursday. Sosebee sought grand jury indictments last month against the two at the request of Judge Brenda Weaver, for whom Sosebee served as a clerk in 2001 after law school. Appalachian Judicial Circuit District Attorney Alison Sosebee dropped... Photo by Contributed Photo /Times Free Press.
Document: Weaver emails Emails from Appalachian Judicial Circuit Superior Court Judge Brenda Weaver to District Attorney Alison Sosebee.
BLUE RIDGE, Ga. — A judge coached a prosecutor to arrest a local reporter, emails show.
Communications obtained through an open records request reveal Appalachian Judicial Circuit Superior Court Judge Brenda Weaver gave District Attorney Alison Sosebee advice about prosecuting the publisher of the Fannin Focus newspaper, as well as his lawyer.
Weaver sent Sosebee a state code section that could be used against the publisher, Mark Thomason, and his attorney, Russell Stookey. Weaver also told Sosebee how to cross examine some potential witnesses in the case.
The advice came after Thomason tried to see the cash flow for Weaver's publicly funded bank account. Sosebee presented a case to a grand jury, which on June 24 indicted Thomason and Stookey on charges of identity fraud and attempt to commit identity fraud for their efforts to access documents pretaining to Weaver's operating account. The grand jury also indicted Thomason on a count of making false statements, in reference to a records request he filed.
The emails obtained this week provide a behind-the-scenes account of how the judge and prosecutor worked together in the case against Thomason and Stookey. They also reveal the nature of the relationship between Weaver and Sosebee, who once worked for the judge and her husband.
"For the DA to take this without much of an investigation and turn it into a criminal indictment is really disturbing," said Bob Rubin, president of the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "It certainly gives the appearance that the DA was doing the judge's bidding."
Thomason's indictment in late June drew national media attention. First amendment organizations condemned the charges, saying Sosebee overstepped her authority in punishing a reporter for a records request. On July 18, at Weaver's request, a judge granted a motion to not prosecute the case.
Since then, Thomason has filed a complaint against Weaver with the Judicial Qualifications Commission, the organization that oversees misconduct by Georgia judges. Weaver is the chairwoman of that organization. Also, multiple sources say, the FBI is investigating the circumstances surrounding Thomason's and Stookey's arrests.
Stookey and Thomason said they plan to file civil lawsuits against Weaver, as well as Fannin County.
"They've gotten away with doing this kind of crap for years there," Stookey said. "There is nobody in that crowd that is smart. It is absolutely the dumbest crowd that I have seen. Maybe they'll learn from this."
Roots of the case
The cases against Stookey and Thomason began last summer, when they sued a court reporter. In April 2015, Superior Court Judge Roger Bradley used a racial slur for African Americans from the bench. Thomason wrote that others in the room that day claimed sheriff's deputies had also used the racial slur, though that did not appear in the court reporter's transcript.
Thomason and Stookey sued for an audio recording of the hearing. A judge ruled against them, saying that the transcript seemed consistent with an audio recording of the hearing that she heard. The court reporter, Rhonda Stubblefield, then sued Thomason's newspaper, the Fannin Focus, for $1.6 million. She later dropped the complaint.
Then, the two sides fought about attorneys' fees. Stookey and Thomason said Stubblefield's lawyer admitted that Weaver paid for Stubblefield's legal defense with taxpayer money. Stubblefield is not a county employee, making the lawsuit a private case.
On June 1, Thomason issued subpoenas for access to Weaver's operating account, which is funded by taxpayers in Fannin, Gilmer and Pickens counties. On June 13, Thomason filed a records request for checks from Pickens County to Weaver's account. He wrote in the request that he had reason to believe the checks had been cashed illegally.
That same day, emails show, Pickens County Commission Chairman Rob Jones forwarded Thomason's request to Weaver. Weaver then forwarded it to Sosebee, as well as a district attorney's office investigator.
On June 17, Weaver emailed Jones and carbon copied Sosebee, multiple sheriffs, a GBI agent and commission chairmen for other counties. She said she had already requested a criminal investigation against Thomason for the records request he sent.
"The allegations that I or anyone in my office have 'illegally cashed checks' are absolutely false," Weaver wrote.
The next day, she sent emails to Sosebee's personal account. Around 10 a.m., she told Sosebee that the key to the criminal case is Thomason's statement in the records request that the checks had been cashed illegally. She also told Sosebee to question Fannin County Attorney Lynn Doss about giving copies of checks to Thomason — which Thomason then used to subpoena her operating account.
Weaver added: "Stookey needs to be questioned about how he got (a copy of) the check and his continued efforts to get more checks."
Later that day, Weaver's law clerk sent her an email with a state code section about the proper process for getting bank account information through a subpoena. The clerk told Weaver that the person issuing the subpoena needs to alert the owner of the bank account.
Weaver forwarded the message to Sosebee, with a note: "Stookey was required to give me notice and did not."
Stookey denied this, telling the Times Free Press that he called Weaver's assistant when the subpoenas had been issued. He said he left a message and didn't hear back from Weaver.
"I find it amazing that Judge Weaver has the audacity to use her judicial authority to direct her constituents how she wants things done," Thomason said upon learning about the emails.
Sosebee and Weaver did not return calls or emails seeking comment for this story. The two have been close for years. In 2001, after she graduated from law school, Sosebee worked as Weaver's law clerk. A year later, she began to practice law with Weaver's husband, George Weaver. She ran for district attorney in 2012, and George Weaver donated $1,000 to her campaign.
"She's clearly influencing the district attorney," Stookey said of Brenda Weaver.
In one email, Brenda Weaver wrote that she had been in contact with a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent about Thomason and Stookey's requests for bank account information. But on Wednesday, GBI Director of Public Affairs Scott Dutton said his office declined to look into the case because FBI agents are already investigating "the entire situation."
Contact Staff Writer Tyler Jett at 423-757-6476 or tjett@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @LetsJett.“When John saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees comting to where he was baptizing, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?'” — Matthew 3:7
“You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” — Matthew 12:34
“You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?” — Matthew 23:33
I’ve always thought that preaching against things can be too easy. It can galvanize an emotional response in a congregation by misdirecting emotion against earthly evil instead of directing it toward the love of Christ. It is the rhetoric of every charlatan, alarmist, conspiracy theorist, and rabble-rouser. Further, our political culture is increasingly marked by shrill, frequent denunciation, especially as a major election draws near, and the character of the Church’s public teaching ought to differ in tone and not just in content. Preachers should avoid drawing a congregation along by the cords of its worst self.
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But we can go wrong by not preaching against things, too. Most preachers are cowards — and I include myself in that category. Preaching only the positive aspects of the Gospel, ironically, keeps us from committing our whole selves to its clear ramifications in the life of our congregation. We can actually teach moral complacency by the example of our choices in the pulpit. After all, holding up a stark standard of good and bad means that we preachers would need to uphold that same standard in our own behavior — and we prefer to be as morally lazy as anyone else. We choose the broad and well-traveled sermon path of talking about God’s love and letting him sort out the ethics: not a path, interestingly enough, ever chosen by a biblical preacher.
Why do we need to preach against things as much as we need to preach the Gospel positively?
There are internal boundaries; and preachers need to be clear about them. For instance, preaching against adultery draws a clear boundary between right and wrong within the Christian community, a boundary that helps enforce biblical standards of behavior but which also provides a useful opportunity for expressing the boundary-crossing mercy of Jesus. A congregation that has never heard the sin of adultery — not necessarily the persons of adulterers — specifically denounced from the pulpit may not learn how bad it really is from the few times we sing the Decalogue during Lent or from the stray Gospel reading on the topic in our three-year lectionary cycle. This is especially true when pop culture and internal rationalization can convince us that biblical boundaries don’t apply to us any more.
Christians do actually stand against things. There is evil, and we cannot compromise with it. We do well to heed the insight of the civil rights movement that silence is complicity. It is a perilous but necessary prayer question for a preacher to ask: “Where, O God, am I complicit in my congregation’s sins? Where are our blind spots?”
Preachers need to be trained in a willingness to risk people’s displeasure. To take your employment in your hands and denounce a congregation’s favorite sin is an experience every preacher ought to have. It forges us into little John the Baptists who rely not on people but on God to take care of us when we honor his calling and his word.
There is abundant biblical precedent for preaching against evil. Jesus did it. John the Baptist did it. Peter’s sermons in Acts are not shy about denunciation. Jeremiah, God’s mouthpiece at a rather unpleasant juncture in salvation history, did little else. The biblical prophets and apostles were not afraid to give the proclamation of God’s word its proper edginess.
Repentance is absolutely necessary. Blessed is the preacher who can risk provoking anger in order to provoke repentance. Hitting the congregation too closely for comfort may mean we have to endure some blowback: but the spiritually wise congregation will actually desire this kind of challenge and miss it when it’s not there. Without a pointed challenge here and there, we never truly repent. And if we never repent, we never actually leave our sins behind, and that is a frightening prospect indeed.
It can improve our preaching style. Great rhetoricians and preachers mix positive proclamation and negative denunciation; they manage the two in a seamless flow that heightens meaning by contrast. They pound on the pulpit one moment and raise their hands in ecstasy the next. If we as preachers can’t generate emotion in our own hearts about the Gospel and against those things which stand against it, we must ask what we think we are doing behind the pulpit in the first place. Why would we want to preach God’s word if we do not feel passionately about it? And about the abrogation of it?
I’m not suggesting that negativity is a magic cure-all for dull sermons or dying churches. Negativity in the pulpit can be dangerous and counterproductive. Preachers who are pastors are rightly hesitant to use negative rhetoric because we consider it our job before God to weld his people together, not split them apart; and we know the positive power of encouragement over time. Negativity is very easily misunderstood and therefore is always an unstable element in a sermon — we can’t be sure it communicates what we want communicated. And preaching against something can overwhelm or distract from the Gospel message in a sermon.
Preaching is like handling dynamite: it can do great good, cause great harm, and can possibly blow up in your face. It would be safer — though far less productive — to avoid denouncing anything. But that’s not the example we have in Christ, and it’s not the Gospel to which we are called.
The featured image is “And I say unto you” (2014) by Neil Moralee. It is licensed under Creative Commons.Global emissions of greenhouse gases jumped 2.3 percent in 2013 to record levels, scientists reported Sunday, in the latest indication that the world remains far off track in its efforts to control global warming.
The emissions growth last year was a bit slower than the average growth rate of 2.5 percent over the past decade, and much of the dip was caused by an economic slowdown in China, which is the world’s single largest source of emissions. It may take an additional year or two to know if China has turned a corner toward slower emissions growth, or if the runaway pace of recent years will resume.
In the United States, emissions rose 2.9 percent, after declining in recent years.
The new numbers, reported by a tracking initiative called the Global Carbon Project and published in the journal Nature Geoscience |
, called for: "MG telling the civil servants to find a way to give NSN cash without delay."
Cummings went on to work for the charity on a freelance basis.
Sent after the election last May, his message goes on to say: "Labour has handed hundreds of millions to leftie orgs – if u guys cant navigate this thro the bureauc then not a chance of any new schools starting!!"
The existence of the email can be revealed as the first 24 free schools prepare to open their doors to pupils.
The first wave of free schools includes one which has the journalist Toby Young as its chair of governors, two Jewish faith schools, a Hindu school and a Sikh school. At least three of the schools – Discovery new school in West Sussex, St Luke's in north London, and Canary Wharf college – will have a Christian ethos. The Maharishi school in Lancashire, which was founded by the Beatles' guru Maharish Mahesh Yogi and teaches children to meditate, has become a state school as part of the programme.
The schools will be the most prominent part of the Tories' "big society" vision, although in many cases faith organisations, education companies or existing academy sponsors have taken the lead rather than groups of parents or teachers.
The government has declined to reveal the costs of funding individual free schools but estimates the overall budget for buildings at between £110m to £130m.
It has also declined requests under the Freedom of Information Act to identify the groups applying to open free schools next year.
In the email Cummings sets out a timetable for the creation of free schools.
He outlines a list of demands – from a "legislative/regulatory timetable" to a "big early july conference with hundreds coming (paid for by dcsf)".
Legislation to enable the creation of free schools was pushed through parliament last summer under procedures usually reserved for counter-terrorism measures. The government held a free schools conference – which David Cameron addressed by videolink – in January.
The message was addressed to Gove; his senior policy adviser Sam Freedman; Rachel Wolf, who heads the NSN; and Gove's special adviser Henry de Zoete.
Lisa Nandy, a Labour member of the education select committee, said: "This is definitive proof that this was a way of diverting taxpayers' money to pay for a political agenda, at a time when the government was making huge spending cuts. Just shortly after that grant was announced they cancelled Building Schools for the Future – it's pretty shocking.
"This confirms what many suspected, that there is a political agenda behind the decision to hand over the money to the NSN. Gove has serious questions to answer – this message is addressed to him, the money was handed over shortly afterwards in a fog of confusion."
A further leaked email reveals the blurred boundaries which existed between Gove's team and the New Schools Network.
In the email, Wolf is asked by one of Gove's staff to provide the prime minister with a "line to take" after a Tory councillor in Birmingham raised concerns that a free school in his city had the potential to be "socially divisive and undermine … community cohesion".
Wolf worked as a special adviser to Gove while he was shadow education secretary. The NSN website says it is an "independent charity" which has been given a government grant to act as the first point of contact with free school proposers.
Nandy said the email indicated the NSN had been given public money to act as "a propaganda machine for a political agenda".
"What they are asking for is a way to play down the negative impact of free schools. They gave this contract to the New Schools Network to provide independent, impartial advice to people setting up free schools. That should surely include advice on the downside of setting up new schools, not just the positive. They were given taxpayers' money in order to act as a propaganda machine for a political agenda."
The email from Cummings gives an indication of the attitude towards the civil service by those around Gove.
He writes that: "There needs to be an announcement soon about indicative timetables for new schools and what is going to be achieved before august. Forcing the conference in july will force the department to focus on it."
Another leaked email exchange indicates Cummings was closely involved in government work, showing he was invited to a "prep session" ahead of the spending review last October.
According to the emails, this involved "posing challenging questions to SoS [Gove] to ensure that his briefing is adequate and to iron out any detailed narrative."
Wolf said that Cummings started work for the NSN as a volunteer at the end of June, and freelanced for them from July to December last year.
She said: "He initially volunteered then we hired him as a freelancer paid by the half day. He did various projects – mostly publications, communications and strategy. He averaged about 10 days a month.
"We were always extremely clear about what specific jobs he was doing for us. He had a standard freelance contract like the others we hire. Those jobs were not about Michael [Gove] and politics. We hired him because he's really, really good and we know that he believes in what we're doing, and he helped us out a lot.
"I'm confident we didn't do anything that was inappropriate. We're obviously very mindful of our obligations as a charity."
Wolf said the NSN had not received any government funds since mid-July and was being financed entirely by donors.
Cummings said the NSN has "unique abilities", and without it there would not have been any free schools this year.
"It was no secret that I thought NSN should be funded as fast as possible so that new schools could open as fast as possible – I said the same thing to senior officials many times."
A Department for Education spokeswoman said the NSN was an established support group and "was best placed to help get the free schools policy off the ground quickly, and to help meet the demand of parents for good, new local schools".
She added: "It is legitimate for government departments to award grants to charities and other organisations in certain circumstances. This in line with procurement rules and the Department for Education has done this before."The House Finance Committee met Thursday afternoon to hear testimony regarding the amended RhodeWorks plan that has been proposed by the Rhode Island Department of Transportation. The bulk of the discussing centered around the changes made to this year's plan from the one that was voted on last year.
House Fiscal Director Sharon Reynolds Ferland outlined her assessment of the plan and was asked about the maximum any tractor trailer will get charged in tolls for traveling through the state under the new proposal.
"There are two maximums," Ferland said. "The first is $40 maximum in a 24-hour period. The second maximum is travel in one direction along the (Route) 95 corridor."
This year's proposal caps tolling for traveling in one direction along Route 95 at $20.50. That toll is only charged when the trucks travel from the Connecticut border and exits onto Route 295 in Massachusetts. That figure is down by more than half of the proposed figure in last year's version of the program.
Another hotly-debated topic focused on road and bridge repair, and how money will be generated to pay for it.
RIDOT Director Peter Alviti said that 22 percent, or one in five, of Rhode Island's 1,162 bridges are structurally deficient. Part of the proposal to raise money is to tax class 8 trucks or larger - tractor trailers - only.
"We want to be very clear. We have no intention of tolling cars. Not now, not ever," Alviti affirmed.
He also pointed out that a passenger car toll would require a referendum vote from the citizens, but the committee worries about if taxing only tractor trailers would leave the state open for a lawsuit.
"Federal law leaves it up to the states to determine the classes of vehicles and gives states the freedom to toll any class of vehicles that they so choose," said Alviti.
There is plenty of push-back from people who oppose tolling truckers at all, however. Ocean State Job Lot president Marc Perlman said budgeting for truck tolls will make it very difficult for his company to manage employee raises and continue its well-known charitable efforts.
Several dozen people testified in front of the Committee Thursday evening as House members considered their votes on the new proposal.Firefox 4 beta 3 for Mobile
It's only been about a month and a half since the last beta release, but it's already time to announce Firefox 4 beta 3 for mobile.
The beta is now available in the Android Market, which you can find by opening the Market application on your phone and searching for “Mozilla Firefox.” The Maemo builds are available for download here. There are more instructions over at the official blog post. The QR code to the left will take you to Firefox in the Android Market.
This beta improves performance over what's come before, and it also brings with it a long list of visible changes. In two areas in particular – Android integration and Sync – I think you'll notice a lot of improvement. Here's a list of what's most exciting!
Android integration
Notification icons in the system bar
Firefox now puts its own notifications, with icons, in the Android system bar. For now, the notifications pertain to add-ons and downloads (progress and notification of completion): Android keyboards
There are a number of variants of the Android virtual keyboard that are optimized for particular cases. In beta 3, Firefox lets you use the one that's appropriate, depending on what you're trying to do. For example, when you're using the URL field on the awesomescreen, the Android keyboard with a "Go" button will be used. Similarly, when searching for add-ons, a search button will be present. It goes beyond fields in the browser "chrome," too. The appropriate android keyboard will come up for field types like email, number, telephone, and URL in HTML5 forms. A native Android menu
Android users have the benefit of a permanent hardware menu button, so it makes sense to let them use it to get to secondary browser functionality. Everthing accessible through this menu is also available somewhere on the on-screen user-interface, but the Android menu button can provide quicker and more convenient access to these tools.
(The menu can also be extended by add-ons, of course, as in Matt Brubeck's Full Screen.) File pickers for uploading
Android phones don't come with File Manager apps, and smartphones in general these days try to de-emphasize the idea of a file system. This means that when a website asks you to browse for a file to upload, the browser has to offer something a little different than a desktop-style file picker. In Firefox on Android, you'll see a list like the one on the left below. If I select the Gallery because I want to upload an image, I get something like what's below on the right. Wrap text on zoom
I'm cheating with this list a little, in that this item doesn't quite fit here — it's not actually in beta 3. If you're a fan of the Android "reflow/wrap-text on zoom" behaviour, and would like it in Firefox, you can get something very similar by using an add-on called Easy Reading. We're looking into adding this behaviour to the browser, but you can get a head start and help test it out with the Add-on.
With beta 2, Firefox introduced a new more Android-like look; in beta 3, Firefox has taken more steps to have an Android-like feel.
Simpler Sync
Fast Setup
In the past, signing into Sync from your mobile has meant remembering and entering your username and password (to identify yourself) and your Sync Key (for encryption). This is great for privacy and security, but makes for a lot of fiddly typing on a small keyboard. In Firefox 4 beta 3, we've streamlined this process. To get going with Sync, you tap on "Connect" in the Sync prefs section (see below left). What comes up is a passcode (below right); you take this and enter it under "Add a device" in Firefox on a desktop system already associated with your Sync account. That's it - entering the code will pair Firefox on your mobile with your account. That code may look long, but remember — you're not doing any typing on a mobile device. If for some reason you can't get to a copy of Firefox that's paired with your account to enter the code, you can always do it the old way. Notice that you can set up and use your own custom sync server, if you want to.
For a more detailed description of the whys and hows of this new approach to Sync setup (called PAKE), Phillipp from the Sync team has a post here. Set it and forget it
Once it's done, that's it, really. You need never do anything to it again - Sync will just work in the background. If you want to turn it off for a while, you can just hit the "Enable Sync" switch. If you're so inclined, you can dig into "Details" for more, well, details.
Firefox Sync is one of the best things about using Firefox on your mobile, so we wanted to make sure that it was convenient to set up and completely simple to use.
The Miscellany
Copy and paste in the URL field
Firefox allows for long-tap copying, pasting, and selecting all (useful for deleting) in the awesomescreen's URL/search field:
When no suggestions, show searches
Usually, typing in the awesomescreen's field will show matches from your history, bookmarks, and tabs open on other computers. When Firefox can't find any matches for what you've typed, or can only find a couple, it will list your search engines so you can just tap and search. In the screenshot below, I have installed a number of the shown search engines; Twitter and Wikipedia, both part of the default set, are just off-screen. Save page as PDF now works on Android See more Add-ons in the Get Add-ons section of the Add-ons Manager
Opening links from other apps now works smoothly
Correct rendering of Arabic and Persian text (on devices with Arabic and Farsi fonts)
Content process crash reporting
Support for web APIs: localStorage and orientation events (new on Android)
Posted by madhava at December 22, 2010 01:35 AMOrganisms carrying beefed-up DNA code could be designed to churn out new forms of drugs that could otherwise not be made
The first living organism to carry and pass down to future generations an expanded genetic code has been created by American scientists, paving the way for a host of new life forms whose cells carry synthetic DNA that looks nothing like the normal genetic code of natural organisms.
Researchers say the work challenges the dogma that the molecules of life making up DNA are “special”. Organisms that carry the beefed-up DNA code could be designed to churn out new forms of drugs that otherwise could not be made, they have claimed.
“This has very important implications for our understanding of life,” said Floyd Romesberg, whose team created the organism at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. “For so long people have thought that DNA was the way it was because it had to be, that it was somehow the perfect molecule.”
From the moment life gained a foothold on Earth the diversity of organisms has been written in a DNA code of four letters. The latest study moves life beyond G, T, C and A – the molecules or bases that pair up in the DNA helix – and introduces two new letters of life: X and Y.
Romesberg started out with E coli, a bug normally found in soil and carried by people. Into this he inserted a loop of genetic material that carried normal DNA and two synthetic DNA bases. Though known as X and Y for simplicity, the artificial DNA bases have much longer chemical names, which themselves abbreviate to d5SICS and dNaM.
In living organisms, G, T, C and A come together to form two base pairs, G-C and T-A. The extra synthetic DNA forms a third base pair, X-Y, according to the study in Nature. These base pairs are used to make genes, which cells use as templates for making proteins.
Romesberg found that when the modified bacteria divided they passed on the natural DNA as expected. But they also replicated the synthetic code and passed that on to the next generation. That generation of bugs did the same.
“What we have now, for the first time, is an organism that stably harbours a third base pair, and it is utterly different to the natural ones,” Romesberg said. For now the synthetic DNA does not do anything in the cell. It just sits there. But Romesberg now wants to tweak the organism so that it can put the artificial DNA to good use.
“This is just a beautiful piece of work,” said Martin Fussenegger, a synthetic biologist at ETH Zurich. “DNA replication is really the cream of the crop of evolution which operates the same way in all living systems. Seeing that this machinery works with synthetic base pairs is just fascinating.”
The possibilities for such organisms are still up for grabs. The synthetic DNA code could be used to build biological circuits in cells which do not interfere with the natural biological function; scientists could make cells which use the DNA to manufacture proteins not known to exist in nature. The development could lead to a vast range of protein-based drugs.
The field of synthetic biology has been controversial in the past. Some observers have raised concerns that scientists could create artificial organisms which could then escape from laboratories and spark an environmental or health disaster.
More than 10 years ago, the scientsist Eckard Wimmer, at Stony Brook University, in New York, recreated the polio virus from scratch to highlight the dangers.
Romesberg said that organisms carrying his “unnatural” DNA code had a built-in safety mechanism. The modified bugs could only survive if they were fed the chemicals they needed to replicate the synthetic DNA. Experiments in the lab showed that without these chemicals, the bugs steadily lost the synthetic DNA as they could no longer make it.
“There are a lot of people concerned about synthetic biology because it deals with life, and those concerns are completely justified,” Romesberg said. “Society needs to understand what it is and make rational decisions about what it wants.”
Ross Thyer, at the University of Texas, in Austin, suggested the synthetic DNA could become an essential part of an organism’s own DNA. “Human engineering would result in an organism which permanently contains an expanded genetic alphabet, something that, to our knowledge, no naturally occurring life form has accomplished.
“What would such an organism do with an expanded genetic alphabet? We don’t know. Could it lead to more sophisticated storage of biological information? More complicated or subtle regulatory networks? These are all questions we can look forward to exploring.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014By Justin Gardner
In January, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) bowed to public pressure and published millions of once-classified documents online, so people could browse them “from the comfort of your own home.” On the face of it, this is a win for transparency, but in classic bureaucratic fashion, the documents say a lot without really telling us anything useful.
They are more like an amusing trip through the eccentricities and failures of a spy agency that gained immense power after WWII through virtually unlimited funding and little oversight. Assassinations, coups, drug running, torture, and economic sabotage are not the subject of these documents, but there is plenty about UFOs, a Penthouse interview that never happened, various banal diagrams, and psychics.
That last subject is interesting in light of America’s tumultuous history with Iran, beginning in 1953 when the US and UK overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh government, installing a puppet dictator to serve Western interests.
US intelligence agencies and the Pentagon got their first chance to use the psychic program, initiated in 1975, after Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy and took 52 US personnel hostage.
According to the Miami Herald:
Officially, the psychics worked for U.S. Army intelligence. But the documents in the CIA database make it clear their efforts were monitored — and supported — by a wide array of government intelligence agencies as well as top commanders at the Pentagon. They were even consulted before the super-secret U.S. military raid that attempted to free the hostages in April 1980, which ended in disaster when a plane and a helicopter collided at a desert staging area.
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Apparently, the CIA was not dissuaded of its fascination with extrasensory mind abilities after Project Mk Ultra – which engaged in illegal human experimentation – was allegedly shut down in 1973.
The psychic program was initiated in 1975 as a “foreign assessment” when the CIA heard rumors that China and Russia were experimenting with psychics. The program continued for 20 years under 10 different code names — ‘Grill Flame’ was one of them.
It continued despite that fact the psychics had, at best, a questionable rate of success when officials were able to compare psychic reports with information from the freed hostages in 1981. According to an Air Force colonel, only seven of the 202 psychic reports were proven correct, while 59 reports were partly or possibly correct.
The degree to which this was ‘dumb luck’ is unknown, but Army officers contested the pessimistic view. They said 45 percent of the reports were partially accurate, and “that was information that could not be obtained through normal intelligence collection channels. The degree of success appears to at least equal, if not surpass, other collection methods.”Multi-division success is a difficult achievement in the sport of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). It can turn a very good fighter in to a legend. Naming the fighters that have had legitimate success in more than one division isn’t a trivia question that will cause any brain cramps. There have been so few that it is easy to list off the likes of B.J. Penn, Randy Couture, Daniel Cormier, Dan Henderson and Robbie Lawler. But to be good in multiple divisions, often times, a fighter is great in one. And therein lies the question. When it comes to legacy, is it better to be an all-time great and stalwart in one division, or be an all-timer because of being good in more than one?
Randy Couture and B.J. Penn are viewed by many fans as two of the greatest fighters of all-time. Part of their acclaim comes from having been a UFC world champion in two different divisions. It is part of the lore of their legend. Penn went up a weight class and tested himself against bigger and equally skilled fighters. Couture went down a weight-class to fight stars of the time like Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz. Then he went back up to heavyweight. And then he went down again.
The debate on who are some of the greatest fighters of all-time is constantly evolving.
But I digress because, without a doubt, both men were stronger at one weight-class than the other. B.J. Penn is arguably the greatest lightweight fighter ever. While Randy Couture is one of the very best heavyweights the sport has ever seen. Would their legacies have been better served by staying in one weight-class? If they had held the same championship for many years, or had multiples reigns with the same belt, would the narrative on their careers be looked at differently? In the end they took the risk and went to other divisions and lost. And rarely is either man mentioned in the conversation for being one of the best pound for pound fighters ever (part of that could be from them fighting well past their prime years and leaving a losing lasting memory).
The debate of who are some of the greatest fighters of all-time is constantly evolving. Though names like Anderson Silva, Georges St. Pierre and Jon Jones are often bandied about. And the way things are going for Demetrious Johnson, it won’t be long before his name is added to the mix as well. The interesting link between all four men is that they have primarily fought in just one division during their UFC careers. Well, you may say “What about Anderson at 205 and ‘Mighty Mouse’ at 135?”
And you would have a point, but Silva fought just twice at light heavyweight and 19 times at middleweight. He also hasn’t tested the waters outside of 185 lbs. since 2009. Johnson has fought three times at bantamweight in the UFC. Though we all know that was more due to a lack of the existence of his optimal weight-class–flyweight. Since then he has only fought at 125 lbs., with no signs of any change coming soon.
There is something about having long and dominant reigns in one division that builds an all-time resume. Silva held his title a few months short of seven years. St. Pierre’s second reign lasted more than five years. Jones had his belt for just shy of four years before his personal addictions defeated him. And Johnson is in year four of his current title reign at flyweight.
Yet, all four men hit a ceiling in their divisions. They had dominated and defeated the best the weight-class had to offer, leading to bouts that garnered far less interest with viewers. It often leads to fans and pundits alike calling for a division change. All four men have that in common as well. Fans wanted to see them move up and test if they could dominate in the same fashion at a higher weight. “Rush” and “The Spider” both heard cries from fans for a super-fight between the two, but it never occurred. “Bones” has mentioned several times an interest in moving to heavyweight. But at light heavyweight he still remains. Now with Johnson having thoroughly cleaned out his division (arguably more than once) there is a desire from observers to see him leave the place he has dominated on a historic level.
Great in one division or good in multiple, what matters more?
While these men had more superior reigns of terror in their careers than Penn, Couture or Henderson, the latter group seems more fondly remembered for their divisional travels. There is a special appreciation accumulated from fans for fighters that test themselves on levels that may be illogical at times.
Current featherweight champion Conor McGregor may be setting himself on the path to legendary status due to taking part in both strategies. An excellent run in one division while looking to fight as far as two weight-classes above his optimal one.
In the end it frequently comes down to what the fighter wants to do, and what means more to them during their careers. So with that in mind, I took to the universal communication machine that is Twitter. And I asked several fighters, “As a fighter, what would mean more to you. Being an all-timer in one division (with Johnson at 125 lbs. as an example) or an all-timer that tests other divisions (with Penn representing that side)?” Here are some of their answers:
Josh Thomson – Former Strikeforce Lightweight Champion and current Bellator 155 lb. contender
@CheapSeatsChat for DJ, it’s time be tested other div. not enough top talent for him at 125. I’d love to see him fight Dillashaw, Cruz, etc. — Josh Thomson (@THEREALPUNK) May 19, 2016
Bubba Jenkins – NCAA Division I National Champion and Bellator featherweight contender
@CheapSeatsChat all-timer in anything or any weight would be amazing but different divisions shows more skill — Bubba Jenkins (@BubbaJenkinsMMA) May 19, 2016
Roxanne Modafferi – Womens MMA pioneer and veteran of Strikeforce, UFC and Invicta FC
I used to want to beat everyone ever, but now I realize that the strength difference puts me at a disadv. So only 1 https://t.co/Y0M5PlPpBi — Roxanne Modafferi (@Roxyfighter) May 20, 2016
Brandon Girtz – Bellator 155 lb. contender
All timer in 1 div is a great accomplishment, Being able to “Successfully” move in div’s is Legendary! #Penn https://t.co/rMm9XyNLxB — Brandon Girtz (@brandongirtzmma) May 19, 2016
Jenkins is accurate that being an all-timer in anything is “amazing”, making this debate more fun conversation, than legacy defining. But the topic is still thought provoking nonetheless. So what do you prefer more? Dominance in one division throughout a career? Or showing you are and all-timer by traversing different divisions? Vote in the poll below.The Juventus striker, Álvaro Morata, told Cadena SER about his dual objective for Saturday's final in Berlin against Barcelona.
"I'll try to win, because of what it means for Real Madrid fans as well".
If he manages to find the back of the net, Morata explained that it will not be special "because of having scored against Barça, but because of the importance of a Champions League final, it's an opportunity to go down in history".
When asked to pick between last year's final with Real Madrid and this one with Juve, Morata refused to express a preference. "The one in Lisbon is no more special than the one in Berlin. If you don't think a Champions League final is special, then you don't like football".
However, he did make a pick when asked who he would cross off the Barça team sheet if he could choose one player apart from Messi. "I'd cross off all of the Barcelona players, but Iniesta's the one I like the most", he said.Mumbai: The quantum of bad loans in the Indian banking system may not have peaked yet, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan warned, echoing the concern of analysts and bankers.
Rajan’s comment comes a day or two after rating companies Crisil Rating Ltd and Moody’s Investors Service warned of more pain for the Indian banking system. Crisil on Tuesday said the gross bad debt of the banking system will likely rise to 4.5% of total assets from 4.3% at the end of March 2015.
Moody’s India sovereign analyst Atsi Sheth warned that India’s sovereign rating could be affected if banks do not repair their asset quality.
Rajan, speaking at a news conference after the central bank’s board meeting in Goa, said the central bank was working with lenders to recognize and resolve these non-performing assets (NPAs), news agency Reuters reported.
One such measure the central bank has already taken is introducing a term-loan facility for infrastructure projects where loans can be reset every five years. Informally termed 5/25 for stretching a project loan to 25 years with a reset every five years, this scheme is expected to ease pressure on infrastructure companies.
Since such schemes ease the load on promoters to pay back, it is also a good way to keep banks’ balance sheet healthy. But technically, it is also a good way for banks to hide the bad debt numbers, Crisil fears.
The 5/25 scheme alone could mask bad loans of at least ₹ 80,000 crore in fiscal 2015-16, according to Crisil. If banks manage to hide more, the bad debt situation on paper will look healthier than that in 2014-15, Crisil said.
Out of 39 publicly traded banks in India, 29 have reported fourth-quarter earnings so far and the bad debt numbers show no sign of improving, although the pace of accumulating bad debts may have slowed a bit.
In the quarter ended 31 March, gross NPAs of these banks grew 28.8% to ₹ 1.81 trillion from ₹ 1.4 trillion in the year-ago quarter. They grew 3.3% over the third quarter ended December. Interestingly, slippages, or good loans turning bad in the quarter, came down for some banks.
Banks continue to restructure a large number of loans, though, an analyst said. “This shows the stress is far from over," said Abhishek Kothari, an analyst with Quant Capital, adding that he expects bad assets to peak in the next two-three quarters.
At least 15% of restructured assets soon fall back to the NPA category.
Infrastructure logjam
According to RBI’s annual report released in June 2014, six sectors account for the majority of bad debt in Indian banks: infrastructure, metals, textiles, chemicals, engineering and mining. The six account for only 30% of the total credit, but 36% of the total bad debts in bank books.
Bankers attribute this to the slower-than-expected recovery in the economy and cheap import of commodities and steel from countries such as China and Russia.
“Domestic companies can’t produce at a cheaper rate than the cheap imports. How can you expect our companies to generate positive cash flow when there is no demand and, at the same time, countries like China dumping finished goods like steel?" asked Bank of Baroda’s managing director and CEO Ranjan Dhawan, while presenting his bank’s results on Tuesday. “We have only one exceptional client in our bank who wants to set up a power plant, but otherwise I haven’t seen a single greenfield project coming up. Who will want to expand capex in this environment?."
Moody’s managing director for corporate finance, Philipp L. Lotter, said in an interview on Wednesday that infrastructure projects would take time to generate cash flow even if the government’s efforts to improve coal and gas availability show results.
Issues related to land acquisition, fuel availability and environmental approvals held up projects, but the National Democratic Alliance government that took over in May last year has tried to address some of the issues. However, several analysts and executives maintain that there has been no change on the ground.
RBI’s hand
That may require RBI to play a hand, say analysts.
“Token rate cuts will not help. We need to see at least 100-150 basis points cut from the RBI because interest cost has become a major drain for companies in the infrastructure and manufacturing sectors," said Vaibhav Agrawal, vice-president (research) at Angel Broking Pvt. Ltd. “Take a manufacturing company with a debt-to equity ratio of 3:1, servicing its loans at a minimum of 12-13%. Now factor in project delays and multiply the cost for a few years more. The damage done by high interest cost will be evident. Now that inflation has fallen and commodity prices have fallen sharply, RBI should take the risk of cutting rates drastically," Agrawal said.
Agrawal does not see asset quality improving in the next six to nine months at least, but expects companies in metals, power, and minerals to show some greenshoots of recovery in a year’s time as positive reforms in these sectors take effect in the coming months.
Ashwin Ramarathinam contributed to this story.NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — A young woman was targeted by nearly two dozen attackers on a Brooklyn street.
The victim said the brutal assault seemed to have no motive beyond cruelty.
“I was getting dragged to the ground, punched left and right,” Jennifer Medina said speaking exclusively with CBS2’s Valerie Castro.
Medina’s walk home from the train station after school last week turned into a violent assault. Her attackers got away with her cell phone battery, a pair of headphones, and her sense of security.
“I’m more aware now, I and I look back, I always look back now,” she said.
Medina was left with cuts and bruises and a scraped up back.
“I thought my neck was broken because of all the pain because I got kicked in the head,” she said.
Police said the group of at least 20 teenagers attacked Medina on Fourth Avenue near St. Mark’s Place in Boerum Hill.
Surveillance video captured the faces of a few of the teenage boys and girls.
The group surrounded Median and began to taunt her.
“They was like ‘oh, what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it,” she recalled.
After the assault the attackers smashed her phone on the ground and ran away.
“I think they just decided to do that because they didn’t have anything better to do with their lives,” she said.
Medina said her biggest concern is for her little sister, who she said walks around the neighborhood to get home from school.Welcome to the Commonwealth of Kentucky's Online Voter Registration.
You may use this system to: 1) Register to vote in Kentucky or 2) Update your current registration record.
Important Information:
Required information will be marked with an asterisk ( * ). For a new registration, you are not officially registered to vote until the electronic application is approved by your county clerk. For a change to an existing registration, your information will not be changed until the electronic application is approved by your county clerk. If your registration application is accepted, the county clerk will send you confirmation, by mail, of your registration/change and notify you of your polling location.
Privacy Information:
Your application may be subject to public inspection or copying pursuant to the Kentucky Open Records Act, KRS 61.870 to 61.884, and KRS 116.095. However, your electronic mail address and social security number are exempt from disclosure.Police want the public’s assistance in finding the suspect in an attempted-murder investigation after a man carrying a baby was shot three times in the torso and abdomen Saturday night in Scarborough.
The man was shot on Madelaine Ave., near Pharmacy and Danforth Aves., around 9 p.m. According to police, he was walking with four women, a child and two infants, one of which he was holding, when the gunman approached him.
The shooter fled the scene on foot. The suspect is described as a black male, about 30 years old, 5-feet-8 or 5-feet-9 and weighing 140-150 pounds, and wearing blue jeans and a dark hoodie.
Police reported soon after the shooting that the victim was conscious and breathing when he was rushed to St. Michael’s Hospital, where he was said Saturday to be in serious but stable condition.
Anyone with information is being asked to call police at 416-808-4100, or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 416-222-8477.In this retrospective before-after clinical study, we compared the outcome and clinical course of consecutive septic patients treated with intravenous vitamin C, hydrocortisone, and thiamine during a 7-month period (treatment group) with a control group treated in our ICU during the preceding 7 months. The primary outcome was hospital survival. A propensity score was generated to adjust the primary outcome.
Results
There were 47 patients in both treatment and control groups, with no significant differences in baseline characteristics between the two groups. The hospital mortality was 8.5% (4 of 47) in the treatment group compared with 40.4% (19 of 47) in the control group (P <.001). The propensity adjusted odds of mortality in the patients treated with the vitamin C protocol was 0.13 (95% |
out. When we do this, here’s the giant chunk of code that gets spit out:
/*QUOTE ANIMATION*/.quote:nth-child(1) { -webkit-animation: quoteshift 30s 0s infinite linear; -moz-animation: quoteshift 30s 0s infinite linear; -ms-animation: quoteshift 30s 0s infinite linear; -o-animation: quoteshift 30s 0s infinite linear; animation: quoteshift 30s 0s infinite linear; }.quote:nth-child(2) { -webkit-animation: quoteshift 30s 10s infinite linear; -moz-animation: quoteshift 30s 10s infinite linear; -ms-animation: quoteshift 30s 10s infinite linear; -o-animation: quoteshift 30s 10s infinite linear; animation: quoteshift 30s 10s infinite linear; }.quote:nth-child(3) { -webkit-animation: quoteshift 30s 20s infinite linear; -moz-animation: quoteshift 30s 20s infinite linear; -ms-animation: quoteshift 30s 20s infinite linear; -o-animation: quoteshift 30s 20s infinite linear; animation: quoteshift 30s 20s infinite linear; } /*KEYFRAMES*/ @keyframes "quoteshift" { 0% { -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=0)"; filter: alpha(opacity=0); opacity: 0; } 2% { -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=100)"; filter: alpha(opacity=100); opacity: 1; } 31% { -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=100)"; filter: alpha(opacity=100); opacity: 1; } 33% { -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=0)"; filter: alpha(opacity=0); opacity: 0; } 100% { -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=0)"; filter: alpha(opacity=0); opacity: 0; } } @-moz-keyframes quoteshift { 0% { filter: alpha(opacity=0); opacity: 0; } 2% { filter: alpha(opacity=100); opacity: 1; } 31% { filter: alpha(opacity=100); opacity: 1; } 33% { filter: alpha(opacity=0); opacity: 0; } 100% { filter: alpha(opacity=0); opacity: 0; } } @-webkit-keyframes "quoteshift" { 0% { filter: alpha(opacity=0); opacity: 0; } 2% { filter: alpha(opacity=100); opacity: 1; } 31% { filter: alpha(opacity=100); opacity: 1; } 33% { filter: alpha(opacity=0); opacity: 0; } 100% { filter: alpha(opacity=0); opacity: 0; } } @-ms-keyframes "quoteshift" { 0% { -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=0)"; filter: alpha(opacity=0); opacity: 0; } 2% { -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=100)"; filter: alpha(opacity=100); opacity: 1; } 31% { -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=100)"; filter: alpha(opacity=100); opacity: 1; } 33% { -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=0)"; filter: alpha(opacity=0); opacity: 0; } 100% { -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=0)"; filter: alpha(opacity=0); opacity: 0; } } @-o-keyframes "quoteshift" { 0% { filter: alpha(opacity=0); opacity: 0; } 2% { filter: alpha(opacity=100); opacity: 1; } 31% { filter: alpha(opacity=100); opacity: 1; } 33% { filter: alpha(opacity=0); opacity: 0; } 100% { filter: alpha(opacity=0); opacity: 0; } } 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 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 /*QUOTE ANIMATION*/. quote : nth - child ( 1 ) { - webkit - animation : quoteshift 30s 0s infinite linear ; - moz - animation : quoteshift 30s 0s infinite linear ; - ms - animation : quoteshift 30s 0s infinite linear ; - o - animation : quoteshift 30s 0s infinite linear ; animation : quoteshift 30s 0s infinite linear ; }. quote : nth - child ( 2 ) { - webkit - animation : quoteshift 30s 10s infinite linear ; - moz - animation : quoteshift 30s 10s infinite linear ; - ms - animation : quoteshift 30s 10s infinite linear ; - o - animation : quoteshift 30s 10s infinite linear ; animation : quoteshift 30s 10s infinite linear ; }. quote : nth - child ( 3 ) { - webkit - animation : quoteshift 30s 20s infinite linear ; - moz - animation : quoteshift 30s 20s infinite linear ; - ms - animation : quoteshift 30s 20s infinite linear ; - o - animation : quoteshift 30s 20s infinite linear ; animation : quoteshift 30s 20s infinite linear ; } /*KEYFRAMES*/ @ keyframes "quoteshift" { 0 % { - ms - filter : "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=0)" ; filter : alpha ( opacity = 0 ) ; opacity : 0 ; } 2 % { - ms - filter : "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=100)" ; filter : alpha ( opacity = 100 ) ; opacity : 1 ; } 31 % { - ms - filter : "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=100)" ; filter : alpha ( opacity = 100 ) ; opacity : 1 ; } 33 % { - ms - filter : "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=0)" ; filter : alpha ( opacity = 0 ) ; opacity : 0 ; } 100 % { - ms - filter : "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=0)" ; filter : alpha ( opacity = 0 ) ; opacity : 0 ; } } @ - moz - keyframes quoteshift { 0 % { filter : alpha ( opacity = 0 ) ; opacity : 0 ; } 2 % { filter : alpha ( opacity = 100 ) ; opacity : 1 ; } 31 % { filter : alpha ( opacity = 100 ) ; opacity : 1 ; } 33 % { filter : alpha ( opacity = 0 ) ; opacity : 0 ; } 100 % { filter : alpha ( opacity = 0 ) ; opacity : 0 ; } } @ - webkit - keyframes "quoteshift" { 0 % { filter : alpha ( opacity = 0 ) ; opacity : 0 ; } 2 % { filter : alpha ( opacity = 100 ) ; opacity : 1 ; } 31 % { filter : alpha ( opacity = 100 ) ; opacity : 1 ; } 33 % { filter : alpha ( opacity = 0 ) ; opacity : 0 ; } 100 % { filter : alpha ( opacity = 0 ) ; opacity : 0 ; } } @ - ms - keyframes "quoteshift" { 0 % { - ms - filter : "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=0)" ; filter : alpha ( opacity = 0 ) ; opacity : 0 ; } 2 % { - ms - filter : "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=100)" ; filter : alpha ( opacity = 100 ) ; opacity : 1 ; } 31 % { - ms - filter : "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=100)" ; filter : alpha ( opacity = 100 ) ; opacity : 1 ; } 33 % { - ms - filter : "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=0)" ; filter : alpha ( opacity = 0 ) ; opacity : 0 ; } 100 % { - ms - filter : "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=0)" ; filter : alpha ( opacity = 0 ) ; opacity : 0 ; } } @ - o - keyframes "quoteshift" { 0 % { filter : alpha ( opacity = 0 ) ; opacity : 0 ; } 2 % { filter : alpha ( opacity = 100 ) ; opacity : 1 ; } 31 % { filter : alpha ( opacity = 100 ) ; opacity : 1 ; } 33 % { filter : alpha ( opacity = 0 ) ; opacity : 0 ; } 100 % { filter : alpha ( opacity = 0 ) ; opacity : 0 ; } }
As I mentioned before, our use of the opacity property is a little suspect because opacity support is a mess. Fortunately, Prefixr takes the lead on this and tries to ensure that our code is primed to work on as many browsers as possible. Unfortunately, it does go a little overboard by inserting all of those filter properties where they aren’t necessarily needed, so some clean up might be a good idea.
Selectivizr
We used some advanced selectors in the tutorial, so while we’re on the topic of browser support, I should point out that you’ll need to add Selectivizr and jQuery to your project to make sure older browser understand these.
Keyframe Support
Here’s the kicker, we’ve gone through all of this to make sure that we’ve maxed out our browser support on selectors and opacity, but in the end IE is still going to refuse to play along because there’s no keyframe support until IE 10.
Obviously, JavaScript is going to be the answer here if you’re going to use this in the real world. You can either do the whole thing in JS or simply use it as a backup for browsers that don’t support keyframes.
Demo
Here’s the live demo. Be sure to wait a while when you launch it, remember that the entire animation takes thirty seconds!
Demo: Click here to launch
Conclusion
Keyframes have come a long way since the days when they were only supported by Webkit browsers. However, keep in mind that because of our old friend IE, they’re still more in the realm of “fun to play with” than something you should bank on for important projects.
Leave a comment below and let us know if you enjoyed this tutorial and how you would improve it!When we look at the samples, that's exactly what we find. The auto mode often failed to sufficiently correct white balance, leaving us with excessively cold outdoor images and pinky-orange indoor ones. Noise affected pretty much every shot to some degree, even at ISO 100, and it became a serious issue beyond ISO 800 due to the overcrowding of those 16 million pixels on the sub-half-inch CMOS chip. Considering that you can get an APS-C Nikon D5100 with a kit lens and the same resolution for $580 these days, or a pedigree fixed-lens compact like the Fujifilm X10 for $550, or a Sony NEX-5N mirrorless ILC for $480, it's impossible for the Galaxy Camera's relatively cheap photographic components to put up a fight.
On the other hand, you could say that's an uneven contest. After all, aside from Samsung's habitual overpricing of its cameras, the money that goes on the non-photographic aspects of the Galaxy Camera is hardly being wasted -- it's just being invested in a different set of talents. If we shift the comparison to smartphones like the Galaxy S III, it's obvious that the Galaxy Camera is in a different league than any traditional mobile device.
Combined with the long lens, the larger sensor opens up a world of different shot opportunities and also allows some shallow depth of field. It has better dynamic range and tends to capture and preserve more data per shot, even after you correct for the difference in resolution -- for example the 16-megapixel image of the tomatoes above weighed 4.2MB on the Galaxy Camera and only 1.7MB on the 8-megapixel Galaxy S III. Although the video data rate is broadly the same across both devices, at just over 2 MB/s, the optical stabilization in the Galaxy Camera means that data is used to capture detail rather than the chaotic motion of camera wobble, and the resultant video is actually very good. The stabilization also helps with stills -- we were able to pull off 1/10s low-light shots with virtually no visible shake. The only slight issue with video recording is that audio volume dips noticeably when you engage the zoom, which is something you'll hear in the video below.
Ultimately, we have to conclude that image quality is good enough for the intended audience -- people who are more interested in getting up close to a subject and capturing a moment, and then tweaking and sharing the resulting image, rather than creating something particularly polished. Many of the images from this camera will even be deliberately subjected to low-fi filters and effects before they're shared on Instagram and other platforms, so raw quality just isn't going to be what counts.
Performance and battery life
There may well be some users who want to use the Galaxy Camera as their primary Android device -- perhaps alongside a small-screened smartphone that isn't great for typing and other non-phone tasks. In that scenario, battery life will be important in exactly the same way as it is on a smartphone or tablet, so we ran our usual looped-video rundown test. Due to a network issue at the time, we disabled cellular data but left WiFi and GPS switched on.
As it turns out, battery life is limited enough that you'll probably want to ration wireless connectivity and only use it as when you need it. With a duration of just six hours and 40 minutes, the Galaxy Camera doesn't last nearly as long as the GS III with WiFi, GPS and cellular data enabled. The gap between the 1,650mAh and 2,100mAh batteries is a big one, and it's likely that the GS III's HD Super AMOLED panel is also more power efficient, in part thanks to its lower brightness.
Bear in mind that you'll need to divvy up that battery capacity between Android usage and actual photography. We were able to drain the battery in just four hours after snapping 115 photos and three minutes of HD video, alongside some heavy editing and sharing over WiFi tethering and WiFi direct. Reducing the amount of browsing and general screen use made a huge difference, especially when we powered off the screen between each shot. This approach gave us 146 shots and 6 minutes of HD video and we still had 40 percent of the battery left. Depending on how you're likely to use the Galaxy Camera, you can count on either charging it every day like a power-hungry smartphone, or carrying a USB power pack or spare battery. Fortunately, the battery is identical to that in the original Galaxy S II, so buying $10 spares should be a cinch.
The upside of all of this wattage is that you're getting an extremely fast and fluid widescreen Jelly Bean experience. We had one crash, and a couple of strange slow-downs, but for the most part every aspect of the camera ran as quickly as the GS III. The processor also allows you to launch the camera app and take a shot within two seconds of tapping the button. It can also pull off a confirmed four frames-per-second at full-res with fixed focus and a maximum burst of 20 shots.
Galaxy Camera Galaxy S III Galaxy Note II Nexus 7 Quadrant Advanced 5,830 5,852 6,819 3,501 Vellamo 2 HTML5 1,674 1,565 1,831 1,650 AnTuTu 12,006 11,960 13,539 8,954 SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms) 1,209 1,170 (1,460) 1,023 1,785 GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt HD C24Z16 Offscreen (fps) 15 15 17 -- CF-Bench 12,910 13,110 15,267 11,807 Battery life 6:40 9:02 10:45 9:49 Lower SunSpider scores are better. Scores in brackets were recorded before a recent update.
Software
Let's get back to that original question: why bother having Android on a camera? When it's implemented properly, as Samsung has achieved here, the answer to that question is something you feel as soon as you switch on the device. Instead of some clunky traditional camera interface, you'll be welcomed by your own, deliciously customizable environment. Favorite shots can be deployed as wallpaper; slideshow widgets can cycle through your recent photos and those of your friends; your most commonly used image editing and sharing apps can be positioned where you need them; the default keyboard can even be switched to one of your choice, making it easier to tag, rename and caption photos you intend to put online.
You feel more creative and more connected to photography.
The overall effect is to make you feel more creative and more connected to photography, to the point where Samsung's marketing about a "new visual communication era" actually has a ring of truth to it. It's hard to explain, but there's just something fundamentally different and exciting about looking at people's Instagram shots on a device that is so powerfully equipped for taking pictures of your own, with no other hardware or file transfers getting in the way.
On a side note, it would have been nice to use the zoom within the Instagram app, especially since Samsung said the app was being tweaked to allow that, but there's no sign of such a feature. Twiddling the zoom now only changes device volume, as it does anywhere except within Samsung's own camera app.
That's right -- there's no "camera mode" as such. To take a shot you simply launch the camera app, whose icon is permanently positioned on the lower-left corner of each home screen. Alternatively, you can press the shutter release to get the same effect. Either way, it takes less than two seconds for the lens protector to flip open, the barrel to pop out and for the camera to be able to focus and pull off a shot. The shooting interface itself is simple and uncluttered, but heavily geared towards auto and scene-based photography.
The main controls are located on the left side of the screen, which displays the current mode, a dial for choosing a different mode, as well as onscreen triggers for movie recording and shutter release (which behaves identically to the physical shutter release but is sometimes more convenient). Auto mode is pretty good, but we found that it often misjudged color balance and tended towards overexposure. Any discontent with Auto's results will lead you to the second easy-to-use mode, known as Smart. This brings together no fewer than 15 separate shooting styles -- not just scene-based profiles (e.g., Macro, Silhouette, Landscape), but also capture modes (Continuous Shot, Best Shot, HDR / Rich Tone), stitching options (Panorama, Best face) and effects (like Beauty face, which claims to smooth out imperfections). This might sound bewildering, but it quickly makes sense to organize things this way, and more importantly each Smart mode is pretty effective at getting the result you're looking for.
Finally, if you're still not satisfied with what Smart mode can do, then you'll need to resort to the least intuitive of the three modes: Expert, which obliterates the screen with a range of onscreen dials covering P / S / A / M mode, ISO, exposure compensation, aperture and shutter speed. Depending on which priority mode you pick, one or more of these dials will be greyed out and inaccessible, because it's under the camera's control. In full Manual, the exposure compensation dial will be inaccessible and used to display the degree to which, by the camera's reckoning, you are over- or under-exposing. Overall, it's a logical system that stays faithful to how proper cameras work, and it's essential for creative control, but compared to physical dials it's still very tricky to hit good manual settings quickly or in response to changing conditions -- not least because the preview of the shot is obscured by all the dials and, well, there's just so much tapping.
When it comes to looking back at your shots, the stock gallery app is no different to that on Samsung's latest smartphones and tablets, but it proves its worth on this device. When you're looking at a single image, there are just four main image-related buttons along the top right of the screen and they're all well thought out. The Share button brings up a list of all the installed apps that can be used to share or exploit a photo -- for example, if you install Evernote on the camera then this button will give you the option of creating a note out of the photo you're looking at. The second button is a shortcut to the method of sharing you used last -- so if you mostly use Facebook to share a picture, then the second button will likely be the Facebook logo. The third button is a quick and painless Delete, while the fourth button brings up an extensive menu that covers pretty much everything else you'd want to do with a photo: including basic crop, rotate and rename functions, and opening the photo in one of the two bundled editing apps to carry out more complicated refinements (there's Photo Wizard which is smart and easy to use, or Paper Artist which is for mostly gimmicky effects). Of course, you can use any app you like to tailor your images -- the entire Android ecosystem is at your disposal.
It's hard to go back to the closed-off, one-trick ways of a traditional shooter.
It should be clear by now that the software on this camera isn't just a bonus -- it's the Galaxy Camera's defining feature, and it's so engrossing that it's hard to go back to the closed-off, one-trick ways of a traditional shooter. But things hopefully won't stop there: now that Samsung has signaled its willingness to let third-party developers design apps specifically for this camera module, we can envisage a multitude of ways in which it could be made better suited to a range of niche users -- from tech bloggers to realtors, location scouts and untold others who'll want automated scripts for resizing, watermarking and filing photos; remote control apps; and who knows what else. Of course, that'll only happen if the popularity of this camera reaches a tipping point. And, as we've seen by now, there are serious limitations to this device -- namely its price, image quality and battery life -- that may prevent that from happening.
Wrap-up
This is a tricky thing to evaluate. On the one hand, if we had $500 to spend on a camera of this size, we'd be more likely to spend it on a sophisticated mirrorless model that delivers better image quality. Alternatively, if we needed a cheap compact, we might opt for the Samsung WB850F, which has WiFi connectivity and the same lens and sensor as the Galaxy Camera, but costs half the price. The fact that we're paying so much money to dupe expensive components already used in smartphones, and that we'd have to spend at least $10 per month extra to get a basic data plan and make use of that SIM slot, all weighs heavily against the Galaxy Camera as a practical purchase.
If the device were smaller and lighter, perhaps with a 4.3-inch panel and a shorter zoom, and if it was priced only slightly higher than a regular non-Android compact (perhaps at $300 or $350), we could imagine it being more mainstream. But alas, that's not what we're looking at right now.
On the other hand, it wouldn't be right to just dismiss something that is so much fun to use. The combination of decent compact camera hardware and the latest version of Android is not only powerful; it's also seriously enjoyable, and it may result in the casual photographer spending far more time perfecting and sharing their pictures than they ever did before. We see it like this: Unless you're a dedicated hobbyist or you're taking photographs for your job, the creativity involved in editing and sharing a photo tends to be a fragile thing. The slightest inconvenience in switching out an SD card, or the boredom of waiting for a file to transfer, could be enough to make someone quit the task at hand and do something more urgent. So, if you've got a wad of notes to spare and you're intent on preserving and sharing the type of photos and videos that even the best smartphone can't achieve, the Galaxy Camera is bound to be rewarding.
(Note: you can find the full sample images of Thailand here.)
Zach Honig contributed to this review.Having visited many middle and high schools, I think these same rules could -- and probably should -- be posted there as well.
I was recently in a third grade classroom and was struck by the presence of rules that were posted for how to have a conversation. The poster said, "Each person must contribute to the discussion but take turns talking. Ask each other, 'Would you like to add to my idea?' or 'Can you tell us what you are thinking?' Ask questions so that you understand each other's ideas. Say, 'Can you tell me more about that?' or 'Can you say that in another way?'"
Maybe you have also observed how common it is nowadays for students to not know how to have a conversation. Perhaps this owes to a preponderance of talk shows in which people with different opinions rarely listen to each other, instead preferring to out-shout their opponent. Maybe it is due to changed dinner habits where more families are eating on the go rather than sitting down together and catching up on each other's day. It could be about how texting and tweeting now trump talking and listening as today's preferred forms of communication.
8 Tips for Speaking and Listening
While it is impossible to know all of the reasons, there is no doubt that learning to listen and talk is an extremely important way to broaden knowledge, enhance understanding and build community. Perhaps this is why the core standards in English-language arts include an important emphasis on developing speaking and listening, the basic tools for conversation. The eight tips below can be used regularly to help your kids learn good conversational skills.
1. Model a Good Conversation
Make a point of having one-to-two minute interactions, one-on-one, at least a few times each week with students who struggle conversationally. Share information about yourself as you might when meeting a friend or acquaintance, and show interest in the student by asking questions about his or her interests. Conversation enhancers include responses and prompts like:
"Really?"
"Wow!"
"That’s interesting."
"No kidding!"
If these students don't or won't share easily at first, don't give up.
2. Encourage Physical Cues
Identify procedures for having a conversation that includes appropriate non-verbal behavior. For example, you might teach a strategy like S.L.A.N.T. (Sit up straight. Listen. Answer and ask questions. Nod to show interest. Track the speaker.)
3. Challenge Put-Downs or Hurtful Comments
For example, if a student says, "I think what she did was really stupid," challenge with "How else can you say that without being hurtful?" If the student seems unaware, teach an alternative like, "I disagree with that." Ask the student to repeat what you said and then move on to:
"What happened to make you feel that way?"
"How would you have handled things differently?"
"Do you think there is only right answer, or could there be more?"
4. Ask Open-Ended Questions
These are questions without one correct answer, questions that stimulate discussion and can be a very powerful way to reinforce the idea that there are different views of an issue, or a set of beliefs that can be equally valid. For example: "So if Columbus came knocking on your door and told you that sailing to the New World would be an amazing adventure and there might be lots of riches there, but you might never arrive because the world was flat, would you go?"
5. Put Thinking Ahead of Knowing
When asked a question, don’t accept "I don't know." Tell students that you don't require them to "know" but that you do expect them to "think." Teach them how to wonder aloud, speculate, guess or give the best answer they can. ("I'm not sure about that, but I think _____.")
6. Have Informal Chats
Before class begins or in the hallway, ask students about their other classes, what they think about a current event, or how they feel about the outcome of a game. Share your thoughts as well. ("I thought it was more that the Jets lost the game than anything the Eagles did to win. How did you see it?")
7. Make Eye Contact
When a student is speaking in class and you are listening, give him or her your eye contact. However, gradually scan away from the speaker and direct your gaze and movement towards other students. This will often get the speaker to redirect his or her talk toward peers, and it invites peers to get and stay involved with what's being said.
8. Encourage Turn-Taking
Use an object, such as a talking stick, as a signal for turn-taking. Teach your students that when they have the object, it is their turn to talk or pass while others are expected to listen.
How do you help your students become better speakers and listeners? Please share your strategies in the comments section below.After the shredding, a moment of silence to those gone before their time. Plus: John Mayer.
Night two of the Grateful Dead’s Fare Thee Well run-up got off to a funky and ferocious start. The cobwebs were shaken loose, the groove found its pocket in opener “Feel Like a Stranger,” and all was well in Deadhead land as the truly faithful showed for the second night in a row and a slew of new nostalgia seekers and first timers got their twirl on.
And twirl they did through surefire crowd-pleasers like “Brown-Eyed Women,” “Alabama Getaway” and “Hell in a Bucket,” each of which saw Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio finally able to stretch out, intensifying his playing patiently as jams wound around to a crescendo or an expected twist. Clearly relishing in the moment -- perhaps better able to process playing alongside the "core four" -- he never stopped smiling.
Grateful Dead Fare Thee Well: 5 Hours of Intermission Music Written
for 50th Anniversary Shows
On “Hell in a Bucket” in particular, Anastasio let it rip -- to bassist Phil Lesh’s visible surprise – and it was not lost on the Phish fans in the crowd that the song was likely a favorite of his from his pre-fame days.
But fame follows Anastasio, a guitar hero on a similar plane to the late Jerry Garcia, who held his own on the previous night but truly shined on Sunday. The slower songs provided an open door to his signature shreds and soaring note extensions, particularly on favorites “Row Jimmy” and “Wharf Rat,” the latter of which came at the start of set two.
A highlight of the night: the moving “He’s Gone” with its three-part harmonies and especially poignant message “nothing’s gonna bring him back.” The refrain hit home, binding band to fan to man up above.
That’s not to say there weren’t missteps. Relegating Anastasio to rhythm keeper on the anthemic “Eyes of the World,” a song so well-suited for his voice he should consider introducing it in Phish sets, was one. Vocals were handled by Lesh, who in an attempt to either sing in his range or alter the main melody for no apparent reason, fell short in the frontman department.
Tales of a Grateful Dead Virgin: Justin Bieber Musical Director
Dan Kanter on Fare Thee Well
Who knows, maybe Anastasio is pulling a reverse-Dave Grohl, putting aside his frontman status to be a player in the band. No one seemed to mind, of course, especially with “Sugar Magnolia” next on the set list.
Not to disappoint, a rollicking, crunchy take on the song that's a staple of the Dead's live canon took shape, with the swell of organs, courtesy of groove maestros Bruce Hornsby and Jeff Chimenti -- driving it to even greater heights as Anastasio's marathon playing elicited among the most enthusiastic cheers of the night.
But it wasn't all about Trey, as Bob Weir made sure to remind the crowd with a request for "a moment of silence in memory of those who couldn't be here tonight." And credit is due to the "core four," which also include drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, for reapproaching these songs with the added collective experience of 20-plus years playing on their own and in Dead offshoots and opening the door to new interpretations by their heirs apparent -- be that Phish on this round, perhaps John Mayer on the next and more after.
Grateful Dead 50th Anniversary: All Our Coverage
Speaking of Mayer, he was spotted in the "friends and family" VIP viewing area on the floor, singing along "pretty much the entire time," one observer noted. "He knew all the words." Also in the house was singer-songwriter Harper Simon, son of Paul Simon, who was still coming down from Saturday night, elated to have heard a song from each of the Dead's first three albums. That the band's choices pre-dated his birth was the best gift Harper, the head, could hope for.
To that end, it was fully expected that the last song of night would be the beloved "Brokedown Palace." After all, it includes the line after which this run of shows is named and was generally considered to be one of the band's strongest regular closers. The band clearly took the responsibility to heart, slowing the song to a crawl that allowed its intricate beauty to bloom and build.
The gentle encore proved a perfect cap to the supergroup's practice run, with all systems ago for the main event in Chicago five days away. Which glaring omissions will find their way to the set -- "China Cat," "Ripple," "Franklin's," anyone? -- and what repeat numbers will the "core four" serve up? Stay tuned...
Set List:
Set One:
Feel Like A Stranger
New Minglewood Blues
Brown-Eyed Women
Loose Lucy
Loser
Row Jimmy
Alabama Getaway
Black Peter
Hell In A Bucket
Set Two:
Mississippi
Half-Step Uptown Toodleloo
Wharf Rat
Eyes of the World
He's Gone
Drums
I Need A Miracle
Death Don't Have No Mercy
Sugar Magnolia
Encore:
Brokedown Palace
[Update: a previous version of this article misattributed lyrics from "He's Gone" to "Brokedown Palace."]Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, “Christ Crucified”, c. 1677
9 Things You Need to Know About Good Friday
Good Friday is the most somber day of the Christian year. Here are 9 things you need to know...
Note: This article originally appeared at the Register on March 28, 2013.
Good Friday is the most somber day of the Christian year.
It is the day our Savior died for us.
It is the day we were redeemed from our sins by the voluntary death of God Himself at the hands of man.
Here are 9 things you need to know.
1. Why is this day called "Good Friday"
It's not for the reason you might think.
Despite the fact that "good" is a common English word, tempting us to say the name is based on the fact that something very good (our redemption) happened on this day, that's not where the name comes from.
Precisely where it does come from is disputed. The Catholic Encyclopedia explains:
The origin of the term Good is not clear. Some say it is from "God's Friday" (Gottes Freitag); others maintain that it is from the German Gute Freitag, and not speciallyEnglish.
It is also argued that the name is based on a Medieval use of the word good where it meant "holy." Thus "Good Friday" would have come from "Holy Friday," the same way we have Holy Thursday and Holy Saturday.
2. What happened on the first Good Friday?
Quite a number of things. During the night, Jesus had been arrested and taken before the high priests Annas and Caiaphas. It was during this time that Peter denied him.
According to the gospels, Jesus:
Was taken before Pilate in the morning
Sent to Herod
Returned to Pilate
Was |
the advice in Poor Richard’s Almanack, experimented with electricity, and negotiated an alliance between the United States and France.
But did you know that he also founded the first successful lending library in North America?
We launch the Ben Franklin’s World podcast with not one, but three episodes that explore “Benjamin Franklin’s Library,” the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Benjamin Franklin viewed the establishment of the Library Company as one of his greatest achievements. This 3-part special will allow you to consider Franklin’s accomplishment by providing you with a survey of the past, present, and future of the Library Company of Philadelphia, the oldest cultural institution in the United States.
Are you ready to join me for an audio tour of the Library Company?
Series Sneak Preview
Episode 001: Our special launch series begins with an interview with James N. Green, Librarian of the Library Company of Philadelphia (LCP). Our conversation with Jim takes us through the history of Benjamin Franklin and the Library Company.
Episode 002: In the second part of our 3-part launch special, we talk with Cornelia King, Chief of Reference at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Connie discusses the Library Company’s exhibition “That’s So Gay: Outing Early America,” to give us a behind-the-scenes look at how the Library Company displays and interprets the historical items in its collections for the education and enjoyment of its visitors.
Episode 003: Our 3-part launch special concludes with a conversation with Richard S. Newman, Director of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Rich discusses the efforts of the Library Company to fulfill its mission to increase public understanding of American history before 1900.
About the Show
Ben Franklin’s World is a podcast about early American history.
It is a show for people who love history and for those who want to know more about the historical people and events that have impacted and shaped our present-day world.
Each episode features a conversation with an historian who helps us shed light on important people and events in early American history.
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Episode Summary
In this episode, we chat with James N. Green, Librarian at the Library Company of Philadelphia and co-author of Benjamin Franklin: Writer And Printer.
Jim explores the role Benjamin Franklin played in the founding of the Library Company of Philadelphia, the history of libraries in colonial North America, and the Junto, Franklin’s sociability and improvement club for Philadelphia tradesmen.
What You’ll Discover
More about the Library Company of Philadelphia
What type of work Jim performs as the Librarian
How the Library Company received its nickname: “Benjamin Franklin’s Library”
Information about the Junto, Franklin’s sociability and improvement club for Philadelphia tradesmen
Why Franklin founded the Library Company as a “company”
The origin of library late fees
The types of people who subscribed as members of the Library Company
Contributions Franklin made to the Library Company
What happened to the Library Company and its holdings during the American Revolution and the British occupation of Philadelphia in 1777
How the Library Company became known as the “‘de facto’ Library of Congress
More about the types of books, manuscripts, pamphlets, and ephemera that make up the Library Company’s extensive collections
Links to People, Places, and Publications
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A builder has been fined after subjecting a Bristol man to homophobic abuse and leaving cement penises on a wall outside his house.
Michael Parkes, a 34-year-old builder, lodged a guilty plea at Bristol Magistrates’ Court yesterday but did not appear in person, the Bristol Evening Post reports.
He admitted using threatening words and behaviour towards the victim, Richard Ives, last spring.
Parkes’s defence lawyer said he would not attend as he had broken his ankle while being pushed down a flight of stairs by a co-defendant in the case in November.
The events occurred on when Parkes was working on a house in the city.
His victim had asked to move his washing before Parkes and his colleagues began work on the neighbouring property.
The prosecutor, Andrea Edwards, said: “Parkes began acting aggressively and called him ‘a queer’.
“Mr Ives went inside and then left the house to pick up his partner. When they got back there was a piece of chipboard outside his house with a drawing of a penis and a homophobic slur written on it.
“There were also two models of penises that had been made out of cement, placed on his wall.”
The builder turned sculptor was fined £200, ordered him to pay the victim £200 in compensation and cover £200 of case costs.Oath Keepers plans rally
By DANIEL BARRICK
Monitor staff
Last modified: 10/12/2010 12:00:00 AM
The director of a self-described anti-totalitarian group is urging supporters to rally outside a New Hampshire courthouse this week in support of an Epsom couple whose newborn was taken last week by state social workers.
Johnathon Irish and Stephanie Taylor say their baby was seized because of Irish's association with the Oath Keepers. Court documents, however, charge Irish with a history of violence toward Taylor and her children.
Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, told his group's members yesterday that the rally, scheduled for Thursday outside the Rochester Family Division Court, would be 'in support of the First Amendment-protected right of freedom of association.'
The case has shined attention on the Oath Keepers, a Las Vegas-based group that describes itself as an affiliation of current and retired military and law enforcement officials who promise to fight government tyranny. Members of the Oath Keepers swear to uphold their oaths to protect the Constitution. Members also pledge 10 specific vows, including, 'We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.'
State social workers took custody of Irish and Taylor's daughter the day after her birth at Concord Hospital. In an affidavit supporting the child's seizure, state officials detailed allegations of child abuse and domestic violence by Irish, including the claim that he had beaten Taylor's two younger children. Those children have been placed in foster care, according to the affidavit. (Taylor is still married to the father of those children, but she and Irish describe themselves as engaged. The newborn baby is their first child as a couple. Taylor has also given her last name as 'Janvrin.')
The affidavit also mentions that state social workers 'became aware and confirmed that Mr. Irish is associated with a militia known as the 'Oath Keepers.''The affidavit goes on to note that Irish had multiple run-ins with the Epsom police over firearms and that he had purchased a rifle, a handgun and a Taser.
The reference to the Oath Keepers, and the description of the group as a'militia,' has riled many of the group's members as well as people unaffiliated with the Oath Keepers who see the mention of the group in the affidavit as an attempt to stifle political speech.
'The fact that the political association of the father with Oath Keepers, and his gun ownership, were even among the reasons given for the taking of this baby takes this case beyond the realm of your mundane family court matter and turns it into something that could affect the rights of us all, nationwide,' Rhodes wrote on the Oath Keepers website yesterday.
History of violence alleged
Calls to the state Department of Health and Human Services were not returned yesterday, and the state court system was closed for Columbus Day, so it was not possible to review Irish's criminal file. And since child protection matters are confidential, state and police officials offered no comment on the case last week. But Lorraine Bartlett with the state Division for Children, Youth and Families told the Associated Press that a child cannot be removed based on a parent's affiliation with an organization.
According to the affidavit, the police in Rochester, where the couple used to live,'report a lengthy history of domestic violence' between Irish and Taylor. The affidavit also states that Taylor has reported being beaten and choked by Irish on several occasions and that the couple had sought restraining orders against each other in the past. A court petition accompanying the affidavit concluded that the newborn faced 'imminent danger' if left in her parents' care.
In a phone interview yesterday, Irish said a state social worker called Taylor yesterday to schedule a visit between the newborn and her mother. According to Irish, the social worker told Taylor that Irish could not take part because he was a'security risk.'
He said allegations that he had abused Taylor and her children were 'nothing but lies and arbitrary opinions.' And he said the incident underscored his long-held belief that government officials were encroaching on individual liberties.
'They seem to think they can act like God,' Irish said.
The case swiftly brought Irish and Taylor to the attention of numerous online anti-government activists over the weekend. The couple's story has been featured on websites and blogs devoted to chronicling instances of alleged government oppression.
' 'Happy birthday. You're property of the State.''wrote one blogger on the website Pro Libertate.
Critics describe the Oath Keepers as a prominent example of the 'Patriot' movement, an extremist, anti-government movement that has gained in membership and momentum over the past two years. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, monitors the Oath Keepers' activities and describes the group as a 'particularly worrisome example of the 'Patriot' movement.'
But members of the Oath Keepers say they are only interested in protecting the American people from dictatorship. Their motto: 'Not on our watch.'
Rhodes, an Army veteran, Yale Law School graduate and former aide to U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, founded Oath Keepers last year, and he has since been active in Tea Party-related events. He was also a guest speaker earlier this year at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum, an annual event hosted by the Free State Project, a libertarian group.
Membership in the Oath Keepers is not limited to military or law enforcement personnel, according to the group's website, though that is the group's focus. Members pay $30 in annual dues in exchange for a certificate'suitable for framing,' a laminated membership card, three Oath Keepers bumper stickers, and Oath Keepers brochures and business cards.
The group's bylaws bar membership to people who have advocated for the overthrow of the U.S. government or have been associated with a racist or violent group.
'Chilling effect'
Rhodes did not respond to a request for an interview. But in media appearances in recent days, he has woven the Concord case into a larger narrative of what he called the federal government's 'infiltration down to the local level' in a mission to stifle opposition.
'Anybody who stands up for the Constitution is going to be fingered as mentally ill or as somebody who's a danger to their children,' Rhodes told internet radio host Alex Jones on Friday. 'Anybody who's not going to just roll over and allow our republic to be destroyed. That's the big picture.'
Later, Rhodes compared government social workers to the Stasi, the secret police force in former East Germany, and said, 'If this is allowed to stand, and they're allowed to start using your associations of lawful assembly as criteria for taking your children, imagine the chilling effect it's going to have on parents across America.'
'Well, that's what Hitler did, that's what Stalin and Mao did,' Jones replied.
Many Oath Keepers and their supporters seem to share this view. At a protest in support of Irish and Taylor in front of Concord Hospital last week, a Weare man who gave his name only as Bill said he was a member of the Oath Keepers, through his position as a justice of the peace. He said he did not know the newborn's parents but came to the rally to protest the inclusion of the Oath Keepers in the affidavit against Irish.
'This is part of a larger effort to paint those who oppose government policies as terrorists,' Bill said.
He said he viewed membership in Oath Keepers as a form of'moral support' -'so members can realize they're not alone.'
It's difficult to gauge Oath Keepers' presence in New Hampshire. The website for the group's New Hampshire chapter lists no events on its calendar stretching back to January and does not include any names of state leaders. 'Leadership is being established for New Hampshire,' a note on the site reads.
Irish said he was active in organizing for the Oath Keepers in New Hampshire earlier this year. But he said he cut back on his involvement with the group because of complications in Taylor's pregnancy.
Irish said he had spoken with Rhodes several times since his daughter was taken, and he said the Oath Keepers were helping organize a legal defense fund on his behalf. He's also hoping the fund can help him with an unrelated criminal charge from several months ago of carrying a concealed weapon without a permit.
Irish also told an online interviewer over the weekend that he had a handful of other past convictions, including criminal trespass. He said he was also arrested for sexual assault but that the charges were dropped. State courts were closed yesterday, so verifying those charges was not possible.Ancient Egypt’s highly decorated tombs and funerary objects—meant to ensure a safe trip into the afterlife—also hold a rich record of the region’s wildlife. Now scientists have used that art, along with other paleontological, archaeological and historical evidence, to map out the rise and fall of Egypt’s large mammals and match those patterns to changes in climate and human interactions.
The results, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer an unprecedented glimpse into the ways population growth and climate change can influence an ecosystem over millennia—perhaps giving scientists crucial insight into the long-term impacts of modern human activities.
Justin Yeakel at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his colleagues began with a book, The Mammals of Ancient Egypt, which documented the distribution of animal communities from their artistic representations and historical records. According to the book, for example, two species of rhinoceroses had once been present but had disappeared by the Late Predynastic or Early Dynastic periods, approximately 5,000 years ago. The researchers then combined this information with other animal records, such as ancient writings. Lions, for instance, were present during the time of Herodotus, around 2,400 years ago, but had become rare a little over a century later, according to Aristotle.
To analyze the patterns of extinctions, the scientists created a computer model that let them relate the disappearances to predator-prey dynamics and changes in local climate. Previous geological and paleontological research shows that the Egypt of 6,000 years ago was very different from the landscape today. That’s because Earth is tilted on its axis with respect to the sun, and the planet wobbles slowly as it orbits, creating slight variations in its tilt that can affect global climate.
Millennia ago, northern Africa was much wetter and cooler. Monsoons struck periodically, and the Sahara was covered with lakes and vegetation. This greener version of Egypt was home to a mix of wildlife more like the one now found in East Africa, with 37 species of large mammals including lions, wildebeest, warthogs and spotted hyenas.
The region began to dry out about 5,000 years ago, a time that coincides with the fall of the Uruk Kingdom in Mesopotamia (located in present-day Iraq) and the rise of the pharaohs in Egypt. The Egyptian people at this time switched from a mobile, pastoral life to one of agriculture and subsistence hunting. The new research shows that several species of antelope, along with giraffes and rhinoceroses, disappeared around the same time—extinctions that could be due to overhunting of herbivores. Shortly afterward, the long-maned lion vanished.
Egypt became even drier around 4,200 years ago, during a time known as the “First Intermediate Period” or the “dark period.” The region depended on yearly flooding of the Nile to inundate the land and leave behind nutrient-laden silt to feed agricultural fields. But during the dark period, this flooding became inconsistent, crop yields dropped and famine ensued. War and chaos reigned, and eventually the Old Kingdom—and with it, the “Age of the Pyramids”—ended. This is when the roan antelope and African wild dog disappeared from the records.
A third aridification event occurred about 3,000 years ago, again bringing drought and an end to the New Kingdom, a time that included Tutankhamun and 12 kings named Ramses. Egypt’s short-maned lions, revered as sacred and even occasionally mummified, vanished around this time.
Then about 150 years ago, as Egypt’s growing population became more industrialized, more species disappeared, including leopards and wild boar. Today, only 8 of the original 37 large-bodied mammals remain.
Egypt’s complex food web didn’t suffer too badly from the first few species disappearances, according to the study. When some herbivores were lost, most predators still had plenty of other prey animals to keep them fed. But as more species were removed, the ecosystem became increasingly unstable, and eventually most animals just couldn’t survive in a dry landscape populated with an ever-growing human population.
While the team notes that they can’t assign a specific cause to any particular extinction event, the model does show that the pattern of extinctions did not occur randomly, perhaps helping to refine theories about modern drops in biodiversity. “The trajectory of extinctions over 6,000 [years] of Egyptian history is a window into the influence that both climatic and anthropogenic impacts have on animal communities,” the researchers write.It is very difficult for European Catholics to make sense of the polarization within the Catholic Church in the United States. I grew up in Northern Italy and studied and worked for almost 20 years at the University of Bologna, my alma mater and the oldest university in Europe, founded in 1088. In the second half of the 20th century, the Catholic Church in Western Europe existed within a political environment split between strong Socialist and Communist Parties and an equally strong Christian-Democratic Party, which was strongly supported by the church. Not all Catholics voted for this party, however; in fact, the percentage of Catholics who were members of the Christian-Democratic Party had been steadily declining. Today this party exists with the same political relevance of 60 years ago only in Germany.
Despite this political polarization in these European countries, the tension did not result in theological polarization among Catholics. In the political and cultural environment of the 1960s, when European Catholicism still set the standard for world Catholicism, the Second Vatican Council represented (especially in Italy) an opening, a kind of thaw, that made it possible to build bridges among different political cultures. So to me, as a Catholic, a scholar and a recent immigrant to the United States, the issue of polarization within Catholicism in this country—a country with historical and political experience so unlike Europe—is important.
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It is worthwhile, first of all, to remember that it is a very recent development for the Catholic magisterium to accept the idea that Catholics can have a political culture, much less different political cultures. The Catholic march toward democracy was a long one. After the shock of the revolutions of the late 18th and mid-19th centuries, politics was seen as the result of the separation of the modern world from the moral guidance of the one true church. Catholic politicians were allowed to do business with the modern world only de facto, as a practical necessity, because for the church hierarchy it seemed too embarrassing to be directly involved with a political realm they did not acknowledge as legitimate. In many cases, however, embarrassment was overcome, and the international politics of the Vatican trumped the political orientations of Catholics. The rise of Italian Fascism, for example, resulted in part from the fact that Catholics were not allowed to have political cultures or a political party of their own.
Only during Vatican II did the church recognize that modernity exists and that Catholics live not only in the church, but also in society and in political communities that in many places had recently become democratic. This was one of the “signs of the times.” A fundamental call to unity, both ecumenical and interreligious, helped inspire the Second Vatican Council. The fathers and theologians of the Council recognized in modernity a moment of advancement toward unity, and they saw the church as one of the agents for the promotion of this unity. The council also renewed Catholic engagement in politics by elaborating a set of principles that Catholics should follow in a democratic public arena. The goal of democracy, according to Vatican II, is not procedural but must be measured by its ability to meet the demands of a human dignity the church proclaims as closely connected to the “social nature” of the human person.
Domestic Challenges
In light of the extraordinary past year for the Catholic Church, we must ask whether the election of Pope Francis might signal an end to the polarization within the church in the United States. The resignation of Pope Benedict XVI marks the end of popes who were involved in the debates at Vatican II. As the broader ecclesial context shifts, however, Catholics in the United States continue to live and work within the political and cultural structures of this country, which have both contributed to a vibrant and important church and have also produced a few challenges that will continue to affect the intra-Catholic debate in the United States. Here I will list a few issues relevant to the polarization I see in this country.
The Constitution. The free exercise and non-establishment clauses of the First Amendment allow for an interesting interplay between religion and politics in the United States. The political views of an individual often relate closely to his or her religious views and vice versa. Many denominations in the United States have experienced a history of adjustment and change according to the always evolving relationship between political and religious views, and Catholics in the United States are not above this phenomenon.
The internal debate. The second largest religious group in United States is former Catholics. Notwithstanding the ever growing size of what Martin E. Marty called “the American Catholic Alumni Society,” Catholics in this country have not left the church at the same rate as European Catholics. In other words, the rise of a critical mass against—or at least questioning—the institutional church has become part of the internal debate within Catholicism. In Europe, the debate is characterized as pitting a clergy-led Catholicism against a more secular landscape.
Competitive democracy. From its beginning the church in the United States has lived in close contact with democracy, and a democratic ethos has become part of its culture. But the United States offers a particular type of democratic environment. Democracy here is not consensual, as it is in European democracies with multiparty alliances; it is competitive—that is, there are two alternative political parties. This environment has affected the ethos of participation in the church, which is often driven by competitive, oppositional views more than by consensual instincts. Ecclesial actors (hierarchy, laity, theologians, Catholic think tanks, universities and so forth) take part in this interaction as competitors. This analysis also clarifies why the “non-negotiable values” became more important among Catholics in the United States than anywhere else. Some bishops explicitly criticized the Catholic Common Ground Initiative, founded by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago in 1996 to help facilitate dialogue among Catholics who hold different political and theological perspectives. Today the function of consensus-building has been visibly lacking at all levels of the church in the United States.
Political cultures. There are many scholarly studies on the impact of electoral systems on the political behavior of a country, and the political behavior of Catholics in the United States, but there are very few on the impact of the electoral system on the political cultures of Catholics in a given country. In simple terms, the existence of a two-party political and electoral system has given birth in these last few decades (among other factors) to something resembling a two-party Catholic Church. In countries where Catholics live in multiparty systems, different theological identities are much more difficult to absorb into the political discourse and partisan narratives, so the church is not as divided.
Political labels. The increasing political polarization in the United States has only exacerbated the political divide within the church. In U.S. politics, Republican means conservative, and Democrat means liberal. This dichotomy is clearly felt in how Catholics engage with each other about issues in the church. Those who invoke Vatican II are labeled “liberal,” and it is “conservative” to refer to the magisterium. Of course, this dichotomy is only possible if we accept an extremely simplified (and more political than theological) understanding of an ecumenical council and the teaching of the church.
This kind of polarization among Catholics is not present in Europe. In most European countries with a large Catholic population, political compromise—in the noblest sense of the word—has always been part of the political reception of the magisterial documents of the teaching office of the church—for example, in the excommunication of Communists in 1949 and its impact on Italy, and the reception of “Humanae Vitae” (1968) and other teachings on the so-called life issues.
Temptation and Opportunity
In the face of an extremely polarized and paralyzed political life in the United States, I understand the temptation for a Catholic retrenchment into an alternative structure—a move from political engagement with the state or government into a world of small communities—more traditional and radical than what conventional politics offers Catholics today. There is an acutely perceived political homelessness among Catholics in the United States, and I greatly admire the conviction of Catholics who want to rebuild ecclesial communities and local networks of social services, a vision expressed in the pages of America by theologians like William T. Cavanaugh (“The Root of Evil,” 7/29/2013) and Michael Baxter (“Murray’s Mistake,” 9/23/2013).
The political challenges in the United States, however, cannot justify withdrawal by Catholics from the polis as we know it. Following this path entails many problems. First, a withdrawal from the affairs of the nation-state might lead Catholics in the United States to something like the early communities of Christians; but in a European context, where there have been established churches, a withdrawal from the nation-state risks a return to the wars of religion that ravaged Europe for at least a century. Second, a retrenchment of Catholicism in the form of resistance against the modern state implies a radical rethinking of the Catholic view of the “political,” which paradoxically augments the “Americanist” taste of Catholicism and makes the polarization even more serious. And third, a retrenchment would move Catholicism intellectually and spiritually toward a sectarian mind-set that is impossible to reconcile with the “universal” claim at the heart of Catholicism.
As a historian, I do not need to be convinced of the destructiveness of public power and its temptation to absorb every aspect of life in a manner that is not even comparable to the times of the empires. Nevertheless, I also believe that the modern state is the last anchor against much more destructive forces, and I fear that Catholic theology might soon become the victim of an anti-political sentiment that contradicts recent papal teaching about service in political life. In “Evangelii Gaudium,” Pope Francis writes, “Politics, though often denigrated, remains a lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good.” This endeavor is worth the investment of the whole church.
The quest for a new common ground in the church serves as the best possible response to Catholics tempted to retreat from the polis. Perhaps in this new papacy the Catholic Common Ground Initiative can play a renewed role in our ecclesial discourse. In other words, this papacy might signal an end to the culture wars. At least it will be more difficult to wage culture wars and claim that such actions embody a faithful reception of papal teaching. Pope Francis has clearly rejected any attempt to turn the Gospel into an ideology, and he is equally distant from an “Americanist” view of Catholicism. As a “social Catholic,” Pope Francis has stepped back from issues that have frequently divided Catholics into two camps, like the use of the triad abortion/contraception/homosexuality as a test for entering, staying in or leaving the church; the weaponization of sacraments; and the ideologization of the Catholic tradition as “conservative” or “liberal.”
Fifteen years ago, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago famously said, “Liberal Catholicism is an exhausted project.” No one expects Pope Francis to refer to any part of the church as an “exhausted project,” but his social radicalism is surely exhausting the spin doctors active in various Catholic think tanks who expect him to endorse a full slate of their positions. In this time of change in the church, the rediscovery of a common ground is necessary, especially as some Catholics attached to the social-political language of the last two pontificates find it difficult to articulate, under Pope Francis, a language for their “faithful dissent” from the magisterium of the church.
The crisis of the engagement of many Catholics in politics is one of the symptoms of the crisis of the idea of politics as one of the highest forms of charity, because it serves the common good. But the Catholic Church is one of the last defenders of the potentially humanizing effect of politics, and of the potentially dehumanizing effect of a community of Christians closing in on itself. The question for Catholics is not whether to engage with the state and one another, but what defines this engagement. The particular challenge for Catholics in the United States is to overcome the temptation to see everything as a competition between two camps, whether in politics or among Catholics. The election of Pope Francis is perhaps the signal that the future of Catholicism consists less of apocalypse and division and more of prophecy and unity.VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - May 23, 2017) -
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Cannabis Wheaton Income Corp. (TSX VENTURE:CBW) ("Cannabis Wheaton" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has entered into a revised engagement letter with Eight Capital and Canaccord Genuity Corp. (the "Co-Lead Agents") on behalf of a syndicate of agents consisting of Cormark Securities Inc., Haywood Securities Inc. and Mackie Research Capital Corporation (together with the Co-Lead Agents, the "Agents") to revise the size of its previously announced best efforts private placement of Special Warrants and Convertible Debenture Units, from up to $50,000,000 in aggregate to up to $80,000,000 in aggregate plus a 15% over-allotment option that can be exercised by the Agents (the "Revised Offering").
Chuck Rifici commented, "We are gratified by the enthusiastic response that has greeted this offering from institutional and retail investors.
The team is very excited to begin building its businesses alongside its unique and top-tier partners across the country.
This fundraising underpins the first stage of the transformative LP2.0 platform that Cannabis Wheaton brings about."
The Revised Offering will consist of "Special Warrants" and "Convertible Debenture Units" as more particularly described in the Company's previous press release: http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/cannabis-wheaton-announces-private-placement-special-warrants-convertible-debenture-tsx-venture-cbw-2217872.htm.
The Revised Offering is expected to close on or about June 21, 2017, subject to a number of customary closing conditions, including TSX-V approval, negotiation of definitive closing documents, due diligence and the absence of a material adverse change.
ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD
Chuck Rifici, Chairman & CEO
About Cannabis Wheaton Income Corp. (TSX VENTURE:CBW)
Backed by a team of industry experts, Cannabis Wheaton is the first cannabis streaming company in the world. Our streams will include production from across Canada coming from our partners comprised of licensed producers of cannabis (LP) and LP applicants. Cannabis Wheaton's mandate is to facilitate real growth for our streaming partners by providing them with financial support and sharing our collective industry experience.
Stay Connected
For more information about Cannabis Wheaton and our management team, please visit: http://www.cannabiswheaton.com, or follow us on Twitter @CannabisWheaton.
Forward-Looking Information
This news release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities law. Forward-looking information is frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "continue", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate", "may", "will", "potential", "proposed" and other similar words, or information that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. This information is only a prediction. Various assumptions were used in drawing the conclusions or making the projections contained in the forward-looking information throughout this news release. Forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to: receipt of regulatory approvals of the Revised Offering, inability to complete the Revised Offering on the proposed terms or at all, delays in obtaining or inability to obtain required government or other regulatory approvals, the ability to generate revenue through the streaming agreements, requirements to obtain additional financing, timeliness of government approvals for granting of permits and licences, including licences to cultivate cannabis, completion of the facilities, where applicable, actual operating performance of the facilities, regulatory or political change, competition and other risks affecting the Company in particular and the medical cannabis industry generally. Forward-looking information is based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the information is made, and is subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking information. The Company is under no obligation, and expressly disclaims any intention or obligation, to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable law.
Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
The securities being offered have not been, nor will they be, registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and may not be offered or sold in the United States or to, or for the account or benefit of, U.S. persons absent registration or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements. This news release will not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy nor will there be any sale of the securities in any State in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.This article is from the archive of our partner.
With the passage of the REINS Act earlier today, the House of Representatives got to do two of its favorite things. First, it got to cast a party-line vote on a measure that would curtail the administration's ability to make new rules. Second, it got to talk about a piece of legislation — the Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny Act — that is referred to by a dumb acronym.
Pointing out that second tendency is not new. The Economist looked at the issue back in 2011, but the high-water mark certainly came with the high-profile, brilliantly wrought USA PATRIOT Act in 2001. That's the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act" — a masterpiece of form. But even in this least popular, highly unproductive 113th Congress that kicked off in January, we've got over 240 examples of similarly clever titling to review.
We've categorized them, below. Please enjoy.
The "We Get It Already" Ones
Some titles can't resist kicking you in the teeth with their obviousness, even if they aren't acronyms. There's the "America is for Americans Act" (guess what that does). The "Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty Embassy Security and Personnel Protection Act of 2013." The "Flat Tax Act." What these ones lack in subtlety, they also lack in creativity.SALT LAKE CITY — Federal regulators have accused two Utah men of orchestrating a $3 million investment fraud scheme through their company Blackbird Capital Partners, and one of them faces criminal charges.
The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint in federal court Monday against Andrew D. Kelley, 41, of Draper, and Paul H. Shumway, 47, of Lehi, alleging they operated a Ponzi scheme.
On Wednesday, a criminal complaint against Kelley was unsealed in U.S. District Court alleging securities fraud.
Kelley told one investor in October that he had "screwed up" and lost $6 million, according to an affidavit. He initially blamed the loss on Brexit but then told the investor he used his money to "plug old holes" and pay other investors due to trading losses.
When the investor confronted Kelley about his "pattern of fraud," Kelley told him, "I am delusional. I am a compulsive liar," the affidavit says. Kelley, according to the affidavit, told the investor he could "trade his way out of it" to repay him if he wouldn't report him to authorities.
Kelley and Shumway solicited several investors to put up at least $3.1 million with Blackbird, or through a separate "friends and family" account, which Kelley claimed he managed as a proprietary trading fund, according to the SEC.
The complaint alleges Kelley told investors that he developed an algorithmic software program for Blackbird to invest its own funds to profit the company and investors. Kelley claimed he spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours developing the program that made up to 300 percent returns, the SEC says.
Kelley also told investors he was a family man and faithful member of the LDS Church, the affidavit says.
According to the complaint, Blackbird was supposed to invest money in various security and futures instruments, but investor funds were used to pay returns to earlier investors and for other personal and business expenses.
Judge Tena Campbell froze some of Blackbird's accounts and issued a temporary restraining order against Kelley and Shumway. An evidentiary hearing is scheduled for January.Donovan Patton (born March 1, 1978) is an American host, actor, voice actor, and singer. Patton graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy and acted in Shakespeare plays such as Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet |
Board by the anti-Muslim rhetoric and prejudice we have seen on social media, read in emails, and heard first-hand at our board meetings.”
“It has caused some of our students to feel unsafe, to feel targeted. We must not allow hatred toward any faith group to flourish,” she said. “We will not stand for that.”
Jummah prayers have been been accommodated in Peel schools for two decades without issue, as required by the Ontario Human Rights Code, which states that only cost or health and safety risks should prevent religious accommodations from being granted.
The accommodation only became an issue after a policy introduced by the board in 2016, requiring students to read only from sermons approved by the board, was overturned following backlash from members of the Muslim community.
The school board issued a fact sheet on Wednesday in response to “misinformation and errors that have been shared in the community and on social media,” in which they explained that Friday prayer has no impact on other students, as they “try to find a time when students are already out of class—lunch for example—or if in class, 15 minutes at the start or finish of the class,” and that students are supervised by a volunteer staff member in an already open space, thus resulting in no undue hardship.
A few weeks ago, Brampton mayor Linda Jeffrey condemned the campaign against the accommodation, calling it “hateful.”
“Muslim students require a time to pray that may happen during a school day, and we must respect that — as we do any other religious requirement,” she wrote in a statement. “Letting Muslim students pray for 20 minutes in an empty space with the supervision of volunteer staff does not cause any financial hardship.”Tickets were selling fast for Saturday night's showing of a "XXX blockbuster" at the University of Maryland's student union. (Pirates! Skeletons! An orgy of belly dancers!) Then, like a douse of cold water, the state Senate stepped in.
During debate yesterday over the state budget -- an exercise usually devoid of sex appeal -- a conservative senator drew his colleagues' attention to the scheduled showing of "Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge," a hard-core porn film, at the state's flagship university.
The award-winning sequel is almost 2 1/2 hours' worth of, uh, swashbuckling. The cast is full of actors whose names are registered trademarks. The film is full of special effects (to say the least).
Legislators were not impressed.
Sen. Andrew P. Harris (R-Baltimore County) called it "shocking" and offered a budget amendment: Any public university that allowed the screening of a triple-X film would forfeit state funding -- about $424 million next year in U-Md.'s case.
Administrators canceled the screening. And although some advocacy groups were relieved, many students were mad.
Not because of the porn, said Liz Ciavolino, a sophomore who is active in the student group Feminism Without Borders, but because of something she thought was worse: "I really don't think the state should bully us around with their budget power."
All the activities at the student union are funded by fees that students pay, not the state. The university did not pay for the movie and would have covered its costs with ticket sales.
Aaron Titus of the Maryland Coalition Against Pornography said that although the outcome was good, the reasons were wrong.
"The University of Maryland should be responding to the power of ideas, not the power of the purse," he said. "I would challenge the university to conduct a thorough inquiry into the harms of pornography."
Operators of the mostly student-run Hoff Theater said they were not trying to offend anyone. It has become increasingly difficult to compete with DVD rentals and illegal downloading, said Lisa Cunningham, the theater's program director. Students have been wanting to show a triple-X movie for some time, and she was waiting for one that wasn't too violent or degrading, one that had a plot.
The movie, produced by Digital Playground, has been marketed to colleges and has been shown at several across the nation without major controversy. There's also an edited, R-rated version available at major chains.Related News
The man was accused of killing a stray dog.
Three police officers who recently tortured a man to death for killing a dog were last week sacked after an orderly room trial found them guilty, the Borno police commissioner, Lawan Tanko, said on Tuesday.
The three dismissed officers, Sergeant Adewale (alias OC Gbale), Corporal Ezekiel and Corporal James are now being tried in the civil court for culpable homicide.
According to Mr. Tanko, the three policemen, who were instructors at the Mobile Police Training Camp, Gwoza, in Borno state, had subjected one Solomon Adamu, the son of the Training Camp’s civilian chaplain, Pastor Adamu, to corporal punishment against the order of the camp commandant.
The police boss said after reading the report of the Orderly Room trial of the three culprits, he immediately applied the rule of the police command which prescribes that offenders should be dismissed with dispatch.
“I have dismissed the policemen involved after reading the report on them from the Orderly Room trial.
“This is a pure murder case, and the police command will not like to be seen abating illegality.
“Though we heard that the father of the deceased young said he had forgiven them, but that is not the business of the police; we don’t condone unprovoked murder on the part of any of our officers and men. After their dismissal, the CID unit of our force will charge them to court at once. if the parent of the young man said they are letting them go, so be it,” he said.
PREMIUM TIMES learnt that Mr. Solomon had angrily maimed the stray dog for pestering him at the camp and eventually killed it. His seeming wicked act angered the three officers who pounced on him and subjected him to series of corporal punishments until the camp commandant reprimanded them and ordered that he should be released at once.
The officers who were fond of the dog probably continued to be angry at its death. They returned to their posts, dragged the deceased back to the camp and continued to punish him, until he died.
“An order had been given to the officers concern to release the man when they detained and punished him for allegedly killing a dog. And the recalcitrant policemen went behind and brought the man back and continued punishing him until he eventually died in their hands,” Mr. Tanko said.As part of Always Sunny Week here at UPROXX Charlie Day was awesome enough to spend a few minutes talking with me about the show, its remarkable following on the internet, and the odd, random, and sometimes off-putting Sunny trivia my buddies and I have spent years debating over beers. He’s as friendly, accessible, and easy to chat with as you’d imagine, and he didn’t even seem to notice how awkward and inarticulate I am over the phone, which makes him even more of a national treasure in my eyes.
Since we dedicate the majority of our time here at UPROXX to the intersection of web culture and entertainment, we kicked things off by discussing the internet’s obsession with Sunny, Charlie Kelly, and the soon-to-be unveiled Fat Mac. We then transitioned into some quick fire questions that I think you’ll enjoy even if you’ve never seen the show.
Do you guys actively discuss the internet, what will work, and things that will be embraced by the internet? Are you ever in the middle of taping a bit and like, “This is going to kill!”?
Mmm, no not really. I mean, first and foremost we’re just trying to make the best product we can and the internet becomes sort of a secondary thing. If a certain joke or scene picks up on the internet and takes off that’s great. Although we never want someone to just get one scene or joke out of context. But sometimes we’ll do a little short video or something for the internet hoping that that goes around just to stir up a little buzz for the show. But you know the internet is just a nice bonus to getting the show out.
Is there any place in particular like Twitter or Tumblr or any certain sites that you like to personally check out for reactions or coverage?
I’m on Twitter and I’ll hop on every now and then although I use it primarily so someone else can’t use it and pretend to be me. I like that little “verified” check. I’m only vaguely aware of what a Tumblr is.
Because there are all these “F*ck Yeah” Tumblrs dedicated to “F*ck Yeah Charlie Day” or “F*ck Yeah Always Sunny” there are just so many animated GIFs of you out there it’s kind of amazing. We actually did a GIF wall feature because there are so many out there. Thoughts?
All I can say to that is f*ck yeah!
The Green Man phenomenon has taken off at sporting events. When did you first become aware of how big that had become?
I think shortly after we did that episode we started to see Green Man popping up at a sporting event or two. At first just in Philly and we thought it was cool. Someone’s out there doing it. I think by then the guy was following Tiger Woods around and then obviously the two guys in Canada have taken it to a whole other level.
It’s sort of been a growing phenomenon. I’m still surprised to this day that people are willing to do it.
Is there a certain phrase or saying that you get most often in public when someone sees you somewhere? That they come up and scream at you or yell at you?
It’s usually “Wild Card.”
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That was my #1 vote.
That’s usually the #1. That or Day Man or Green Man.Wipro, India's third-largest IT services firm, expects its headcount to come down by about 47,000 in the next three years as it stresses on automation, artificial intelligence and digital services.
According to a source, Wipro CEO T K Kurien, at an analyst event in Frankfurt (Germany) on Tuesday, said that as the firm moves its automation focus to applications from services, there will be reduction in employee strength.
"In the same breath, the CEO made it clear that the focus is not on eliminating positions, but gaining greater efficiency", the source added.
An industry insider believes that Wipro with its increased focus on automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and digital services may bring down 30 per cent of its headcount in the next three years.
As of 31 March 2015, the Bangalore-based company's total workforce stood at 1,58,217.
Kurien sees the next big wave of growth for the software vendor will come from BPO automation.
Besides, Wipro expects digital services to be among its top three service lines in the next 3 years.
The software services major posted a net profit of Rs 2,286.5 crore in January-March 2015, 2.1 per cent higher than Rs 2,239.1 crore a year ago, in line with expectations.
This was helped by robust momentum in infrastructure and healthcare services.
Wipro, which gets a dominant chunk of its revenues from IT, saw its topline growing 3.9 per cent to Rs 12,171.4 crore for the March quarter from Rs 11,703.6 crore in the year-ago period.
Revenues from IT services business increased six per cent year-on-year to Rs 11,240 crore, up 3.2 per cent, in the reported quarter.
PTI
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An interesting immigration case is winding its way through a federal court in Austin, Texas: A group of mothers has filed suit against the chief of the state's Department of State Health Services Vital Statistics Unit, because it has refused to give their U.S.-born children birth certificates.
The issue here is not whether or not these children are U.S. citizens. They are and that's made plain by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which says most people born in the U.S. are automatically citizens.
The issue in this case is what kinds of identification Texas can demand of their undocumented immigrant parents to issue a birth certificate.
According to the complaint, Texas is refusing most forms of ID that undocumented immigrants would have access to. In one case, for example, the Vital Statistics office refused to a accept a matrícula or an ID card issued by a local Mexican consulate.
Under state law, Texas can also refuse to accept a foreign passport, unless it "bears a current U.S. visa."
Enlarge this image toggle caption Eric Gay/AP Eric Gay/AP
The mothers claim that the state is discriminating against them because of their "immigration status and national origin."
On Wednesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked a federal judge to dismiss the case, arguing that the federal judiciary did not have jurisdiction over this matter, because the state enjoys immunity and this involves state, not federal law.
In his motion, Paxton does not get into the particulars of state law, but the Texas Tribune reports that the agency explained their reasoning earlier:
"In a statement to the Texas Observer this month, a DSHS official said the agency accepts several forms of ID to verify identity but not the matrículas consulares because the documents used to obtain them are not verified by the 'issuing agency.' "The issuing agency is the United Mexican States, attorney [Efrén] Olivares said. "'I would be curious to see if a similar ID issued from Canada' received the same response, he said."
In his complaint, Olivares argued that Texas has accepted martrículas in the past. For example, one of the plaintiffs, Maria Isabel Perales Serna was able to get a birth certificate using that ID when her daughter was born 14 years ago.
But when she gave birth to another child, referred in documents as "K.Z.P.S.," last year, she was refused a birth certificate even though she presented a matrícula, a Mexican passport and hospital records.
"As a result of Defendant's wrongful denial of the birth certificate, Plaintiff Perales faces serious problems in enrolling her daughter in day care, traveling with her child, obtaining necessary medical care and other health, education and welfare services requiring parental consent and/or proof of K.Z.P.S.'s Texas birth," the complaint reads.
Update on July 30 at 1:16 p.m. ET. Birthright:
Our original post stated that the 14th Amendment automatically confers citizenship on anyone born in the United States.
One careful reader rightly noted that this is not quite right: The 14th confers citizenship on anyone born in the United States "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof."
As a Congressional Research Service report from 2010 puts it, what that means has been the subject of great debate. Did it mean that the children born to Chinese immigrants — who were once under law not permitted to become naturalized citizens — conferred birthright citizenship? Did it include Native Americans born on a reservation?
All those questions were eventually settled in the 1898 Supreme Court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark.
Essentially the court said the common law concept of jus soli — or birthright citizenship — applied to the 14th Amendment. CRS explains:
"The Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment affirmed the traditional jus soli rule, including the exceptions of children born to foreign diplomats, to hostile occupying forces or on foreign public ships, and added a new exception of children of Indians owing direct allegiance to their tribes. It further held that the 'Fourteenth Amendment... has conferred no authority upon Congress to restrict the effect of birth, declared by the Constitution to constitute a sufficient and complete right to citizenship' and that it is 'throughout affirmative and declaratory, intended to allay doubts and settle controversies which had arisen, and not to impose any new restrictions upon citizenship."
In other words, and as our reader rightly noted, the 14th excludes children born to diplomats or hostile occupying forces and those born on foreign public ships.
As a historical curiosity, you may find it interesting that the court also found that the 14th did not confer birthright citizenship to some Native Americans. As the CRS reports, the Nationality Act of 1940 "finally and unambiguously declared all Native Americans born in the United States to be U.S. citizens."This may be the oddest way to “enjoy” a toy — it’s certainly one of the most passive — but Sphero’s BB-8 isn’t a toy so much as it is a very simple robot performer with Pixar-esque aspirations. The $149.99 droid will go on sale starting this Friday at Apple’s retail stores, Best Buy, and Sphero’s own website (don’t worry, it’s Android compatible, too). That’s a pretty hefty price tag, but Sphero’s BB-8 is offering something few Star Wars toys have been able to pull off: it captures the personality of the droid, and it speaks volumes to where Sphero wants to try and push robotics in the future.
As I write this, holed up in a small office, I can hear a quiet whirr going to and fro on the floor. Actually, it’s more of a quiet whirr followed by a less quiet thunk as plastic meets plaster wall, followed by a brief intermission where my aural focus shifts to the various emotive beeps emanating from my phone’s speaker.
Photo by Ross Miller / The Verge
If trailers are meant to generate hype for a film, a Star Wars trailer serves to tease an entire cross-media entertainment platform. Since the beginning, the mythos of Star Wars has been equal parts on-screen movie magic and off-screen merchandising. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, it was largely dominated by Kenner action figures, and though Star Wars merchandising has remained a massive force — in 2011 alone, the license made an estimated $3 billion — this year is poised to be exceptionally large, thanks in no small part to The Force Awakens, the first new Star Wars film since 2005’s Revenge of the Sith. The hot new items from those Force Awakens trailers? A cross-guard lightsaber and a really cute soccer ball with a robot head. It’s a big enough moment in Star Wars fandom that Disney has made a global event out of unboxing all the tie-in toys — an event that is being branded as "Force Friday." Star Wars has always been equal parts film and merchandise But while this kind of fanfare is maybe old hat for Hasbro and Lego, it’s a fairly new feeling for Sphero. The company was founded in 2010 (then called Orbotix) and has released a handful of products since: the titular Sphero (an orb you can control with your phone), the cylindrical bot Ollie, and a few variations of each — all intriguing ideas, but nothing that found mainstream commercial success. With the BB-8 toy, that’s all about to change. Sphero’s collaboration with Disney began last summer when it joined the Disney Accelerator program. It’s a rather odd move for a four-year-old company with commercially released products, but it was clearly a smart one. As chief creative officer Rob Maigret tells us, one of Sphero’s mentors was none other than Disney CEO Bob Iger, who has shown a knack for acquiring strong (read: profitable) talent, including Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm. (Maigret himself was the other mentor, joining the company after the program.) At their first meeting, Iger (reportedly) showed the Sphero co-founders a picture of BB-8 and challenged them to make a working version, which the duo (again, reportedly) managed to conceptualize in about 24 hours’ time. (The version on film, however, is more puppetry than robotics.)
It’s no surprise that the base of BB-8 is essentially the company’s flagship product with a glossy, Star Wars-y paint job. The biggest outward addition is the headpiece — a piece of plastic with tiny wheels "attached" magnetically to the orb. (For those who want to nitpick, the head is proportionally smaller than its on-screen doppelgänger.) It’s a key addition and one that, much like the film model, gives BB-8 its personality. Much like John Lasseter’s It’s no surprise that the base of BB-8 is essentially the company’s flagship product with a glossy, Star Wars-y paint job. The biggest outward addition is the headpiece — a piece of plastic with tiny wheels "attached" magnetically to the orb. (For those who want to nitpick, the head is proportionally smaller than its on-screen doppelgänger.) It’s a key addition and one that, much like the film model, gives BB-8 its personality. Much like John Lasseter’s classic animated short film Red’s Dream, which starred a unicycle, having just a little bit of articulation lets BB-8 emote in identifiable ways. As with past Sphero products, your smartphone is essential to interacting with BB-8: all interfacing (and indeed all of the sound effects) happens via an iOS or Android device. BB-8 can be imprecise — I dare say "moody" — in how it responds to manual driving. That’s especially true when you first get it moving; there seems to be a preprogrammed maneuver where it goes backwards for a few seconds too long, as if it’s "winding up" to move (and to be fair, this thing's top speed is pretty damn fast). Once it’s in motion, however, steering becomes fairly intuitive. BB-8 also has several patterns you can trigger, such as a figure eight, but more importantly, it can be prompted to convey several "emotions" like nodding yes, shaking its head no, and something that’s either joy or panic, I’m still not sure which. You can reportedly use voice commands to drive it as well, although we couldn’t get it to work in the early build of the app we used. Then there’s patrol mode. Left to its own devices, BB-8 wanders around the room without directive. It doesn’t have a camera (again, the head is just plastic), so for the most part it’ll just drive around until it hits a wall, act pissy (that’s my interpretation at least), and then go another direction. I wouldn’t recommend letting it on tables or other elevated surfaces, but if you do, it's worth noting that the thing's been pretty durable so far. (Its effectiveness on carpet is variable, pending your floor fabric of choice.) Sphero makes a lot of bold claims on the packaging, chief among them "holographic communication," but really it’s just an augmented reality video — either of an X-Wing model or some small video you record with a front-facing camera — that you can see by pointing. It’s cute, but you’ll probably only try it once.Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Mo., said Thursday that Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, "has not earned" her backing.
"First and foremost, I have absolutely no intention of supporting Hillary Clinton — not now, not ever," Wagner told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "I am kind of like all voters. The candidate who is running for public office has to earn my vote, and Donald Trump has not earned my vote."
Wagner's statement echoes House Speaker Paul Ryan's announcement that "he's not ready" to endorse Trump and it's consistent with her previous criticism of Trump following his mockery of Arizona Sen. John McCain's capture during the Vietnam War.
"He is going to have to earn my vote and prove that he is capable of stepping up to the leadership position of being the nominee of our party," she said. "I am going to take a thoughtful approach on this."
Ryan made a similar comment during a CNN interview on Thursday. "I think the bulk of the burden on unifying the party will have to come from our presumptive nominee," he said. "I think what a lot of Republicans want to see is that we have a standard-bearer that bears our standards and that unifies all the wings of the Republican Party."MADRID (Reuters) - Beggars, dog-lovers and fortune-tellers who venture onto Madrid’s busy streets may soon find themselves out of pocket as authorities in the city and elsewhere seek creative solutions to their financial problems.
Dogs wait for their owner as people enter a government-run employment office in Madrid August 2, 2013. REUTERS/Susana Vera
The Madrid council laid out plans this week to levy fines of 750 euros ($1,000) for public activities including soliciting for money outside shopping centers, feeding or washing dogs, reading tarot cards and performing acrobatics with a bike.
Saddled with huge debts since a property bubble burst in 2008, Spain’s autonomous regions and town halls have seen core revenues fall as unemployment holds stubbornly above 25 percent and corporate investments dry up. Many owe millions to service suppliers and staff.
Since last year, several have sought new ways of making up the shortfall, introducing taxes on plastic shopping bags, gambling and tourist stays, or fines for skateboarding, letting off fireworks or drinking or offering massages on the street.
The strategy looks to be paying off, with revenues for the 17 regions, including metropolitan Madrid, up 25 percent last year at 168 billion euros as direct and indirect taxes rose.
Their income is forecast to grow through 2016 - also good news for the federal government, which spent 70 billion euros in 2012 and 2013 bailing out regional authorities and town halls.
Local governments heaped up debt during the property boom, when they enjoyed buoyant investment and high tax revenues as construction companies scrambled to build across the country.
“There was a tax that worked very well for many years and gave town halls a lot of money and that was the construction tax... That’s where there’s a hole,” said Javier Suarez, a tax professor at the University of Oviedo.
CRIMINALIZING POVERTY?
But the new fines and levies have their critics.
Spain’s sky-high unemployment rate has increased the number of homeless on Madrid’s streets, as well as hawkers and beggars, who the proposed penalties in the city would target.
The town hall also proposed a fine for camping in the central Puerta del Sol square, where Spain’s “Indignados” movement took off and inspired similar “Occupy” protest movements around the world.
“The strategy of criminalizing poverty has always produced results but it’s ugly,” said Jesus Sandin, head of the homelessness program at non-profit group Solidarios.
“We’re talking about blaming people who have no other option than to use public spaces because they don’t have housing or work for the deterioration of a city that just a moment ago was aiming to host the Olympics, which is a little unfair.”
Spain’s No. 3 city Valencia - left with a major financial hangover after a huge spending spree last decade - expects to take in around 9.5 million euros in fines in 2013, slightly more than in 2012.
In March at Valencia’s annual “Fallas” festival featuring processions of huge papier-mâché figures that are later burned, officials introduced a 300 euro fine for children under the age of eight caught throwing firecrackers, according to local media.
Parents were outraged last year when some regions charged children who brought packed lunches to school, even if they did not eat cafeteria food. As the economic crisis has eaten into family budgets, many were trying to save by sending their children to school with home-made meals.
TAX ON SERVICES
The new proposals in Madrid, which has promised to cut local taxes from 2015, could come into effect later this year. They also include a penalty of up to 3,000 euros for placing flowerpots in precarious positions on balconies.
Dolores Navarro, city councilor for families, social services and civil participation, said the fines aimed to make the capital more liveable rather than simply raise money.
“Any law or regulation has to have some kind of sanction... People do not learn without some type of punishment,” she said.
In the southern city of Seville, the local government has frozen taxes while introducing new charges for public services, including a 12 euro fee to enter the historic alcazar, a royal palace that was originally a Moorish fort, at night.
“There’s a fair bit of margin in charging for services, because right now lots of services are subsidized by town halls without good reason,” said the University of Oviedo’s Suarez.
Not even death merits exemptions. Burial costs have risen in several cities and the town hall in Zaragoza jacked up maintenance fees for mausoleums to 123.30 euros from just 34.65.When I teach sociology I usually think about daily life examples to stress the value of concepts in sociology, and it’s one of the reasons I enjoy blogging here, to test these examples and connect them to concepts. One of the big draws to sociology for me was the importance that good concepts can have in rethinking how our daily lives function. This is actually a key matter when we think about religion. Religion as a way to view reality, a worldview, changes the way we think about how we live life. As many a religious leader has noted, religious people make real decisions that radically alter the way their lives run. We’re invited to reconsider our priorities in life and how they mesh (or fail to mesh) with our lived reality. In the world of evangelicals they use phrases like “walk like you talk” or “having a consistent witness.”
Sociologist Mark Chaves noted however that this is a bad assumption to start with regarding the personal lives of religious people. We’re highly inconsistent or “incongruous” when it comes to what we believe and what we do. At its worst it’s popularly defined as hypocrisy and at best it’s being a “goody-goody” at some things but not others.
When it comes to religion and daily life then, few things are more applicable than the simple day-to-day routines of being a parent. How do moms and dads live out their faith when it comes to bringing up baby? Believe it or not, there’s not a lot of research out there on this point given that these two social institutions of family and religion are so fundamental to society. So it surprised me when one of the only religion studies to show up last year in the top sociology journals tackled this very topic. Alfred DeMaris, Annette Mahoney, and Kenneth Pargament examined data derived from 169 English-speaking married couples in a Midwestern US city that were in their third trimester and attending childbirth classes as they awaited the birth of their first child. Unlike other studies, the couples were not interviewed once, but 4 different times at the 4th, 7th and 13th month. They accomplished this for every couple between 2005 and 2008.
Daily tasks in infant care included the following: changing “poopy” diapers, changing wet diapers, putting the baby to sleep, getting the baby dressed, bathing, getting up at night to care for the baby, feeding, soothing when in distress, and play. It’s exhausting just reading that list isn’t it? So they used this as a way to determine whether religion helps dads become more involved and thus reduce the “gender gap” in infant care.
The researchers asked each parent how much he or she did of the aforementioned tasks, and then asked them to rate their spouse on his or her task accomplishments. Further they introduced questions that one doesn’t normally see in surveys. They asked a series of questions that tap into what they call “theistic sanctification” which refers to their view of whether God played a large or no role in the pregnancy, delivery and care of their baby. Their second unique measure refers to “spiritual investment” which picks up on each spouse’s view of their religious behavior regarding their child (e.g. “I have prayed for my unborn child”).
They also included other important characteristics such as “spouse’s knowledge of infants,” infant temperament, marital satisfaction, and a key scale, “sex-role traditionalism,” an established set of questions that identifies whether each spouse has a fairly traditional view of the roles & responsibilities in the relationship (e.g. wives are nurturing, more involved in the private sphere and subordinate in the relationship). God bless these couples for answering all these questions.
The upshot: no effect for theistic sanctification on infant care. Sigh. As they conclude: “In sum, all these efforts revealed only one consistent effect: The more religious the couple, the greater the gender gap ‘in favor’ of moms” (363). For those not familiar with this kind of language the quotations mean this: more religious couples usually exhibit greater infant care from the mom rather than a leveling out between mom and dad. Further they state, “To the extent that religiousness promotes a traditional gendered division of labor with respect to child care, then, our evidence suggests that it hinders rather than furthers the goal of gender equality in parenting.” (365)
Some of the main factors that do affect father involvement in daily tasks:
Time spent at work: more time at work, less infant care. More time spent by mom at work, the lower the gender gap in infant care.
Knowledge of infant development: the more mom knows about taking care of baby, the greater the gap.
Mom’s traditional view of sex roles: more traditional the views of mom, the greater the gap.
Fussy babies: more fussy, the greater the gap.
What’s striking in this study are the implications and suggestions for what religious communities and couples might make of this study. They suggest that religious communities that want fathers to be more involved should consider “parenting workshops focused on increasing knowledge about child development that coincide with religious naming rituals for infants.” (367)
Couples should consider the costs and benefits of trading time off from work in order for dads to bond more with their infants at this early and vital stage.
As with other good studies, they close with a half dozen caveats. For example, a minority of moms that are “home centered” would find these results reflective of their experience. Their findings don’t jibe with some other research that finds that religious fathers are actually more involved and their response is that this may be due to the specific time frame in a child’s life that is examined here. It’s possible that religious dads are way more involved when a kid gets older but when it comes to changing poopy diapers and the like, they’re nowhere to be found. In fact they state that the very necessity of these duties might be one reason why personal faith doesn’t make a difference, as opposed to empowering knowledge of childcare that some moms exhibit.
What do you think about their implications? If father involvement is a priority for Christians, what sort of ways could Christian communities get more faith-informed dads to be more involved in baby duty? (doodie?)In a provocative new essay, NBC News Think claims that science has proven that having kids is bad for the environment and therefore “having many children is wrong, or at least morally suspect.”
In an article titled “Science proves kids are bad for Earth: Morality suggests we stop having them,” bioethicist Travis Rieder argues that having a child “is a major contributor to climate change” and thus “everyone on Earth ought to consider having fewer children.”
In an ominous warning to parents, Rieder declares that we “need to stop pretending kids don’t have environmental and ethical consequences” before comparing the decision to have children to that of freeing a convicted murderer from jail.
Consider this case, Rieder proposes: “If I release a murderer from prison, knowing full well that he intends to kill innocent people, then I bear some responsibility for those deaths — even though the killer is also fully responsible.”
“Something similar is true, I think, when it comes to having children,” Rieder continues. “Once my daughter is an autonomous agent, she will be responsible for her emissions. But that doesn’t negate my responsibility.”
Science proves kids are bad for Earth. Morality suggests we stop having them. https://t.co/aCQDsNrPy1 pic.twitter.com/rxpJaQqU9R — NBC News THINK (@NBCNewsTHINK) November 15, 2017
The unarticulated supposition behind this line of reasoning is that the environment is valuable for its own sake, rather than the sake of the human beings who inhabit the earth. Therefore, if humans cause dangerous climate change, fewer humans is a good thing.
Similar arguments were famously employed by Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 doomsday bestseller, The Population Bomb, which spawned mass hysteria over the future of the world and the earth’s ability to sustain human life.
To allow women to have as many children as they want, Ehrlich said, is like letting people “throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.”
As a logical consequence of his position, Ehrlich has defended mass sterilization, sex-selective abortion and infanticide, since by his worldview human beings are the enemies of the planet. For the religion of environmentalism, overbreeding is a mortal sin while population control by any means is a sacrament.
Although Ehrlich’s apocalyptic thesis proved to be spectacularly wrong, it has shown remarkable resilience, as Wednesday’s article in NBC Think demonstrates.
Ehrlich sold the world the idea that mankind stood on the brink of Armageddon because there was simply no way to feed the exponentially increasing world population, while climate alarmists now say that the environment cannot sustain the procreation of little carbon dioxide emitters. The earlier thesis focused on consumption while the newer version underscores output. The conclusion is the same.
Rieder claims that the science behind his contentions “is fairly well-established,” since scientists have shown “that having a child, especially for the world’s wealthy, is one of the worst things you can do for the environment.”
While I recognize that this is an uncomfortable discussion, Rieder concedes, “I believe that the seriousness of climate change justifies uncomfortable conversations. In this case, that means that we need to stop pretending the decision to have children doesn’t have environmental and ethical consequences.”
The author goes to make a further provocative comparison, that some parents might find somewhat offensive, by likening children to consumer luxury items.
People who care about the environment “might eventually admit that having many children is wrong, or at least morally suspect, for standard environmental reasons: Having a child imposes high emissions on the world, while the parents get the benefit,” Rieder writes.
“So like with any high-cost luxury, we should limit our indulgence,” he concludes.
“If having one fewer child reduces one’s contribution to the harms of climate change, the choice of family size becomes a morally relevant one,” he says.
While generously suggesting that his arguments don’t necessarily mean coercion should be applied to force parents to have fewer children, not much imagination is required to connect the dots |
in Nerudia’s boardroom, in front of a sign that reads: “Remember: confidentiality is our top product.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chris Lord and David Newns, founders of Nerudia. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
The pair bought a few samples to put in their suitcases and headed back to Accrington, Lancashire, where they were running a company adapting vehicles for the disabled. Back in his kitchen, Lord set about dismantling the e-cigs to try to work out how they were made, while using the devices to kick his own smoking habit. “The first thing we thought is: if we are going to sell these products we need to know what’s in them. We can’t sleep at night unless we do,” says Newns. “We realised we can never make sure it’s 100% safe unless we make it ourselves … Right from the start we realised that the e-liquid, the liquid that’s going into people’s lungs, we have to make that in the UK.”
An aeronautical engineer by training, Lord, now 44, spent hours and hours in his makeshift lab experimenting, before the pair moved into the University of Manchester’s bioscience incubator, where they were introduced to the venture capitalists who invested an initial £1m in the firm, then called CN Creative.
It was quite an undertaking, Lord remembers, sucking hard on a slim kazoo-like e-cig in the Nerudia boardroom. “E-cigarettes are multi-discipline,” he says. “You’ve got chemistry, you’ve got fluid dynamics, you’ve got air dynamics, you’ve got electronics, which is fundamental – does the thing charge safely and discharge safely? Now, I’m not trained in chemistry. I’m trained in common sense and looking things up when you don’t know. So I asked a lot of people and Google is amazing.”
While Lord experimented, wheeler-dealers around the UK started importing more and more stock from China as the appetite for smoking substitutes rocketed. Others had a short-term plan to make a quick buck, but Lord and Newns were playing a longer game. By January 2009, they had come up “ECOpure”, an e-liquid they were determined to get approved by the Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) as the key ingredient of the world’s first medicinal e-cigarette. It was, they realised, a game-changing prospect: what a coup, for their product to be able to make certain health claims on their labels, while cigarettes are forced to carry scary health warnings.
It was a long and arduous process, but by 2012, British American Tobacco – caught on the backfoot along with most of the tobacco multi-nationals having made the mistake of writing off e-cigs as a passing fad – were so convinced that ECOpure was indeed going to get the all-important licence that it bought the firm for a figure Lord will say only was “between £30m and 50m”. The licence is still pending, but it should be granted in months, not years, according to Newn. Public Health England expected it to have been granted last year.
Around 1.5 million Britons are now thought to be regular vapers – many trying to kick their cigarette habit and others just looking for a way to get around the smoking ban, which was introduced in 2007. As well as Nick Clegg, other high-profile fans include Lily Allen, Jack Nicholson and Simon Cowell. June Brown, who plays Dot Cotton on EastEnders, was an early adopter, being photographed puffing away on a £40 device way back in 2009. So ubiquitous have the devices become that, in March, the Office for National Statistics added e-cigarettes to the basket of goods they use to measure the UK’s inflation rate.
By 2013, the sector was thought to be worth £193m in the UK and in 2014 £2bn on a global basis. But recently growth plateaued, amid conflicting health advice and disputes over whether the sweet-flavoured products were being surreptitiously targeted at children. The World Health Organisation is pushing for a global ban on indoor vaping, saying “evidence suggests that exhaled e-cigarette aerosol increases the background air level of some toxicants, nicotine and particles”.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Plants inside the tobacco cultivation lab, where samples are grown to allow researchers to find new ways of extracting nicotine from their leaves. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
The Nerudia founders see their mission as an altruistic, as well as lucrative, one: to help cut smoking deaths. They like to talk up their products as smoking cessation aids for cigarette addicts, yet increasing evidence suggests that vaping is attractive to teenagers whose fingers have not yet yellowed from a lifetime of cigarette clutching. On Tuesday, scientists in Liverpool called for urgent controls on the promotion and sale of e-cigarettes to children after finding high rates of usage among secondary school pupils in the region.
In a survey of more than 16,000 teenagers in north-west England, the researchers found that one in five students aged 14 to 17 had bought or tried e-cigarettes. Many of those who dabbled with vaping were already regular smokers. Nearly one in 20 of the teenagers who bought or tried e-cigarettes had never smoked conventional cigarettes before, suggesting that vaping may have become a new activity to experiment with.
However, ASH, the well-respected anti-smoking pressure group in the UK, considers e-cigs a helpful aid to smoking cessation. “There is little real world evidence of harm from e-cigarettes to date, especially in comparison to smoking,” according to an ASH factsheet. “Smoking tobacco is a major risk to health and half of all long-term users will be killed by their addiction. Every year 100,000 smokers will die from smoking-related diseases. This is because users inhale hundreds of toxic chemicals contained in the smoke.
“By contrast, electronic cigarettes are designed only to deliver nicotine. Although currently there is a lack of any firm evidence to establish their absolute safety, such products should be considered many times safer than smoking.”
The problem, as ASH notes, is that “current, unlicensed, products on the market vary widely in their levels of quality and effectiveness”. When tested by the MHRA, some products contained levels of nicotine that did not match the amount stated on their label.
All of this should change with the new EU directive, which will require European e-cigarette manufacturers and vendors to become far more transparent about what they are selling.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Inside Nerudia’s analytical lab. The firm hopes to set the highest-possible industry standards. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
It is against this backdrop that Lord and Newns have spotted an opportunity. They have attracted £11m investment based on the gamble that the new EU regulations, plus the medicinal licences, are going to lead to another boom in the e-cig industry. As the firm’s website puts it: “We are committed to being at the forefront of the truth agenda within the e-cigarette industry helping to set the standard throughout Europe for quality products and new levels of care with e-cigarettes.”
Essentially, this means building what Newns calls “a centre of excellence” for e-cigarettes, insisting that Nerudia will soon be considered the world’s leading authority on nicotine: “What we would like to do is provide that leadership from a science perspective. What we hope to become is a service provider to help everybody in the industry, large and small, meet a set of standards which the regulators can go, yeah, we’re really comfortable with that, we can appreciate the potential health benefits of e-cigarettes over traditional smoking. That’s our real goal here.”
He adds: “We will be setting the bar of quality really high. The whole idea of producing everything to pharmaceutical standard is that there are no questions unanswered.”
Nerudia will be manufacturing e-liquids under white labels to sell to big brand products, and will offer advice and analysis to those in the market. Having been through the rigmarole of applying for a medicinal licence, they have a consultancy arm that will hold the hands of others going through the same process. And they can test products in what they claim is the UK’s only dedicated testing lab for e-cigarettes, using special machines that simulate human inhalation and exhalation, measuring how much nicotine is delivered per puff.
By the end of the year, Nerudia aims to employ 150 people and soon expects to be turning huge profits. “We have always been clear that we see this as a billion-pound business,” says Newns, who admits that some in London are sceptical of their ability to build such a firm in the north-west.
But he and Lord are adamant there is no better place to set up a pharmaceutical business.
Other pharma firms, including AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly, are also based in Speke, providing an ample workforce from which to poach. And with George Osborne banging on constantly about his vision for a northern powerhouse to rebalance the UK’s Londoncentric economy, “the government is finally recognising the opportunity in the north-west,” says Newns. “In London, where we spent time during the sale to British American Tobacco, they all think we’re stupid. We are out to prove them wrong.”SF man says citations he received for inflating 50-person rafts at Dolores Park are 'bogus'
Now Playing:
A San Francisco resident says he is using his experience of receiving citations at Dolores Park to raise awareness about the number of people being cited for "bogus" reasons by Recreation and Park rangers.
Clarence "Sparr" Risher, who works as a computer engineer, was slapped with three citations when he brought two massive inflatable life rafts to the park on Nov. 11, and in a Reddit thread he shares his experience where a debate is unfolding around whether rangers should have stopped him.
"If you were just flopping a raft around as a way of claiming space or disrupting other people's enjoyment of the park, that's one thing, but if it was more like, 'Hey everyone, come play in my raft!' and drunks and children alike were taking you up on that offer, then your raft's impact on society was a big net positive," shares raldi.
"I'm amazed at the positive comments here cheering for you," writes thecementmixer. "By your logic everyone should be able to bring tents and inflatable structures to the park, and at the end of the day there's no space left! The law is enforced for a reason, to not make a precedent."
Inflatable life rafts deployed at Dolores Park on Nov. 11, 2017. Inflatable life rafts deployed at Dolores Park on Nov. 11, 2017. Photo: Victoria Dobbs / YouTube Screen Capture Photo: Victoria Dobbs / YouTube Screen Capture Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close SF man says citations he received for inflating 50-person rafts at Dolores Park are 'bogus' 1 / 5 Back to Gallery
San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department's Connie Chan also responded to the incident with a statement: "Our job is to maintain fun and safe recreational spaces for people to enjoy. And for this person who inflated two giant 50-person life rafts in the middle of a busy park and impeded on everyone else's ability to enjoy the park, the answer is yes, he was cited for violating the park codes."
***
Spread across a grassy hill overlooking downtown, Dolores Park is among the city's most beloved outdoor destinations. On sunny weekends its 16 acres often attract a festive crowd who spread out their blankets and beach chairs, uncork bottles of wine and cook elaborate meals on portable grills.
It's a place where people like to congregate and share their creative endeavors, and it's not unusual to see park-goers doing hula-hoop tricks and partner yoga, walking slack lines tied between the palm trees, dancing to the sounds of bongo drums and setting up temporary art sculptures. But the Park and Rec reservation website indicates that a special event permit is required for any event "requiring special set ups of stages, tents, barricades, fences or other items."
The park's popularity in recent years has spurred a number of issues including massive pileups of trash, destruction of the grass and landscaping and vandalism of the children's play equipment. There's also been a recent bout of violence, including a shooting and stabbings. Two Rec and Park rangers patrol the park everyday for eight hours, and the San Francisco Police Department has recently added to its daily foot, bicycle and car patrols.
On Reddit, Risher shares that he assumed he would receive a citation and told SFGATE he was willing to take the risk to spread the word about his and friends' experiences with "permit denials and ranger harassment" in Dolores Park.
"The rangers often threaten people with citations in order to scare people away, and most people just give up," he says. "I am willing and able to fight, and possibly pay, the citations, so I got them in order to find out what they would be for, and which, if any, of them would be legitimate. Once I find those things out, I'll publicize the results, so other park-goers will have a better idea of what legitimate (or not) citations they might get from the rangers."
Risher purchased the self-inflating, 50-person life rafts used from a cruise ship company because they make fun trampolines when turned upside down. To test out his new purchase and have some fun, he brought them to the park on Nov. 11 with the intention of sharing his giant toys with friends and anyone interested. Even though he says the park wasn't overly crowded (possibly due to the Veterans' Day holiday), he was approached by a ranger as soon as he pulled the cords to start the inflation process.
"As they were inflating the rangers said I need to deflate them immediately," he says. "I told them I'd deflate them later after folks had played on them."
That's when the rangers called the San Francisco Police Department to intervene.
"They threatened to take me to jail because I didn't have my ID on me," says Risher, whose girlfriend had his wallet and was on her way to the park.
Risher says he opted to not try getting a permit because he has attempted in the past and only ever hit a wall. About a year ago, he was turned down when he requested a Dolores Park permit for a decertified hot air balloon that he sets up like a wind sock.
The ranger eventually gave Risher three citations for failing to obtain a permit (code 7.17), failing to obey order (code 4.13) and setting up a structure without a permit (code 3.12).
On Reddit, Risher questions each of the citations writing:
3.12 is definitely bogus; that's "CAMPING PROHIBITED" and describes structures you can inhabit or camp in.
4.13 sounded legit at first, since I didn't immediately deflate when asked to. However, upon reading the park code, I see that "REFUSAL TO OBEY LAWFUL ORDER" specifically calls out lawful orders given pursuant to 4.14, and 4.14 specifically and only calls out the prohibition on fighting, loud and unreasonable noise, and the use of offensive words.
7.17 might be legit depending on which of the 25 permit-requiring activities they want to describe us as having engaged in. I won't find out about that until the court date.
"I hope I can gather more information that's useful to share with other park-goers," he adds.Nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) are capable of operating in shallow, confined waters-but the smaller, quieter, more maneuverable antisubmarine subs (SSKs) are better suited for operations in such waters. The U.S. Navy should acquire a relatively small number of SSKs for operations in the littorals. SSNs, which can conduct long-range operations submerged and at high sustained speed, should be used primarily in deep water.
The Littoral Operating Environment
The characteristics of the physical environment and weather/climate considerably affect the employment of surface ships and submarines. An ocean's open, deep water poses different challenges than areas close to the landmass, or littorals. (The strict definition of "littoral" refers to a coastline of land and near-shore waters, particularly the area between extreme high and low tides. More broadly, the term designates a coastal region.)Valve is supposedly working on a bunch of new projects, and one of them is an open world space game called ‘Stars of Barathrum’. Apparently, the title is extremely ambitious in its scope, and we may have our first look at it via these amazing concept arts.
Now, of course, this should be taken with a pinch of salt, but according to Facepunch–a well known gaming forum–some of these images belong to Valve’s new IP. Apparently, you have the ability to command large cruisers and capital ships, and again, as mentioned above, this looks something that is very ambitious, especially considering the type of games Valve has released so far.
According to the poster who leaked these images, Valve is investing a lot of resources into this game, and who knows it may end up as a free-to-play MMO, too, considering Valve has shown a lot of interest in that type of business model and encourages it as well.
“An inside source has confirmed that SOB (Valve’s new IP) is an unannounced game entitled Stars of Barathrum (working title). Plays like privateer/freelancer but also with the ability to command larger cruisers and capital ships. It’s a very vast and open-world game where you choose your own adventure, a lot of internal resources are being put into SOB,” reads the Facepunch post.
What is interesting is the fact that these concept arts are developed by Peter König–a concept artist. He was an ex-Valve employee who worked with them from 2008-2012. You can check his resume over here.
Apparently, the game was hinted before as well, but nothing of this level has been leaked before, so without further ado, check out the screenshots below.
Again, please treat this as a rumour, as nothing is confirmed.The British company is continuing its collaboration with Japanese design company AIM to produce the new AIM-Judd 5.5-litre normally-aspirated V10, which builds on the success of its previous sportscar designs.
The powerplant exploits changes to the rules for 2018 devised to allow normally-aspirated engines to be competitive with turbocharged units under the fuel-flow regulations introduced for the 2014 season.
This has been done to boost the pool of engines available to privateers with non-hybrid machinery, who have been guaranteed lap-time parity with factory hybrid P1s.
The engine is built around a new 72-degree cylinder block billed as "significantly lighter" than previous Judd sportscar engines and incorporates new combustion chamber and piston designs.
It will also have a revised cooling system and an updated engine management system with an electronic throttle and fuel-flow management software.
Exploiting non-turbo benefits
Engine Developments believes that the new engine can "deliver extremely competitive lap times without the problems of throttle response, complexity and reliability associated with turbocharged engines", according to a statement.
"The expected technical regulations in LMP1 will guarantee parity of performance between various engine types used through a rigorous homologation procedure," the statement continued.
"We therefore believe the V10 platform should be the natural choice for any LMP1 team that is serious about having a trouble-free run in the 2018 Le Mans 24 Hours."
The engine will be available to teams on a lease-only basis in time for the beginning of the 2018/19 WEC'superseason'.
Prototype history
Engine Developments has a long history in sportscar racing with the Judd V10 developed out of its early-1990s Formula 1 unit.
Its four-litre Judd GV4 engine won the Daytona 24 Hours in the back of a Doran Dallara SP1 in 2002 and its successor, the five-litre GV5, notched up podium finishes at Le Mans with Pescarolo Sport in 2005 and 2006.
The company subsequently joined up with AIM to produce a wide-angle version of the enlarged 5.5-litre GV5, which was run by the Creation Autosportif LMP1 squad in 2008-09.
Have your say in the WEC Fan Survey here: https://wecsurvey.motorsport.comDave Haste
Monday Miscellanea
This Week In London’s History
Monday – 14 October 1852: King’s Cross Station is opened.
– 14 October 1852: King’s Cross Station is opened. Tuesday – 15 October 1881: The Royal Comedy Theatre (known for most of its life as the Comedy Theatre, and latterly the Harold Pinter Theatre) opens in the West End.
– 15 October 1881: The Royal Comedy Theatre (known for most of its life as the Comedy Theatre, and latterly the Harold Pinter Theatre) opens in the West End. Wednesday – 16 October 1987: In the early hours of the morning, a huge storm of hurricane intensity wreaks havoc across London (and much of the rest of southern England).
– 16 October 1987: In the early hours of the morning, a huge storm of hurricane intensity wreaks havoc across London (and much of the rest of southern England). Thursday – 17 October 1814: At the Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road, a colossal vat containing 3555 barrels of beer bursts (equivalent to 2.5 million pints). The ensuing tsunami of beer causes several nearby buildings to collapse, and results in eight fatalities.
– 17 October 1814: At the Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road, a colossal vat containing 3555 barrels of beer bursts (equivalent to 2.5 million pints). The ensuing tsunami of beer causes several nearby buildings to collapse, and results in eight fatalities. Friday – 18 October 1922: The British Broadcasting Company (later to become the British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC) is formed, and soon starts broadcasting from Marconi House on the Strand.
Random London Quote Of The Week
London – A place you go to get bronchitis.
Fran Lebowitz
Photo by Tom Bland via the Londonist Flickr Pool.Happy 20th Birthday to Fuji-OSCAR 29! FO-29, known as JAS-2 (Japan Amateur Satellite #2) prior to launch, was built by the Japan Amateur Radio League and launched on August 17, 1996 from Tanegashima Space Center on an H-II launch vehicle into a 1,323 km x 800 km orbit with an inclination of 98.5 degrees. In addition to a 100 kHz wide analog Mode V/u (JA) transponder, the satellite also includes a packet BBS and digitalker. While the packet BBS and digitalker are non-functional, the analog transponder continues to provide excellent service to the present day.
With an apogee of 1,323 km, FO-29 provides satellite operators with excellent DX opportunities every few months when the passes over a certain area are at or near apogee. Intercontinental QSOs are regularly reported, including between Japan and Alaska as well as North America and Europe. Although the theoretical maximum range at apogee is 7,502 km, the excellent sensitivity of the transponder as well as it’s strong and solid 1 watt downlink signal allows that distance to be stretched when the conditions are suitable. The longest distance QSO made via FO-29’s analog transponder occurred on August 27, 2015 with an unscheduled 7,599.959 km contact between KG5CCI in Arkansas and F4CQA in France.
The sensitivity of the transponder and Mode V/u configuration also allow for the effective use of minimal equipment. QSOs have been reported using a single Yaesu FT-817 transceiver and the stock rubber duck antenna. Taking advantage of the large footprint and ease of use, the K1N DXpedition to Navassa Island made a total of 29 QSOs during two passes of FO-29 on February 12, 2015 using a single Yaesu FT-817 along with an Arrow antenna, activating that extremely rare DX entity on satellite for the first time since 1978. To this day, FO-29 remains the most widely used linear transponder satellite and an ideal satellite for beginners looking to become active on the linear transponder satellites to try first. The FO-29 control station maintains a blog (in Japanese) at http://blog.goo.ne.jp/fo-29. The JARL also offers an award for confirmed QSOs with ten different stations via FO-29.A LIMERICK BIKER will be sentenced to life in prison in October after being found guilty of murdering a member of a rival motorcycle club two years ago.
Alan ‘Cookie’ McNamara, a 51-year-old from Mountfune, Murroe, Co Limerick had pleaded not guilty to the murder of Andrew ‘AOD’ O’Donoghue at the gates of the Road Tramps motorcycle club at Mountfune on 20 June 2015.
The jury delivered a unanimous verdict to the Central Criminal Court this afternoon.
The seven men and four women had been asked to decide if the accused was acting in defence of himself and his family or in retaliation, after he was assaulted and threatened.
Evidence
The trial heard that McNamara, a member of the Caballeros motorcycle club, was assaulted at a pub in Doon in Limerick by members of the Road Tramps the day before the shooting. Doon was Road Tramps territory.
One of the Road Tramps punched McNamara in the face and one of them took his waistcoat, which had a Caballeros patch sewn into the back. Another member held back his wife.
McNamara claimed that three Road Tramps later pulled up to his house in a car and, in front of his wife and children, threatened to kill him and burn down his home. He said he was terrified.
He received a phone call from his stepson, Robert Cusack, the following day. He said that Cusack told him that he was in a car with two other Caballeros following a Road Tramp.
McNamara loaded a shotgun, got in his car and drove to the Road Tramps’ clubhouse, where he claimed he thought O’Donoghue was holding a gun, so he shot him.
Cusack (28) of Abington, Murroe, Co Limerick had gone on trial with his stepfather, having pleaded not guilty to impeding McNamara’s apprehension. However, he changed his plea to guilty during the trial and will be sentenced later.
Alleged threats
The prosecution said the shooting “evolved out of acts which were revengeful or retaliatory”, that McNamara had seen an opportunity for retribution and had murdered an innocent man.
The prosecution said it did not stand over the attack at Doon, the alleged threats or the presence of “an arsenal of weapons” at the Road Tramps clubhouse. However, Michael Delaney SC said in his closing speech:
You are not entitled to take the law into your own hands and shoot an innocent man.
He noted that there was no evidence that O’Donoghue had been involved in any of the incidents leading up to the shooting.
The defence said the whole event unfolded very quickly and that the accused felt there was a threat to him and his family. McNamara had claimed to be “out of my mind” and in a panic on the morning of the shooting.
Hugh Hartnett SC, defending, said that his client had been attacked and then threatened by three men, one of them waving a gun.
“Would that have an effect on the mind of an average man?” he asked in his closing speech.
He added that McNamara knew what the Road Tramps were capable of, reminding the jury of the weapons found at their clubhouse and that one member, Kevin Ryan, had a conviction for a firearms offence.
What did he believe
Justice Paul McDermott told the seven men and four women on the jury that they had to examine the accused man’s state of mind and ask, “what did he honestly believe at the time?”.
He said to think about the manner of the shooting and the events leading up to it – why the accused come to be there with a loaded shotgun and whether Andrew O’Donoghue did anything other than point towards him.
They were told to consider whether there was a basis for McNamara fearing a threat to him or his family.
He explained that homicide was not murder if committed in reasonable self defence or in defence of others.
They were told that if the accused believed that he was using necessary force but the force he used was greater than a reasonable person would deem necessary, then he would be guilty of manslaughter and not murder.
However, where the accused knowingly used more force than was reasonable in the circumstances, he would be guilty of murder.
Following two hours and 43 minutes deliberating, the jury reached a unanimous verdict of guilty of murder.
McNamara, who walks with the aid of canes, showed no reaction when the registrar read out the verdict. However, his family sobbed quietly in an otherwise silent court.
Justice McDermott said that, although the sentence of life was mandatory, modern practice was to defer sentence. He remanded McNamara in custody for sentencing on 27 October.
His family became emotional and embraced McNamara before he was led away to the cells.
The deceased man’s family left court quietly without making comment, as did a number of members of his motorcycle club.
Comments are closed as a second person is on trial in connection with this case/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - What’s in a name? U.S. pork producers are finding that the name of the virus spreading from Mexico is affecting their business, prompting U.S. officials to argue for changing the name from swine flu.
At a news briefing, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack took pains to repeatedly refer to the flu as the “H1N1 virus.”
“This is not a food-borne illness, virus. It is not correct to refer to it as swine flu because really that’s not what this is about,” Vilsack said.
Israel has already rejected the name swine flu, and opted to call it “Mexico flu.” Jewish dietary laws forbid eating pork.
The Paris-based World Organisation for Animal Health also objected to the name, saying the virus contains avian and human components and no pig so far has been found ill with the disease.
And there is growing sentiment in the farm sector to call it the North American virus — although disease expert Anthony Fauci told a Senate hearing the “swine flu” designation reflected scientific naming protocol.
For U.S. pork producers the swine flu name has hurt, forcing government officials into the position of stressing that American pork is safe to eat and that other countries should not ban imports.
Pork, soybean and corn prices have fallen in the last two days, “and if this continues, obviously you have significant potential, which is why it’s important to get this right,” Vilsack said.
At the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, there was also talk of stripping the “swine” from swine flu, which CDC acting director Richard Besser said was leading to the misapprehension that people can catch the disease from pork.
“That’s not helpful to pork producers. That’s not helpful to people who eat pork. It’s not helpful to people who are wondering, how can they get this infection,” Besser told a briefing.fullscreen continue view fullscreen close
Stately Grand Central Terminal houses many secrets, and hidden amenities. From its whispering galleries to the tennis court and its gorgeous bar The Campbell Apartment, which has been reborn The Campbell under new ownership.
The Gerber Group, which runs upscale lounge-type spots including Mr. Purple and The Roof, made moderate updates to the space, including the addition of two added areas for drinking: Campbell Palm Court and Campbell Terrace. While the Campbell Apartment was semi-hidden, the Times reports that its "days as a hard-to-find, slightly mysterious hideaway appear to be over." A large awning will now signal its presence on Vanderbilt Avenue, but you can also access it from inside the terminal, by walking through Cipriani restaurant, then through a door and up a set of stairs.
Cocktails like the Aviation (pictured) start at $18 and run up to $25 with the John Campbell's Martini, made with Stoli Elit—a $3,000 bottle of vodka—Carpano dry vermouth and olives. They'll also serve an $85 "Rare" Old Fashioned, made with Macallan "Rare Cask" Single Malt Scotch Whisky alongside other interpretations of classic cocktails including mules and negronis.
A limited menu of finger foods also debuts with the revamped bar. Snacks include Deviled Eggs ($12) and Spiced Roasted Nuts ($11), with more substantial offerings—but still just "a little bit more"—include Crispy Tuna Tartare Tacos ($18) and Mini Lobster Rolls ($23).
The historic space was once the office of John W. Campbell and after his death went through many iterations that included a gun storage facility and a jail. Its contemporary history as a bar began in the late '90s when it was reopened by Mark Grossich. In April 2016, Grossich lost the lease during a contentious bidding process to Scott Gerber, who runs The Gerber Group.
The Campbell is located at 15 Vanderbilt Avenue, inside Grand Central Terminal
The Campbell Menu by Nell Casey on ScribdWelcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com —and let us know what you think.
Welcome to a world of unimaginable wealth and rampant inequality, a world where monolithic corporations act as a law unto themselves, where automation and technological progress threaten to undermine the very foundations of society, and where frightened, forgotten, and furious citizens turn in droves towards political extremism.
This is Fantasy Flight's dystopian Android universe. While you could be forgiven for mistaking it for the world of 2017, it’s actually a cyberpunk setting best known as the backdrop for the card game Android: Netrunner, which pits elite hackers against corporate security systems.
Over the years, though, other titles besides Netrunner have been set in this world of cybercrime and corporate excess, and New Angeles, from designer James Kniffen (Forbidden Stars, Star Wars: Armada), is the latest. The game casts you and your friends as heads of rival mega-corporations battling for power, prestige, and profit in the titular city. New Angeles is a sprawling metropolis that’s home to the Beanstalk, a gargantuan space elevator that connects the Earth with lunar mining bases. It’s also a designated “special commerce zone,” where businesses operate free from almost all government interference—and thus the perfect place for an unscrupulous shark to make a couple million credits.
To emerge victorious in New Angeles, you have to defeat a corporate rival chosen randomly and secretly from among your fellow players. You’ll aim to finish the game with more capital—or victory points—than this rival, meaning that multiple players can win. And while a sharp and savvy executive can find plenty of ways to generate cash, that’s not the game’s only concern. Almost every action you take has an effect on the broader city, sometimes sparking civil unrest and fueling resentment among the populace. Allow dissent to get out of control and the US government will step in to impose—shudder!—market regulation, ending the game in a loss for all players.
Game details Designer: James Kniffen
Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games
Players: 4-6
Age: 14+
Playing time: 2 - 4 hours
Price: $72.56 ( James KniffenFantasy Flight Games4-614+2 - 4 hours: $72.56 ( Amazon ) / ~£45 ( Amazon
That’s the 30,000-foot view of New Angeles, where weighing profits against populist outrage is a constant concern. While the game is ruthlessly, unabashedly competitive, it also comes with a huge element of reluctant cooperation.
Zoom in and you start to see how effective cooperation is. The game revolves around manipulating the city’s various districts. Each round sees neighborhoods produce different resources—consumables, tech, entertainment, energy, or credits. You’ll need to produce different amounts of each to meet consumer demand at various points in the game. Failing to do so will dramatically increase unrest. But keeping districts productive is a challenge. For one thing, they only generate resources if android laborers are present at the end of a round. With your robot supply limited, you have to work with rivals to deploy bots judiciously.
But robotic workers are themselves a source of discontent. Every time you exploit a neighborhood for resources, you spark protests, which shut down production until you find a way to deal with them. And you still have to contend with all the other threats, like disease outbreaks, power outages, political agitators, and organised criminal elements.
New Angeles gives you a lot to keep up with, and it’s made harder still by how you and your rivals have to coordinate in order to keep the city productive and profitable. You all start the game with a hand of action cards that give you a range of ways to interact with the board. These come in different varieties, and the game’s various corporations have access to different types. The Jinteki biotech conglomerate specializes in actions that cure disease. The Haas Bioroid Company excels at deploying android workers to the areas of the city where they’re needed. The NBN media syndicate can use its influence to calm disquiet.
On your turn, you propose an action card from your hand; if everyone else agrees that your card is the best way to deal with the current situation, it will be enacted. What’s more likely, though, is that another player will put forward a suggestion of their own, and you’ll have to vote as a group on which proposal should go ahead.A white South African judge, who was revealed to have stated that gang rape is “a pleasurable pastime” and a part of black people’s culture, claimed that her racist comments, made during a private argument with an activist, were taken out of context.
The scandalous remarks were made by Mabel Jansen, a High Court Judge in the city of Pretoria, during a conversation with social activist Gillian Schutte on Facebook. Schutte had the discussion with Jansen in 2015 but has only now posted the comments online.
The screenshot of the private messages purportedly shows Jansen saying that “in their [black men’s] culture a woman |
video posted a few minutes after midnight on Saturday morning – failed to move the needle for most voters. On the same zero-to-10 scale, 47 percent gave Trump’s apology a negative rating, 14 percent gave it a neutral score and the remaining 39 percent gave it a positive rating. Twenty-six percent of voters scored it a zero (very negative), and 13 percent scored it a 10 (very positive).
The apology did help Trump somewhat with Republicans: 65 percent said they view him either very or somewhat more favorably after viewing it. But among all voters, only 37 percent viewed Trump more favorably.
Still, even after viewing both videos as part of the poll’s administration, more voters say Trump shouldn’t drop out of the race, 45 percent, than say he should, 39 percent. More than three-quarters of Republicans, 78 percent, say Trump shouldn’t end his campaign. And more independents, 44 percent, say Trump should stay in the race, compared with only 35 percent who think he should drop out.
A number of high-profile, down-ballot Republican candidates distanced themselves from Trump on Saturday – but there’s little indication voters are preparing to punish continued support for Trump among other candidates. If a GOP candidate continued to support Trump, just 39 percent of voters overall said it would make them somewhat or much less likely to vote for that candidate, compared with 23 percent who said it would make them more likely to vote for that candidate, and 31 percent who said it wouldn’t affect their vote.
But again, GOP voters reacted differently than voters overall. Some Republicans, like Ayotte and Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), have for months balanced personal ambivalence toward Trump with efforts to avoid alienating pro-Trump voters in their battleground states. And even after watching the video, 41 percent of GOP voters say continued support for Trump would make them more likely to vote for the down-ballot candidate, while only 12 percent said it would make them less likely to vote for that candidate.
In fact, there’s evidence that cutting Trump loose could hurt Republicans like Ayotte, at least initially. There’s little to gain from bailing on Trump: While 31 percent of voters say renouncing support for Trump after the newly released video would make them more likely to vote for a Republican candidate, 25 percent say it makes them less likely to vote for that candidate. More than a third, 34 percent, say it doesn’t matter either way.
And GOP voters could be prepared to punish Republicans who bail on Trump: 28 percent said it makes them more likely to vote for a candidate who says they can’t support Trump anymore, but 25 percent say it makes them less likely to vote for that candidate. A 41-percent plurality say it won’t affect their vote.
Some of the Republicans who have split from Trump have said they will write in his running mate, Mike Pence – or called for the Republican National Committee to promote Pence to the top of the ticket in an official capacity. But there’s little evidence, at the outset, that move would help Republicans: Clinton holds a 6-point lead over Pence in a hypothetical matchup among likely voters, according to the poll.
While Republican voters are thus far mostly shrugging off Trump’s comments, Sunday’s debate – and Trump’s reaction to questions about what he said and how he feels about and treats women – could reinforce this controversy.
Still, the race on the eve of the debate remains both close and volatile. Clinton’s 4-point lead on the initial ballot test is slightly smaller than her 6-point edge on the four-way ballot in last week’s POLITICO/Morning Consult poll. And, even a month before Election Day, 20 percent of likely voters won’t commit to Clinton or Trump on the initial ballot, either choosing a third-party candidate or saying they are undecided.
Morning Consult is a nonpartisan media and technology company that provides data-driven research and insights on politics, policy and business strategy.
More details on the poll and its methodology can be found in these four documents -- Toplines: http://bit.ly/2dVJL2y Crosstabs: http://bit.ly/2dK7p3v | Topical questions -- Toplines: http://bit.ly/2dTh7Q6 Crosstabs: http://bit.ly/2dK8pVeThe protests outside fast-food establishments last week featured calls for a $15 hourly wage. Unemployment is only the most obvious unintended consequence we could expect under such a large forced increase in wages. For consumers, the most noticeable difference would be the price of fast food: A typical fast-food meal would probably cost about $2 more. For example, a Big Mac meal would cost $7.82 instead of $5.69.
My Heritage Foundation colleague James Sherk used research on the price responsiveness of fast-food consumers to calculate how a typical fast-food establishment would respond to an increase in wages from $9.04 (the 2013 average) to $15.50. If the high wage were imposed, prices would rise on contact because the wage bill would vastly exceed most establishments’ small profit margins.
But the reactions wouldn’t stop there: Faced with higher prices, consumers would buy less fast food, substituting home cooking, prepared food and sit-down dining. The appeal of fast food, after all, lies in its cheap convenience. With lower sales, restaurants would most likely raise prices even more (and lay off staff) to maintain profitability.
Sherk estimates that in the short run, prices would rise 38 percent, production and hours worked would fall 36 percent, and wages would decrease to 1 percent of revenue from 3 percent in 2013. In the long run, some restaurants would close, and the survivors would shift to fewer, higher-skilled workers and more labor-saving technology.
Some workers would come out ahead from a $15 fast-food wage: those with the most experience and the highest efficiency. Sadly, marginal workers–including those with the worst alternatives and the fewest marketable skills–would be left behind.
Originally appeared on WSJ.com.Environment
This will be done on June 5, which is also World Environment Day and comes under Kerala’s Haritha Keralam Project.
With Kerala going through a severe drought and water crisis, the state government has decided to cut down all Acacia and Eucalyptus trees as they result in groundwater depletion.
This will be done on June 5, which is also World Environment Day and comes under Kerala’s Haritha Keralam Project.
CM Pinarayi Vijayan in a high-level meeting held in Thiruvananthapuram on Thursday ordered to cut down all the Acacia and Eucalyptus trees from government land across the state and to replace them with fruit-bearing trees and medicinal plants, reports CM Pinarayi Vijayan in a high-level meeting held in Thiruvananthapuram on Thursday ordered to cut down all the Acacia and Eucalyptus trees from government land across the state and to replace them with fruit-bearing trees and medicinal plants, reports Deccan Chronicle
“Acacia and Eucalyptus trees were planted by Kerala Forest Development Corporation during the ministership of Aryadan Muhammed. They thrive on the northern and western side of Agasthykoodam hills near the dams. This drought should serve as an eye opener to replace them,” “Acacia and Eucalyptus trees were planted by Kerala Forest Development Corporation during the ministership of Aryadan Muhammed. They thrive on the northern and western side of Agasthykoodam hills near the dams. This drought should serve as an eye opener to replace them,” DC quotes an environmental activist Raj Kumar.
The government has also decided to plant one crore trees on June 5.
The forest department has kept ready 72 lakh saplings, the agricultural department five lakh and Kudumbasree women’s mission 23 lakh saplings.
40 lakh trees will be planted by school students.
There are reports that Acacia plantations near Peppara and Neyyar dams of Thiruvananthapuram have intensified the drought. The acacia trees were being used for wood by the forest department.
In December 2016, the neighbouring state of Karnataka had banned planting of saplings of Eucalyptus and Acacia and had decided to table a bill in the Legislature to enact a law for effective enforcement of the ban.Population of NSW ageing rapidly, older people outnumber children in some regions
Posted
The population of New South Wales is ageing rapidly, with regional areas seeing the biggest growth in older people, new figures show.
It is predicted that by 2021, there will be more people aged 65 years and older living outside Sydney than under 16s.
The figures are contained in the latest Population Bulletin of the Department of Planning and Environment and coincide with the United Nations National Day of the Older Person.
In the period between 2004 and 2014, the over-65 age group grew the fastest in the South and East Tablelands, where there was a 46 per cent increase.
The Far West saw the slowest growth in the older demographic at 24 per cent.
While Metropolitan Sydney remains relatively young, there has still been a 31 per cent increase in people aged 65 and over.
The department's analysis shows those aged 65 and over are already outnumbering those younger than 16 in the Central Coast, Illawarra-Shoalhaven, North Coast, South East and Tablelands.
That same pattern is predicted for all regions outside Metropolitan Sydney by 2021.
State must 'learn to adapt' to ageing population
New South Wales Planning Minister Rob Stokes said strategies to get younger people to move to or stay in the regions would be vital for the future.
"Transport access, education opportunities as well the mix of jobs that are going to be necessary to inspire people to live outside of Sydney," he said.
Mr Stokes said he was confident good planning could meet the needs of an ageing population with more disabilities.
"[That includes] shorter distance public transport routes, more accessible dwellings, more one and two person units, terraces and apartments," he said.
The minister said family immigration could only play a part in arresting the trend.
"Migrants age too, so in and of itself migration levels are not going to be sufficient to deal with the general ageing trend," he said.
"This [ageing population] is an inexorable trend and it's one of those challenges that as a society we're going to have to learn to adapt to."
Topics: population-and-demographics, states-and-territories, sydney-2000WASHINGTON — They hear that their cause is lost, that demographics and the march of history have doomed their campaign to keep marriage only between a man and a woman. But the young conservatives who oppose same-sex marriage — unlike most of their generation — remain undaunted.
They identify themselves as part of the “pro-marriage movement” and see themselves at the beginning of a long political struggle, much like the battle over abortion. If they can begin shifting the terms of the debate away from gay rights and toward the meaning of marriage, they say, they have a chance to survive short-term defeats.
“The primary challenge that our side faces right now is the intense social pressure,” said Joseph Backholm, 34, the executive director of the Family Policy Institute of Washington. “To the extent that the other side is able to frame this as a vote for gay people to be happy, it will be challenging for us.”
To put it another way, opponents of same-sex marriage say they must argue in favor of traditional marriage, not against gay people or gay rights. “It’s really a broader defense of marriage and a stronger marriage culture,” said Will Haun, 26, a lawyer and member of the Federalist Society.Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
A grieving father facing eviction over unpaid bills found a $4.85million winning lottery ticket in his dead daughter’s bedroom.
Ricardo Cerezo was left devastated by the death of his 14-year-old daughter Savannah, who died in August last year following a number of seizures.
In February, the family was dealt another blow after they were warned they faced losing their home, in Chicago, to foreclosure, the Beacon News reported.
Mr Cerezo was just days from eviction when his wife encouraged him to check a stash of lottery tickets kept in a cookie jar in his daughter’s bedroom, which was left untouched for months following her death.
The grieving dad drove to a nearby gas station where one of the unchecked tickets, bought on February 2, was found to be worth $4,850,000.
"I can’t believe I had $4.85 million in a cookie jar for over three months!" Mr Cerezo told the Illinois Lottery, who presented him with his cheque last week.
But he added that the win is tinged with regret that their daughter cannot share in the family’s joy.
Mr Cerezo added: “The honest first reaction was mammoth regret. Regret because our youngest wasn't here to enjoy this.”
But he added that he is able to find peace in the “incredible gift” from his daughter.
"Faith tells us our best days are ahead of us," he told the Beacon-News.Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is staking out a position on illegal immigration that is more conservative than President Bush, a strategy that supporters and detractors alike see as a way for the New York Democrat to shake the “liberal” label and appeal to traditionally Republican states.
Mrs. Clinton — who is tagged as a liberal because of her plan for nationalized health care and various remarks during her husband’s presidency — is taking an increasingly vocal and hard-line stance on an issue that ranks among the highest concerns for voters, particularly Republicans.
“Bush has done everything he can to leave the doors wide open,” said Robert Kunst, president of HillaryNow.com, a group dedicated to drafting Mrs. Clinton to run for president. “Hillary is the only one taking a position on immigration. She will win that issue hands down.”
In an interview last month on Fox News, Mrs. Clinton said she does not “think that we have protected our borders or our ports or provided our first responders with the resources they need, so we can do more and we can do better.”
In an interview on WABC radio, she said: “I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants.”
“Clearly, we have to make some tough decisions as a country, and one of them ought to be coming up with a much better entry-and-exit system so that if we’re going to let people in for the work that otherwise would not be done, let’s have a system that keeps track of them,” she said.
Unlike many pro-business Republicans, Mrs. Clinton also has castigated Americans for hiring illegal aliens.
“People have to stop employing illegal immigrants,” she said. “I mean, come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau counties, stand on the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx. You’re going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work and domestic work.”
In contrast, Mr. Bush backs a guest-worker program that allows foreign citizens entry into the United States and an eventual path to citizenship. One of the president’s first acts after his re-election was to push for it again, before both domestic and foreign audiences.
Mrs. Clinton’s position has been noticed by Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Republican and leading proponent of stricter immigration controls.
“She’s not a dumb woman,” Tancredo spokesman Carlos Espinoza said. “She’s got a great liberal base, and she realizes there’s no better way to draw in more conservative voters. She has really come out to the forefront on that.”
With the vast majority of Americans in polls viewing illegal immigration as a serious problem, Mrs. Clinton also could make deep inroads in the conservative red states, especially those in the South that the Democrats have largely written off in recent presidential campaigns.
As the immigration issue has entered the debate over national security, the New York senator — representing the state hardest hit by the September 11 attacks — is uniquely positioned to take a firm stance on the issue, to the delight of some conservatives.
“More than any other leader of either political party, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton has been focusing on immigration reform and border security — taking hard-line positions that appeal to frustrated Republicans in a move that could guarantee her enough support in red states to win the White House in 2008,” conservative author Carl Limbacher wrote recently on NewsMax.com, which has chronicled many of Mrs. Clinton’s statements on immigration.
Mr. Espinoza said the former first lady has become particularly vocal on the issue during and after the November election, in which Democrats performed so poorly.
“I think she’s realizing how much this issue has grown since 9/11,” he said. “If you talked about it before then, you were just a flat-out racist. Now it’s this huge issue.”
Moving to the right of even some Republicans, the former first lady told WABC she favors “at least a visa ID, some kind of entry-and-exit ID. And … perhaps, although I’m not a big fan of it, we might have to move towards an ID system even for citizens.”
Jennifer Duffy with the Cook Political Report said a conservative stance on immigration would be wise in the event Mrs. Clinton runs for president in 2008.
“Democrats are asking if it’s really smart to nominate another Northeastern Democrat, and she is a Northeastern Democrat,” she said. “It’s probably smart to blur that perception a little.”
But not everyone sees it as a wise a move.
“I think she is trying to move to the right, and immigration is one of the ways she is using to do it,” said political strategist Dick Morris, who has a history of working with former President Clinton.
“I think this is a particularly misguided choice on her part, however, since two-thirds of Bush’s margin this time was due to his closure of the Democratic margin of victory among Hispanics.”
Mr. Bush lost the vote of Hispanics — many of whom are wary of tougher immigration laws — by only 10 percentage points this year, whereas he lost it by 20 percentage points four years ago, Mr. Morris said.
Mr. Kunst, whose Web site supporting Mrs. Clinton got thousands of hits daily right after Mr. Bush’s re-election, said Mrs. Clinton is now the strongest Democrat for 2008 in terms of both popularity and financing.
Immigration is a good issue for her even as, he hopes, she holds onto her liberal credentials.
“It’s not just about cheap labor anymore,” Mr. Kunst said. “It’s about security. We have to do something about it.”
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Tankers!
After the intense fighting that took place during the first stage of our Clan Wars Campaign event our Community Coordinator for World of Tanks, Catstalker, caught up with Bryant21 of Clan [RDDT] to deliver some good news. Read the full exchange below!
Good morning, would you like to take a moment to introduce yourself and RDDT?
Sure no problem, I am Bryant21 the Deputy commander of the clan Reddit: The Front Lines of the Internet [RDDT]. I am also one of the moderators of the portal http://www.reddit.com/r/WorldofTanks/ where all 11 Reddit clans make their home
Did RDDT have any specific strategies coming into the start of this campaign?
Teamwork between the "RDDT Family of Clans" was our main strategy. Before this event our main clan RDDT clan would be the sole driving force of clan wars, with our sister clan NARWL providing backup. However, with the introduction of the low tier event, we were able to train all RDDT clans for clan wars to help us out significantly.
So was ending up in Greenland part of the plan, or how did that happen?
Well, unlike most clans who focused on gold value, we realized that Greenland offered the most strategic value to gain victory points and our goal of using all the RDDT clans. Rather than spreading out across the map, we could place RDDT clans across each end of Greenland and slowly expand into each other. Our sister clans were excited to be able to participate in such a direct way.
Of course everybody is aiming for the M60, but did you expect to be in the top 5 so close to the end of the stage?
Oh not at all. Our goal was only to get into the top 10, but then we just kept winning, and taking land, and winning again. It slowly began to dawn on us that our plan worked better than we could have hoped! With our strong sister clans backing us up, we saw it within reach so we went for it!
Based the situation we’ve seen on the forums, it would appear there were some diplomacy issues you ran into. Would you like to comment on that?
Har har. Sure, we had talked with of our neighbor and good ally Enjoy about giving us some extra Victory Points to ensure we reach top five. We had been informed that several clans on mainland USA were planning on giving land away in order to push us out of top five and we wanted to guarantee we made it. We could then focus on getting Enjoy into a higher position in later stages, and everyone would get an M60. We believed that after 10 months of being close allies, giving up three territories would be a no brainier. After hours of intense negotiations, Enjoy decided it would be in their own best interests to keep the land. This was a huge shock to RDDT, and while we could have attacked them in an attempt to take the land by force, we decided to uphold our initial agreement and stood down. In the end, they chose 15,000 Victory Points over 10 months of steadfast camaraderie and hard work. If the roles were reversed, we would have given them the land in a heartbeat. Unfortunately we will not be working with them in the future.
Well, congrats RDDT, you’ve just qualified for the M60 medium tank. What are you going to do next!?
WHAT?! Are you joking?
No, RDDT, OTTER, and PBKAC have all tied for 5th place!
That is amazing! Well, first I think we might eat some cake! But after that, we will look at helping to repay NARWL, hoping to get them into the top 30 clans. Really, we will try and roam the map, helping out clans who need assistance.
We're looking forward to seeing that all take place and we wish you the best of luck with your allies! Congrats again!
Thanks, this is amazing!This is the 'baby gecko' but that's not its mother or even the woman who 'gave birth' to it. This is the 'baby gecko' but that's not its mother or even the woman who 'gave birth' to it.
As strange as it may sound, an Indonesian woman apparently 'gave birth' to a lizard and is now being threatened by an angry lynch mob that is accusing her of practicing witchcraft.
Debi Nubatonis, 31, gave birth to the gecko after an eight-month pregnancy. Though scientists say that it is clearly nonsense that a woman has given birth to a lizard, officials are sending in a team of experts to clear the mystery.
Nubatonis apparently gave birth to the gecko in May in the remote Oenunto village where a midwife "delivered" the lizard.
The news of the lizard birth led to threats being levelled against the woman and her family who were accused of witchcraft and the debate quickly made its way to the internet as well.
Dr Messe Ataupa, Chief Medical Officer of nearby Kupang city says, "It is clearly nonsense to suggest that the woman gave birth to a lizard. There has never been a proven case of a living organism from one species giving birth to a different species, it just doesn't happen.
The woman who allegedly gave birth to a gecko. The woman who allegedly gave birth to a gecko.
"We have spoken to locals who confirmed that the woman showed all the symptoms of pregnancy, and it does seem according to the midwife that she appeared to be going into labour. However, we believe it was just a phantom pregnancy or pseudocyesis where there was never a child although the woman would have had many of the symptoms."
Ataupa said that a small percentage of the women who have phantom pregnancies also experience labour. He further said that there might have been some discharge during "birthing" which could have landed on the lizard leading to the confusion and belief that the woman had given birth to a gecko.
He said: "If there was no baby, it might be possible that she (the midwife) just jumped to the wrong conclusion."UPDATE/BONUS: Since this went up, we posted another map—this one of the popular languages throughout the country. Peel back the obvious English or Spanish and there’s a surprising amount of diversity in languages spoken.
At the start of every year, government agencies, think tanks and businesses release sets of data and reports charting the nation’s social, economic and demographic course. Individually, each release of data offers a narrow snapshot of a narrow issue — voter attitudes, migration, unemployment, an assessment of policies, etc. — but collectively they tell a broader story.
In just the first two months of the year, we here at GovBeat have already written dozens of posts looking at the state of the nation in maps and charts. Here are some highlights that explain who we are and how we live today (with links for those who want more):
1. Who’s most well off
Gallup’s well-being index relies on 55 metrics, including rates of obesity, produce consumption, smoking, depression and psychological fulfillment. Generally, the best-off states are in the Midwest and West while the worst are in the south. And there was quite a bit of a shakeup last year. Nineteenth-ranked North Dakota rose to the top spot, while 12th-ranked South Dakota took the second spot. After four years on top, Hawaii fell to the eighth spot. Read more at Gallup.
2. The top 1 percent have gained in every state
Top 1 percent’s share of income between 1979 and 2007.
The chart above shows just 10 states, but you get the picture: The richest one percent have gobbled up an increasingly large share of income during the past few decades, reversing an earlier trend toward income equality.
3. Big cities are less equal than the rest of the country
The rich are richer and the poor are poorer in the nation’s largest cities than the nation as a whole, according to the findings from the Brookings Institution. Just three — Denver, Seattle and El Paso — saw inequality shrink, marginally, since before the recession. For the rest, things got worse.
4. Where the millionaires are
More than six million households in the United States have liquid assets worth more than $1 million, according to new estimates that show the greatest concentrations of wealth in the United States are along the Interstate 95 corridor. (Click through for an interactive map.)
5. Where the breweries are
The number of brewery permits issued last year soared to new all-time highs, with about a third concentrated in just four states — California, Washington, Colorado and Oregon — according to a beer industry trade group. Read the original story for a full state chart.
6. Where people are moving to and from
The map above comes from Atlas Van Lines and shows where their customers were headed last year. Most states had a steady balance of people coming and going, but the blue ones below are where the movement was mostly inbound and the yellow ones show states that were losing people faster than they were gaining them.
7. The 47 states where ‘conservatives’ outnumber ‘liberals’
Map shaded by the conservative advantage over liberals in each state. (Gallup) People who identify as “conservative” outnumber those who call themselves “liberals” in 47 states, according to a Gallup survey. But the map likely reveals more about language than politics, as the word “liberal” had long been — and some might argue still is — politically toxic.
8. The states whose legislatures are more partisan than Congress
This chart shows state legislature polarization with the dotted line in the middle representing the U.S. Congress. The half of state legislatures to the right of that line are more partisan — though many are unified by party so they’re at least more productive, too.
9. Where unemployment has recovered (sort of)
State unemployment dipped to post-recession lows in 29 states. But it’s a bit of a Pyrrhic victory (see next map).
10. Where long-term unemployment is at historic highs
Before the recession smashed the record, long-term unemployment peaked at 26 percent thirty years ago. But in 2013 it was higher than that in 41 states and D.C. It’s highest in D.C., New Jersey and Florida, where more than 45 percent of the jobless are long-term unemployed (i.e. unable to find work after about six months of looking).
11. Mapping the geographical digital divide
This Gizmodo map of average Internet speeds by congressional district shows how disparate access to the web is.
12. Where the recession never happened
There is a recovery underway, but it’s uneven, as depicted by the map above, from a report by the National Association of Counties. The darkest-blue counties never experienced a recession—as measured by economic output—while the lighter blue ones recovered by 2013. The grey ones are still working through their recoveries.
13. Where the Protestants are
In 29 states, Protestants account for at least half of the population. That’s true for Catholics in only one state: Rhode Island. That’s according to Gallup data. See five more maps that explain religious America.
14. The states that tax booze the hardest
Kentucky taxes wine the most; Tennessee leads on beer and Washington has the highest taxes on spirits.
Map: Wine Excise Tax Rates by State, 2014. (Tax Foundation)
Map: Beer Excise Tax Rates by State, 2014. (Tax Foundation)
15. The 8 states that ban educators from promoting homosexuality
“No promo homo” states are those that prohibit educators from discussing homosexuality in a positive way or, in some cases, at all. States that prohibit enumeration are those that don’t allow local school districts from enacting policies aimed specifically at preventing bullying over sexual orientation or gender identity. (Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network)
16. How felon voting policies restrict the black vote
Cartogram of disenfranchisement rates, 2010. (Sentencing Project) In Florida, more than one in five black adults can’t vote. Not because they lack citizenship or haven’t registered, but because they have, at some point, been convicted of a felony. More than 20 percent of black adults have lost their right to vote in Florida, Kentucky and Virginia, according to the Sentencing Project, a group that advocates for reforms to sentencing policy that reduces racial disparities.
17. The incredible shrinking blue-state advantage
The Democratic Party’s advantage in the states was halved last year, continuing a dramatic multi-year decline. A 30-state advantage in 2008 is now down to 3. (That is, Dems can claim three more states in their corner than Republicans can. But that’s down from 2008 when they claimed 30 more states than their counterparts.)
18. The 30 states where abortion rates are at multi-decade lows
The map above shows how long it’s been since each state has had an abortion rate as low as in 2011. The darkest red states reflect those where the 2011 abortion rate was the lowest since at least 1976. In 30 states, abortion rates are at their lowest levels in at least 30 years, according to new data from the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that advocates for sexual and reproductive health and rights. In nine of those states, rates are the lowest since records began in 1973.
19. Where women are most and least represented in state legislatures
Just under one in four state legislators is a woman — a fact unchanged over the past five years.
20. Where low-income students lag behind
Minority and poor students in most states seriously lag behind their peers when it comes to successfully completing Advanced Placement exams. The gap was largest in Louisiana, where low-income students make up 66.2 percent of the graduating class, but just 15.4 percent of successful exams. The gap between the two is larger than 30 percentage points in 24 states.
21. Which states plan best for the future
Virtually every state could do a better job at long-term fiscal planning, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Just 11 states earned high marks on a 10-point test of their ability to budget in the long-term, according to the fiscal policy group.
22. Where housing remains a serious problem
States in the lightest shades of red have more “deeply underwater” foreclosures than not. (Data unavailable for some states.) In at least 14 states, there are more deeply underwater mortgages than those in solid standing.
23. The 116 counties responsible for half the uninsured
Source: Associated Press
A new study conducted for The Associated Press shows that the Obama administration is best off focusing on signing up uninsured Americans in a relatively narrow geographic area: Half of non-senior adults without insurance live in just 116 of the nation’s 3,143 counties.
24. Record drought spreads to California
For three straight years, California’s farmers have been dealing with severe drought, with 2013 being the driest year on record. It’s a serious ongoing problem, and this year is expected to be just as bad.
25. What the closest pizza joints are
This map, courtesy of FlowingData.com, shows which chain’s stores are closest to various parts of the country. Pizza Hut and Dominoes reign.
Did you like this post? Sign up for GovBeat’s twice-weekly newsletter.SRINAGAR: J&K police have arrested a man who gave shelter to captured Pakistani terrorist Naved Usman, Times Now reported on Saturday.Naved Usman alias Qasim Khan of Faisalabad, captured three days ago, was on Saturday brought to the Kashmir Valley to identify those who helped him reach Udhampur where he was arrested, an official said.Usman, a member of the Lashkar-e-Taiba ( LeT ) terror outfit, was brought to the valley from Jammu region by road, an intelligence officer said.Usman was overpowered by villagers after he and a fellow Pakistani terrorist shot dead two Border Security Force (BSF) troopers on the Jammu-Srinagar highway in Udhampur district on August 5.The captured Pakistani is now in the custody of the National Investigation Agency ( NIA ).While NIA officials reached here on Friday from Delhi, Usman has been brought to establish the route he used to reach Udhampur and to identify accomplices who facilitated his passage to Udhampur, the officer said.Usman is expected to identify the hideouts used by him after he crossed into Jammu and Kashmir's Kupwara district from Pakistan and also the other LeT cadres he met while planning the attack.The NIA has taken over Usman's interrogation to know more about the LeT network in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere in India.Usman is now reportedly lodged in an office of the Special Operations Group of the Jammu and Kashmir Police in Srinagar.(With inputs from agencies)Release your inner Dick Dale and jam with a set of laser etched original Tiki art, hand-made wooden guitar picks. This set of 3 Tiki art picks are available as a group or individually sold in my shop. This unique set of 3 picks makes a great gift for any guitar player, pick collector, or fans of Tiki culture!
The Tiki illustrations are hand drawn, digitized, and laser etched directly onto Poplar wood. After etching, the pick is lightly coated with mineral oil, buffed, and then sealed with a moisture-resistant permanent acrylic coating that protects the laser etched artwork.
Thickness and wood grains will vary slightly from pick to pick due to the character of the wood. The shape and dimensions are similar to those of a heavy sized mass produced plastic pick. These unique wooden picks are about 2 – 2.2 mm thick at the top and are very slightly tapered down towards the tip.
Please ask me any questions and thanks for looking!A Hawaii teacher is under fire for pretend shooting the president. Wait, no, wrong teacher. This teacher is hot ka wai for saying he won’t teach illegal immigrants. Scoundrel. But he didn’t utter these scandalous thoughts on a national stage, YouTube address, or self-aggrandizing Facebook post. But in response to a private email to colleagues. One of those colleagues, feeling like he could capitalize on a minute or two of fame by shaming his coworker, obviously snitched to the press. Who scuttled like ants avoiding soap droplets.
Hawaii News Now obtained a copy of the email, which was sent Wednesday morning. The full text of the email reads: “This is another attack on the President over deportation. Their parents need to apply for immigration like everyone else. If they are here in the US illegally, I won’t teach them.” The email was sent by social studies teacher John Sullivan in response to another email sent by a school counselor about nationwide statistics on students who are being kept home from school due to deportation fears. In an email to Hawaii News Now on Wednesday afternoon, Sullivan called the situation a “misunderstanding.”
Are we at all surprised the educators in a far left state like Hawaii (both politically and geographically) would burn down Sullivan’s kauhale (village) for daring to follow the sentiments of the law? Hardly. Educators are as logically minded as two Easter Peeps forced to fight to the death in a microwave. We have examples aplenty of educators illustrating their frustration with both Trump and logic (see Professor Says Trump Election an ‘Act of Terrorism’ and Boy Votes Trump in Mock Election, Mother Kicks HIM OUT of the House!). But if this was an email to educators, one of those educators instead of expressing disagreement to the teacher… ran to the press like a tattle tailing sissy. At least he’s a teacher, not say, a bomb-defusing soldier. #Perspective
Never mind there’s nothing outrageous about what John Sullivan said. That is, echoing the law. Why educate someone who’s here illegally? Since that person is in violation of the law. Yet the Hawaiian media couldn’t wait to make an example out of John Sullivan, knocking mics and camera men out of their way to rush to the stage, where they pronounced how NOBLE it is to educate ALL THE CHILDREN! Rule of law can go screw itself. Don thy ribbons, launch thy hashtags, lynch the teacher who dared stand up for legality.
Sounds like leftism to me.
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the help of a solicitor or conveyancer, but they are not strictly necessary.
The Law Society of NSW advises that it is legal to draft your own contract and do your own conveyancing, but recommends hiring a solicitor.
“It is legal... However the risks may outweigh any potential savings,” says a spokeswoman.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Average commission rates for selling houses range from 1%-2% in Sydney and Melbourne, to 3%-4% in regional areas. Photograph: Paul Miller/EPA
According to the Law Society, solicitors help sellers ensure their contracts comply with vendor disclosure laws that vary state-to-state, and also advise them when negotiating the terms of the contract with the buyer.
A spokeswoman said sellers should be especially careful in New South Wales, where it is an offence to place a house on the market without a proper contract, or when selling apartments, as strata titles require additional documentation.
Naturally, Cunningham, as president of the peak body for real estate agents, also recommends sellers should employ agents.
He says average commission rates range from 1%-2% in such high-density areas as Sydney and Melbourne, to 3%-4% in regional areas or states such as Western Australia and Tasmania. On top of that, marketing is charged separately at 0.5% to 1%.
'Lying in wait for your next chapter': the Sydney real estate nightmare | Paul Daley Read more
For a house in Sydney, where the median price is $1m, that comes to $10,000 – $20,000 in commission and $5,000 in marketing.
In contrast, listing an ad on Domain as a private seller costs $660 for 8 weeks or $770 for 12 weeks. Gumtree listings, where Alam advertises, are free. He says the only person he employs is a solicitor, who costs less than $1,000 per sale.
“There shouldn’t be a market,” he says. “I know how it works. I’ve put advertisements on Gumtree and realestate.com.au and it doesn’t cost that much.”
However, Cunningham says the purported savings are a myth: “The concept of what people think they are saving is not what they are actually doing.”
He says real estate agents deliver higher prices for sellers through their experience in negotiating and valuing.
“We are in a really time-poor world, moving into a more specialised world and the whole selling and buying process is one of the highest, emotionally charged things people ever do. You’re dealing in an area where you are being driven by emotion. It’s very hard.
“Private sellers tend to overprice and thus they miss the market. People think it’s easy to put a price on a property. But you don’t actually know the value of the house in the first place.”
It is my property, I know how to deal, I know how to sell it. Alam
He says that sellers who go it alone are making “the most costly mistake in their lives”.
“They don’t understand the art of negotiation – they’re going into a huge unknown world which is quite complex. It’s one of the most psychologically skilled things in the world. They tend to be their own worst enemy on that front.”
John rejects the idea that there is any fat to cut in the process, or anything in the business model for the internet to disrupt.
“There’s really not much left here in the equation. If you’re looking for a quote on a plumbing job, you’re not going to choose the cheapest one. You pay for what you get in this life – I’d rather fly Qantas than Tiger Air”.
Amy, who lives in the Blue Mountains, is in two minds. She tells Guardian Australia she and her husband have put their home for sale online “as an experiment”.
“We haven’t made the final decision to go with an agent or without,” she says. “We’ve umm-ed and ah-ed and weighed up both sides.”
They are selling their family home in Leura, an hour and a half from Sydney by car. It’s a rare level block in the Blue Mountains, on 1,200 square metres with four bedrooms and 2.5-metre ceilings.
“We’re a young married couple who are doing our best to save every cent we can,” she says. “The money we save can go towards building our new home. We’ve still got a loan that we’re trying to get ahead of by doing this rather than renting. Every dollar counts.
“The advantages seem big, though, in going with an agent. They have many more contacts and experience. And if they do their job properly they want to get the best price they can. But then you’ve got this whacking great fee.”
Amy says she’s received quite a few inquiries on Gumtree, but doesn’t know if any are genuine enough to proceed. “Most of them just messaged, and when I got back to them, they’d never ring.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Amy, who is thinking about selling privately, says: ‘We keep a close eye on the market so we’re pretty confident we’re fairly accurate.’ Photograph: Sam Mooy/AAP
They have a solicitor, and Amy, who is a photographer, has done the publicity shots herself.
Crucially, they’ve had the house valued by real estate agents multiple times – for free – and say it sits around the high $700,000s.
“We’ve probably had about six or eight through in the past 18 months. We really want to know what we’re talking about. We keep a close eye on the market and the houses around us so we’re pretty confident we’re fairly accurate.”
Alam also denies that private sellers need agents to value their own homes: “I do market research, I look at previous sales, then I figure it out. It’s not hard.”
In January, Victoria introduced legislation to crack down on real estate agent underquoting, after receiving 236 complaints in 2015.
Alam also disputes the idea that agents are better negotiators, saying the three he has previously sold with were unimpressive.
“They didn’t drive a really good price for me, they just tried to sell the property. Some of them are really, really unprofessional because they just don’t care.
“It is my property, I know how to deal, I know how to sell it.”
Amy however, says the issue of an emotional connection to a family home is very real.
'They’ve lost the lot': how the Australian mining boom blew up in property owners' faces Read more
“That’s definitely true and that’s one of the reasons that we might go with an agent. All that negotiation side of it is left up to someone else. It’s all a learning curve.
“A lot of agents aren’t very honest. But there’s a lot of good ones out there, there’s honest ones, there’s a couple that we know. You don’t have a lot of faith when you know that others have a track record of not being entirely honest, I haven’t personally experienced that.”
In one week of his listing, Alam has received 105 views and three offers, and he is supremely confident. “Hopefully it will be sold in a few days,” he says.
He does not plan to use an agent ever again.
“I wish somebody would come out and break their business like Gumtree. Maybe one day I will do it.”ADVERTISEMENT
Reminder: Reminder: Alec Baldwin is no liberal folk hero.
The “ The “ Saturday Night Live ” actor flew off the social media handle on Wednesday night after Decider published an article reexamining a documentary he produced with director James Toback, who’s been accused of sexual harassment by more than 200 women. Baldwin responded by encouraging the article’s female author to “stick to divorces and plastic surgery.”
The 2013 film, “Seduced and Abandoned,” follows Toback and Baldwin to the Cannes Film Festival as they try to secure funding for a new movie. Marketed as an inside look at what happens behind the curtain in Hollywood, it features cameos by stars including Ryan Gosling, Jessica Chastain and Diane Kruger.
Journalist Kayla Cobb Journalist Kayla Cobb revisited the documentary through the lens of the sexual misconduct allegations against Toback in a piece titled “James Toback and Alec Baldwin’s ‘Seduced and Abandoned’ Watches Like a Parade of Hollywood Toxicity in 2017,” published Tuesday.
She describes a sinister undercurrent throughout the film, writing:
Knowing what we do now, ” Seduced and Abandoned”’s “boys will be boys” tone transforms from mildly charming to repulsive. As a viewer it’s deeply uncomfortable to watch Toback confidently saunter into exclusive meeting after exclusive meeting knowing that the director has likely already forced several women to help him get off. It’s even more unsettling to watch Toback touch or hug big stars like Neve Campbell, Diablo Cody, Jessica Chastain, Bérénice Bejo, and Diane Kruger for just a beat too long. Throughout every meeting and every interview, the same question still lingers: Did they know? Are they victims?
Baldwin, who stars in Toback’s “The Private Life of a Modern Woman,” which premiered at the 2017 Venice International Film Festival, didn’t take too kindly to the article. The actor directly targeted Cobb from his official Hilaria and Alec Baldwin Foundation account, which is one of his two active Twitter handles.
″I cheered when Gawker lost its case to Hulk. So, of course The Decider wants to tar me w the Toback brush,” Baldwin wrote. “Kayla Cobb, ur a dreadful writer.”
His initial tweet somewhat confusingly references the now-defunct Gawker and its legal battle with Hulk Hogan, who His initial tweet somewhat confusingly references the now-defunct Gawker and its legal battle with Hulk Hogan, who sued the outlet for publishing an excerpt of a sex tape. There is no relation between Gawker and Decider, which was launched in 2014 by The New York Post.
A representative for Baldwin declined to comment when contacted by HuffPost.
In the heated (on Baldwin’s side, at least) exchange that followed, Cobb said that her piece only mentioned the actor to say he has not released any statement about his connection to Toback in light of the allegations.
“I would send you an email, on any subject, if you weren’t such a dishonest, awful writer,” Baldwin wrote in response to Cobb’s request for comment.
He then continued: “Why don’t you let prosecutors and real journalists investigate such cases and you stick to divorces and plastic surgery.”
ABFoundation TwitterCraving one of Ellwood Thompson's sandwiches for lunch, but don't have the time to go there? Now it can come to you.
The popular longtime Richmond organic grocery store announced today that it's partnering with Quickness RVA's bicycle service to offer delivery in the city.
Diners can choose from a menu that includes signature sandwiches, vegetarian wraps, fresh-baked cookies and cakes. The full menu can be found here on Quickness RVA's ordering site.
Press release reprinted below.
Ellwood Thompson’s Now Offering Delivery!
Local Market Announces Partnership with Quickness RVA
Richmond, VA
Today marks the launch of delivery service for Ellwood Thompson’s! A Richmond staple since 1989, Ellwood Thompson’s is a community market known for its locally-sourced, sustainable grocery selection and homemade prepared food. Now, in partnership with Quickness RVA’s bicycle couriers, Ellwood’s is offering a meal menu for delivery all around town!
The menu features a selection of 13 sandwiches and wraps, catering to a variety of dietary preferences - vegetarian, vegan, carnivore, organic, and gluten-free, along with drinks and sides from Ellwood’s grocery aisles. The menu, of course, stays true to the Ellwood’s values of sustainable, local agriculture and additive-free ingredients; a sure-fire hit for environmental and health-conscious foodies in Richmond!
Regarding the partnership, says Jess Izen, General Manager, Quickness RVA, “This is a natural partnership, given our core focus on sustainable transportation - what else could Ellwood Thompson’s be delivered with, but bikes? We also respect Ellwood Thompson’s support for local farmers, as a business that prides ourself on building local community. Wholesome food ahead!”
Says Colin Beirne, Marketing Director, Ellwood Thompson’s, “We are excited to be partnering with Quickness to offer our healthy, locally made and sourced when available sandwiches, wraps, bowls and salads to the Richmond community. Not only are we pumped to be able to offer up delivery but we are equally as pumped to partner with Quickness. It’s awesome to be able to work with a similar mission-minded, environmentally friendly, bike loving, local company.”A new study from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) finds that Americans receiving food stamps are more likely to be overweight and obese than those who do not receive assistance.
The USDA analyzed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) for the years between 2007 and 2010 and found that 29 percent of Americans are overweight and 31 percent are obese.
Overall, 40 percent of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants were found to be obese. Only 32 percent of income-eligible nonparticipants were obese, while 30 percent of those who made too much money to qualify for assistance were obese.
The pattern held for children as well as for adults.
Fourteen percent of children enrolled in the SNAP program were overweight while 24 percent are obese. For income-eligible nonparticipants, 15 percent were overweight while 20 percent were obese. Among higher-income nonparticipants, 15 percent were overweight while 13 percent were obese.
Among adults, 28 percent of SNAP recipients were overweight and 44 percent are obese. Thirty-one percent of income-eligible nonparticipants were overweight and another 33 percent were obese. Among higher-income nonparticipants, 32 percent were overweight and 32 percent were obese.
The study found that while females in all categories had the same levels of caloric intake, males who received SNAP benefits consumed fewer calories than those in other groups. Males SNAP participants consumed 2,302 calories on average versus 2,424 calories for males in the other two groups.
Male children participating in SNAP consumed 1,960 calories on average versus 2,072 calories consumed, on average, by income-eligible nonparticipants.
Older adult males in the SNAP program consume 1,840 calories on average while higher-income males consumed 2,117 calories on average.
The study found that SNAP recipients were less likely than either group to consume raw vegetables and fruit and more likely to consume whole milk versus versus lower-fat milk.
SNAP recipients were also more likely to consume soda and more often chose regular soda compared to diet soda.
However, the study did find that SNAP participants were less likely to choose sweets, desserts, salty snacks, and to add fats and oils to their food.
Follow Chuck on TwitterSan Francisco 49ers's general manager Trent Baalke made one of the boldest roster moves in recent memory on Monday, as the organization traded wide receiver A.J. Jenkins to the Kansas City Chiefs for Jon Baldwin. It wasn't bold because it put the franchise at risk, but because it was an acknowledgement of a mistake -- something we don't often see out of an NFL general manager. In one week Panthers general manager Dave Gettleman will need to make a decision of his own, and it's time to channel his inner Trent Baalke.
The move is simple, the Panthers need to cut Domenik Hixon. It's not because he's a bad receiver, but because he can't stay healthy. A constant treadmill of "will he, or wont he" has led to a third preseason game missed, and no indications he's right for this team or whether he meshes with Cam Newton.
In order to make the move Gettleman needs to acknowledge that he rolled the dice on a player he knows well. He chose to take the oft-injured receiver, bumps and all, hoping he could find healthier legs in Charlotte. The move didn't work out, but the Panthers didn't make any long-term commitment to Hixon, making it a fairly routine decision.
A few months back this didn't seem possible. The Panthers were languishing with one of the worst receiving corps in the NFL, as they threw darts hoping guys like Ted Ginn and Hixon would get them through the season. Gettleman said in his first press conference that "sometimes the answer is on the roster," and magically Armanti Edwards had his light bulb moment, while David Gettis healed -- playing like he did in 2010.
Make no mistake, these two factors were blind luck. There was no predicting these two players would be able to contribute. So sharp was the rise in Edwards' play that it couldn't have been foreseen, while a re-committed Gettis understood he was on his last chance in the NFL, and showed it in two straight preseason games.
Up to this point conventional wisdom has been to predict Hixon sneaking onto the back end of the depth chart, supplanting either Joe Adams or Kealoha Pilares -- but there's no point in cutting either. Adams has shown enough flashes as a punt returner that it would be foolish to eat the remainder of his rookie contract, while Pilares has evolved into a very good coverage man on special teams, who can be called on to kick return in a pinch.
Gettleman retaining Hixon at this point would be nothing more than blind loyalty to "his guy." The offense is crossing their fingers, hoping Jonathan Stewart will be ready week one, and they can't have another injured offensive player eating up a valuable roster spot. The PUP list is a possibility, but unless he can practice and acclimate to the offense it's a moot point.
The long-standing criticism of former general manager Marty Hurney was his unwavering belief in his guys. They got too much rope, and were awarded with too lavish contracts. Make no mistake, this is on Jerry Richardson too, who often rises about the fray as the public continue to pelt Hurney's name with their rotten tomatoes. If Gettleman really wants to prove this is a new regime, with a new way of looking at players, truly putting the best players on the field, then he needs to be like Trent Baalke -- own the mistake, and move on.
More from Cat Scratch Reader:Overlap of the Paths of Eclipse 2017 and Eclipse 2024
Many people have become enthralled with the fact that, after so many years without total eclipses, the mainland US will be getting TWO in the space of less than seven years! That's right, while we absolutely don't want anyone to miss the great eclipse of 2017, there will be another one coming along in 2024! Our sister site, www.eclipse2024.org, will have much more detail on that eclipse as the time draws closer.
It just makes sense that if two eclipse paths are going to both cross the US, there must be a very lucky spot that will get to see BOTH of them!! WOW! People living there will not have to travel at all to see either eclipse! (And I've gone all the way to India just to see 52 seconds of totality!) Talk about luck.
And of course, many die-hard eclipse chasers are wanting to go to that location, so they can say they've seen two eclipses from the same location. This actually isn't a very tough thing to do in one's lifetime, but those intersection points generally happen to lie in far-off, out-of-the-way locations – if not in the ocean! (The 2006 and 1999 total eclipses were both visible from a location in central Turkey, for example.) This intersection point happens to lie in the WAY FAR out-of-the-way spot of… Southern Illinois.
Actually, to be fair, the overlap of the paths of totality of these two eclipses lies in three states: Illinois, Missouri, and Kentucky. Here is a map that shows you the quasi-parallelogrammatical (is that a word?) region that, if you're in it, you get to see eclipses on two different dates:
And here's a closer view:
Here is a little more information on these two eclipses from the point of intersection of the centerlines (where the blue lines cross):
2017 eclipse:
totality starts 1:20:02pm
mid-totality 1:21:22pm
totality ends 1:22:42pm
2m40s of totality, with the sun 64 degrees up in the sky just slightly west of south!
2024 eclipse:
totality starts: 1:59:00pm
mid-totality 2:01:05pm
totality ends 2:03:09pm
4m9s of totality, with the sun 57 degrees up in the sky just a little bit more west of south!to facilitate the Library's continuing redevelopment of the premises. Venue: National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street,. All other services/exhibitons/cafe, including Genealogy Advisory Service, will operate as normal., with Alan Rosborough. Host: NIFHS, Belfast Branch. Venue: C S Lewis Room, Holywood Arches Library, 4-12 Holywood Road,, BT4 1NT. 7:30pm. Free. All welcome., with Paddy Waldron. Host: Kilrush and District Historical Society. Venue: Teach Ceoil, Grace Street,, Co Clare. 8pm. Free to members. €5 for non-members, payable on the door. All welcome., with Lisa Dougherty. Host and venue: Irish American Heritage Museum, 370 Broadway, Albany,12207,. Free. 6:30pm–7:30pm. No need to register. (Rescheduled from 12 Feb.). Host: NIFHS, Causeway Branch. Venue: Guide Hall, Terrace Row, Coleraine BT52 1HF. Venue: Guide Hall, Terrace Row,BT52 1HF. 8pm. All welcome. Free.. Reopening at 2pm. RCBLibrary, Braemor Park, Churchtown,. Host: NIFHS, Ballymena Branch. Venue: Michelin Arts Workshop, Braid Arts Centre, 1-29 Bridge Street,, BT43 5EJ. 7:15pm. Free. All welcome., a workshop. Host and venue: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), Titanic Boulevard,. This two-hour workshop includes an orientation tour of PRONI and an introduction to searching online resources. 6pm. Free. Need to book, by Michael James Nugent. Host and venue: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 2 Titanic Boulevard,. 7pm. Free, but need to reserve your place.. No access to the Archives and Manuscripts Collections on Fridays (on-going). Access to Printed collection not affected. RCB Library, Braemor Park, Churchtown,, a day of Irish family history and DNA talks and discussion. Hosts: Irish/British Genealogy Meet Up Group and New York Irish Center. Venue: New York Irish Center, 1040 Jackson Avenue, Queens,. 10am to 4pm. Cost: from $39, includes lunch and tea/coffee. Tickets to facilitate the Library's continuing redevelopment of the premises. Venue: National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street,. All other services/exhibitons/cafe, including Genealogy Advisory Service, will operate as normal., with Ronnie Kilgore. Host: NIFHS, Foyle Branch. Venue: Lecture Room, Derry City’s Central Library, 35 Foyle Street,, BT48 6AL. 7pm. All welcome. Free., with Laura Spence. Host: NIFHS, Killyleagh Branch. Venue: Killyleagh Masonic Hall, 50 High Street,BT30 9QF. Free. 8pm. All welcome., with Mary Muldowney. Mondays at the Mess talks series. Host and venue: Richmond Barracks, Off Bulfin Road,. Free. 11am. Reserve your place at EventBrite with Megan Henvey. Host: Royal Society of Antiquities of Ireland, Venue: Helen Roe Theatre, Society House, 63 Merrion Square,. 7:30pm. Free. All welcome.. Numerous events, most of them free. Hosts: NUI Galway, Galway CC, Creative Ireland. Various venues in. Download programme, with Professor Linda Connolly. Part of the Social History and the Irish Revolution public lecture series. Hosts: Glasnevin Museum and Trinity College Dublin's School of History & Humanities. Venue: Milestone Gallery, Glasnevin Cemetery Museum, Finglas Road, Glasnevin,. 7pm to 8:30pm. Tickets should be booked in advance. €6., with Robert Corbert. Part of PRONI's Wreck and Rescue lecture series. Host and venue: PRONI, Titanic Boulevard,. 1pm. Free. All welcome. Need to book. Details, with Patrick Salmon. Host: Rathmichael Historical Society. Venue: Rathmichael NS, Stonebridge Road,, Dublin 18. 8pm. All welcome. €3.. Doors to the public will open 2–5pm only. NAI, Bishop Street,, a workshop. Host and venue: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), Titanic Boulevard,. two-hour workshop will start with an orientation tour of PRONI, followed by an introduction to searching online resources 11am. Free. Need to book, with Prof Davis Coakley (2:15pm) and, with Jim Herlihy. AGM from 10am. Host: Irish Family History Society. Venue: Dublin City Library and Archives, Pearse Street,. Free. All welcome., a genealogy workshop with the Ulster Historical Foundation. Host and venue: New Hampshire Historical Society, 30 Park St,. 9:00am-4:30pm. Details and registration. $75 Members of New Hampshire Historical Society / $125 for non-members.. Host: The Manchester Irish Education Group (MIEG). Venue: Irish World Heritage Centre, 1 Irish Town Way, Cheetham,. A full day of lectures and workshops, plus bookstall, exhibition and raffle. 9am to 4:30pm. Tickets £25 prepaid / £30 on the door. Includes lunch and refreshments. Details, with Chris Connell and Donna Vaughn. Host: Troy Irish Genealogy Society. Venue: Troy Public Library, 100 2nd St,. 2pm–5pm. Need to register, with the Ulster Historical Foundation. Host: The Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania. Venue: Brookside Manor, 50 Bustleton Pike,. 8:30am-4:30pm. Cost: $104. Details and registration.My nephew got the new Macbook, with its single USB-C port. I wondered what Apple was thinking. Our friends at Plugable wondered too, but unlike me, they are doing something about it -- Kickstarting a USB-C universal docking station.
The 2015 MacBook and Its Single Port: Such a beautiful machine, yet limited in its potential with a single port that can be used for charging, one display output, or connectivity to a single USB device - but not all at once unless you obtain a $79 adapter cable from Apple.
With just a single USB-C connection, our Ultimate Docking Station and its included 60W power adapter can unleash the potential of your computer by providing up to three additional video outputs, gigabit Ethernet, and four additional USB ports to connect your other USB devices. (The dock can also simultaneously power and charge laptops and tablets that comply with the USB-IF Power Delivery specification!)This Week in Legacy: MKM Prague
This Week in Legacy legacy Miracles lands Esper Delver Esper DeathBlade Grixis Delver Griselstorm Goblins Aluren Death's Shadow
Welcome to another This Week in Legacy! Some pretty interesting stuff to cover this week; most importantly, from Europe, the MKM series made its stop in Prague, with two-hundred and ninety-five players attending. The weekend before also had another large event I have yet to cover – a two-hundred and nine player side event at GP Kyoto.
The winner of both of these, you might say, was a Miracle.
And, as always, we’ll have a look at the weekly Legacy Challenge results!
MKM Prague
MKM always do a great job of coverage, and you can look to their coverage site here for details. Here’s their pie chart with less fluorescent colors:
The big winner was “Grixis” which I imagine is Grixis Delver and Grixis Control lumped together. I’d imagine the majority of this encompasses Delver variants nonetheless. Next, “Stoneblade” again does little for descriptiveness, and although Bant Deathblade was incredibly popular in the previous MKM event, I wouldn’t be surprised, after the success of Jeskai on Magic Online, that more typical Stoneforge variants (Jeskai, Esper, Esper Deathblade, Blue-White) made up this archetype too. Elves always makes a strong showing in these events, and Czech Pile and Death & Taxes followed. That’s a pretty fair Top 5 represented decks! Sneak & Show was the most prominent combo deck, followed by “UWx Control” which I’m assuming is Miracles. Miracles hasn’t been making huge waves recently (especially on Magic Online, where it was once flourishing) but a solid 6% of the metagame means it sits within a solid niche.
Speaking of Miracles, here’s the Top 8:
Deck Player Placing Mentor Miracles Johannes Gutbrod 1 RUG Lands Steffen Moller 2 Grixis Delver Jonathan Anghelescu 3-4 Miracles Kevin Wagner 3-4 BUG Delver Manuel Hochegger 5-8 Esper Deathblade Maurice Lenz 5-8 Elves Tomasz Szadziul 5-8 Esper Delver Nicklas Krull 5-8
The winner was Miracles, but with a pretty exciting twist – a flashback to Claudio Bonnani’s winning list at GP Lille – and from what I hear Bonnani worked with Johannes on this list. Yes, Mentor Miracles, feat. Daze, has returned!
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Four Mentors return, and this list has a much leaner counterspell suite, with two Counterspell, three Daze, and a singleton Flusterstorm. I’m sure the Dazes surprised many. The Predict engine has been emphasized a little less too – I guess because card advantage is less necessary when Mentor is the plan A and the opponent is dead. I like the look of this list a lot and, again, it’s showing the flexibility and strength of the cantrips and Predict backbone, along with the usual suite of Terminus and Swords to Plowshares. The sideboard also leans pretty heavily on the Red splash for Blast effects, Moons for difficult matchups, and interestingly Pyroclasm as sideboard sweeper of choice.
This wasn’t the only Miracles list in the Top 8 though!
Much more typical, only using two Mentors as an eventual win condition, rather than its primary plan. Harder control elements like more Jace, more Predict and Unexpectedly Absent replace Daze, which shines in the early game. The sideboard, other than Entreat the Angels, is quite similar to Johannes, only lacking the additional sweepers.
Nonetheless, this tournament was a big shot in the arm for Miracles players everywhere. Have faith, the deck, despite its recent lull, is still alive and well and rising through the ranks of the format. Just as everyone thought Miracles’ lists were distilling into something expected, Johannes came in and put everyone in a Daze. There may be more in the shell to be explored.
There’s also a few other exciting decks to explore:
Mr. Nicklas Krull is at it again with an Esper brew, sort of. Esper Delver has been gaining more and more prominence and may very soon push its way up the echelons of Delver variants. All the numbers here look pretty reasonable, with a very diversified mix of disruption in Spell Pierce, Snare, and Thoughtseize. The sideboard, per usual in these Esper lists, shows off the versatility of the colors, leaning heavily on hatebears.
Another Deathrite-Stoneforge Esper list made Top 8 as well:
Very similar, but eschews Delvers for more midrange creatures like Baleful Strix, Snapcaster Mage and… Notion Thief and Tombstalker?!
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That’s pretty exciting. Again, Tombstalker seems to be the “biggest” Delve threat that fits neatly into midrange shells looking for a big finisher. An interesting lack of in this list is Jace, the Mind Sculptor!
Another interesting list is this Grixis Delver. It looks pretty stock… Until one realizes that neither Stifle nor Cabal Therapy has made its way into the main deck! This gives the deck room for an additional threat (a True-Name), an additional piece of permission (Spell Pierce), and an additional piece of removal. Interestingly, Jonathan also made the mana cleaner by having a 3/3 split of Sea and Volcanic Island… But cut a Wasteland for the Tropical in the main. Not sure I agree on the mana base change, but I do like this "no Stifle or Therapy" being a third option for the main deck in addition to maining either one of them.
I also really like the sideboard Jitte to gear up Pyromancer tokens or assemble the combo of True-Name Abomination and equipment. Ew.
Lastly, the second-placing list was RUG Lands. We’ve seen this a few times already, but it’s nice to see the “alternative” version of Lands also putting in a lot of work at larger events. Surprisingly there’s been a lot of innovation in terms of how to take the archetype: Red-Green Combo, David Long’s Burning Wish version, the Black splash for Decay (less important with Counterbalance now gone) and RUG:
Sweet bit of sideboard technology is the Green “kill spell”: Song of the Dryads.
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GP Kyoto Side Event
Next, let’s go to Japan and see what they have in store for us. Their huge Kyoto Legacy side event had a Top 8 of:
Deck Player Placing Miracles Kobayashi Tatsuumi 1 Aluren Suzuki Shouta 2 Blue-White Stoneblade Konokuchi Yuji 3-4 ANT Matsui Ryosuke 3-4 Death & Taxes Mihara Yuki 5-8 Griselstorm Nagahashi Ray 5-8 Reanimator Takada Hiroki 5-8 Blue-White Stoneblade Kagotani Naota 5-8
Yes, that’s Miracles again! Crushing!
There’s two camps in the Miracle-sphere – to splash Red, or not to. Here, unlike the MKM lists, Red is absent, leaving a nice clean basic-heavy mana base. Interesting deviations from the norm are only three Force (I like four Force in Miracles a lot, because it gets to hard cast territory often) but this is padded out with main deck Flusterstorms. Council's Judgment is often relegated back to the binder due to Unexpectedly Absent being more synergistic, but here Kobayashi Tatsuumi went for a 1/1 split of the two.
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In the sideboard is some interesting Japanese tech:
Cast Out has been popping up in multiple White-based lists from Japan. Like last week’s Druid's Deliverance, it’s a little overpriced for what it does, but the ability to cycle cheaply is pretty nice – especially with Terminus in the deck to trigger at instant speed!
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Counterbalance returns as a shell of its former self, and I’m not sure how this is better than a hatebear like Ethersworn Canonist and Meddling Mage – they’re arguably “harder” locks than Counterbalance with perfect deck manipulation from Top now unavailable.
Suzuki Shouta utilized a card that I expected a little heavier use in Aluren but largely fell by the wayside to Glint-Nest Crane.
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Trophy Mage is a little more expensive than the Crane, but assuredly hits, finding Shardless Agent when going on the value train or finding Parasitic Strix when comboing out. In the sideboard there’s not as many bullets as expected (Swords and Trinisphere are an option) but Ensnaring Bridge is a neat one to hide behind that Mage can get. Also interesting is rather than a more value-orientated flex land in the deck, Suzuki opted for the beatdowny Creeping Tar Pit, highlighting these Aluren lists’ solid fair axis of attack.
I have a dear Italian Legacy friend who loves the deck below. Hearing him exclaim its name in joy lights up the room.
“Grrrrrrrriselstorrrrm!”
Like Tin Fins, this list aims to reanimate Griselbrand and then win the game on the spot. However, this list doesn’t use Children of Korlis but instead Resolute Archangel to feed Griselbrand and churn through cards. This can also be sacrificed to Cabal Therapy and reanimated again to keep the cards flowing. The deck also essentially has a “Ritual” effect that can be reanimated in Skirge Familiar, turning excess cards into mana into a kill via Tendrils of Agony. Or, like the recent Reanimator Depths lists, this deck has a secondary plan of making a Grave Titan (either via reanimation or lots of Black mana) and riding that to victory.
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The sideboard also has some interesting options. Grim Monolith and Lake of the Dead allows the deck to become a Griselbrand and Grave Titan ramp deck post-board. Karn Liberated is also a pretty exciting colorless option when ramping, dominating the game if he sticks and exiling problematic permanents that may be a hindrance to reanimation. I’m surprised Ugin, the Spirit Dragon or Black walkers like Ob Nixilis Reignited weren’t considered too.
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30/07/17 Legacy Challenge
The Top 8 of the recent Challenge broke down as:
Deck Player Placing 4c Control Mahonen 1 TES Bryant_Cook 2 ANT MonkeysCantCry 3 4c Control Ballestin93 4 Turbo Depths Daft 5 Dark Thresh EronRelentless 6 |
media outlets, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) has recently started enforcing long-ignored legislation that restricts contract breweries – i.e. brewers that don’t own their own facility, and instead lease capacity at a third party brewery – from selling their beer to events that require a Special Occasion Permit (SOP), a group that includes most beer festivals in the province.
In a press release issued this morning, the Beer Store says that it has “developed a new sales process designed to facilitate the sale of contract brews […] to special occasion permit events in a manner consistent with Ontario’s Liquor Licence Act.”
The release also notes that Les Murray, president of Toronto’s Festival of Beer, and Left Field Brewery, the first contract operation to be affected by the AGCO’s stricter enforcement, were instrumental in triggering the initiative.
Described as a “temporary fix,” the new sales process will be in place until the AGCO is able to revise its policies to fully open SOP sales to contract brewers, a move that is expected to take place sometime after this June’s provincial election.ATHENS — Setting the stage for a pivotal deal with Europe, the Greek Parliament early Saturday approved Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s proposal for a three-year, $59 billion rescue package with harsh austerity terms that was remarkably similar to the one Greek voters rejected in a referendum less than a week ago.
With a Sunday deadline looming for a decision on the bailout, a crunch point that all sides see as Greece’s last chance to avoid bankruptcy and stay in the euro currency zone, the plan passed by an overwhelming margin.
The final vote showed that 251 lawmakers voted for the plan, while the rest of the body’s 300 members opposed it, abstained or were absent. But because 17 lawmakers from Mr. Tsipras’s coalition did not support the plan — 2 voted no, 8 voted present and 7 were absent — a shuffling of the prime minister’s government seemed likely, and some analysts said that it was possible that Mr. Tsipras might resign.Native American Tribe's Battle Over Beer Brews
toggle caption Hilary Stohs-Krause/NET News
Anheuser-Busch, Pabst and MillerCoors are among the big beer makers the Oglala Sioux tribe has accused of illegally selling millions of cans of beer each year in Whiteclay, Neb. The town borders Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, which is located across the state line in South Dakota and is dry.
The Oglala Sioux's federal case was thrown out, and the tribe is considering what to do next — legalize alcohol or go to state court.
Lying on sidewalks in Whiteclay, passed out against storefronts day and night, are some Native Americans who come here every day to drink. The town has just one central road, a grocery, a couple of abandoned buildings and four liquor stores. Each year, those four stores sell what amounts to 4 million cans of beer.
And who lives in Whiteclay? According to the latest census: 11 people. That's right. Only 11 residents in a town that sells 4 million cans of beer each year.
Nebraska lawyer Tom White is suing beer makers and those stores on behalf of the Oglala Sioux. The suit was dismissed. But White says the federal judge acknowledged the tribe's claims and left the path open to continue the fight in state court.
White says nearly all the beer sold in Whiteclay is smuggled across the border onto the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation where 40,000 people live.
"Well, there are 11 people. There's three houses in Whiteclay. [The beer] can't be drunk in public, but it is. And it can't be brought into the Pine Ridge, but it is openly right in front of the retailers, and everybody knows it," White says.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Robyn Wisch for NPR Robyn Wisch for NPR
Lawyers for the beer makers won't comment for this story. But in asking the court to dismiss the suit, they argued it would force the stores to discriminate against Native American customers, and that the tribe has no legal standing to sue.
A few miles east of Whiteclay, Gayle Kocer runs one of the few addiction centers serving Pine Ridge. She too says suing beer makers isn't the answer.
"It's not Whiteclay's problem and fault, it's not the state of Nebraska's fault. We as people have to make this choice to get in there and do something," Kocer says.
She points to Oglala Sioux leaders and suggests they could slow the flow of alcohol by setting up checkpoints on the road from Whiteclay. The Pine Ridge has been dry since 1832. In the 1970s, alcohol was legalized but the ban was quickly restored after a public outcry. Today, some younger tribal leaders think the ban should be lifted, but many elders continue to resist that. Kocer says tribal leaders also need to acknowledge the scope of alcohol addiction here and look to other tribes for help.
"No, we're going to ask for money from the state of Nebraska and from all those beer companies because they're destroying our people. Well guess what? This has been going on for generations," Kocer says.
Frank LaMere is a longtime activist and a member of the Winnebago tribe on the other side of Nebraska. He says alcohol continues to flow because of inaction on both sides of the border.
"When I hear somebody say, 'Well, that's their problem. They've really got to deal with that issue on Pine Ridge.' That's like code. It's a subtle message to you that we're not going to do a damn thing," LaMere says.
Fellow Winnebago member Lance Morgan agrees. Morgan is a Harvard Law School graduate who has studied Indian law. He says the property rights of the store owners are being valued over tribal law and the rights of Native Americans.
"Any time you talk about property rights to Indians, it's sort of a joke to us. I have a map on my wall of us owning Wisconsin before we got moved to a small, tiny corner of northeast Nebraska," Morgan says.
Morgan says Nebraska would have shut the liquor stores down in Whiteclay a long time ago if the stores had a different customer base.
"If it was anywhere else, it would have been hammered down. If it was any other group — if it was white people laying in the streets and Indians selling to them — well hell, they'd have the cops in here. They'd try to shut us down, they'd take us to court. So for us, it's just obvious and ridiculous and ironic. And in the end, tragic," Morgan says.
As the sun sets in Whiteclay, a couple of people spontaneously begin to chant as they mill around on the steps of a liquor store. That sad ritual will continue into the evening and every night, so long as the political and economic battle over who's to blame for alcoholism on the Pine Ridge continues.The wise-ass Kentucky crime drama Justified had the good fortune to premiere in the spring of 2010, Tuesdays at 10 p.m., which means it accidentally got the best possible lead-in, even if that lead-in aired on another channel: the final season of Lost, over on ABC.
You will recall that the final season of Lost was a fucking disaster, somehow triangulating Mitch Albom and the Wu Tang Clan via a goopy, confusing, schizophrenic, colossally unsatisfying denouement that explained nothing and insulted everybody. (Marnie Stern said it best.) It sucked. But as it mercifully wound down, the enraged viewer could, having fully absorbed each new Lost episode's fresh indignity, immediately click over to Justified on FX and watch Timothy Olyphant wear a hat, reel off some quips worthy of series inspiration/oracle Elmore Leonard, and shoot some dudes. It felt so right, it felt so comforting, it felt so logical.
Premise: Olyphant is Raylan Givens (a reoccurring EL character; the show was initially based on his 2002 short story "Fire in the Hole"), a studly U.S. marshal forcibly relocated from Florida (after he shoots a dude) to his rural Kentucky hometown, whereupon he encounters all manner of riotously well-spoken ne'er-do-wells, half of whom he shoots, the other half of whom shoot each other, generally. Five seasons now, the fifth concluding last night (with Michael Rapaport getting shot in the nuts). It has never been the best show on TV; it is still my favorite, in part because it has never tried to be the best. The next season is the last, and unlike, oh, say, Lost's, it will probably be rad—perhaps the raddest yet. Let's help make it more so.
Raylan's arch-nemesis is the loquacious and magnificently coiffed Boyd Crowder, who was supposed to die at the end of the pilot (he gets shot), but everyone liked him too much. This happens on long-running TV shows, the surprise reprieve—see Breaking Bad's Jesse Pinkman—but what made Boyd's situation so odd is that he is introduced in the pilot as a sociopath with a swastika arm tattoo who blows up a black church (empty, at night, but still) with a rocket launcher. They spared and redeemed that guy, via an immediate religious conversion and racial-matters enlightenment that all Boyd's enemies (including Raylan) assumed was cynical and fake; brilliantly, the show never actually settled the issue. It still comes up, five seasons on, the sincerity of this change of heart, and Boyd still has the tattoo.
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That profound weirdness (plus all the gunplay) makes season one my favorite, even now. Justified has never vastly improved nor appallingly fallen off since then: Most people prefer season two (featuring Margo Martindale as a semi-evil, bootleg-liquor-poisoning matriarch, winning the show its only major Emmy), but any of 'em will do, really. There's usually a new charismatic-sociopath "big bad"; there's usually a tough but sympathetic kid in peril; there's invariably a byzantine new assemblage of henchmen to shoot-and-be-shot.
The plot usually doesn't quite make sense and never matters: This is a character/dialogue show, suffused in Elmore Leonard's whimsical, erudite malice. What do we do about all these dead bodies? "Don't worry, Cousin Dewey," drawls a deadpan, pre-nut-shot Michael Rapaport, in an Internet-reviled backwoods accent to which he showed no loyalty episode to episode, or even scene to scene. "We'll hide 'em under all the heroin." The third-funniest moment this season was when a low-level henchmen got shot in the leg and yelled, "THIS IS THE WORST JOB EVER!" The funniest was a five-second cutaway of Boyd and another U.S. Marshall playing Scrabble.
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The low-key, low-stakes thing cuts both ways. Justified did not benefit this year from the mere existence of HBO's True Detective, which had a vaguely similar rot-of-the-rural-South premise but way bigger stars, a way bigger cinematography budget, and an inclination to take itself about 50 billion times more seriously, enrapturing the Reddit-prognosticator wing of the Internet to a degree not seen since at least Breaking Bad and possibly since Lost itself. (Way better finale, it's true, though all the über-machismo and Yellow King hysteria seems a little silly now—in retrospect, the badass six-minute long take in which Matt McConaughey suddenly becomes a coked-out biker-gang member robbing a projects stash house feels just a wee bit random.)
Here, we're dealing with a lower ceiling, Event Television-wise, but also a higher floor. The only Justified plotline with any real emotional weight this season involved the most prominent female character (Ava Crowder, a lot of relation to Boyd, it's complicated) and her season-long stint in prison, a way more heroin- and shiv-heavy spin on Orange Is the New Black. Otherwise it was a random mélange of bad guys killed off in random ways (occasionally in Mexico, occasionally at an irritated actor's request), meant to distract from the show's only real problem, which is that Raylan vs. Boyd is the obvious focal point, but each season has to contrive ways that they might face off half a dozen times or so (invariably the best scenes) without ever resolving anything. At one point this season all the main bad guys, including Boyd, got in one room to divide the profits from a Mexican heroin score; Raylan barged in with another lawman, the least-vital bad guy (here defined as "the black dude who hadn't been on The Wire") got shot (after quoting from King Lear), and everyone scattered again, no questions asked. In my experience, profits from a Mexican heroin score are generally not divided so casually/inconsequentially.
But "w/e," as Elmore Leonard would definitely not have said. A fixed endpoint tends to help all shows that do not involve plane crashes and mysterious islands; next season might be transcendent precisely because it'll force Raylan vs. Boyd to a definitive conclusion. To that end, a modest proposal: no new characters. Justified already has too many underused fan favorites who work wonders with, like, one line per episode—take especially charismatic sociopath Wynn Duffy, whose eyebrows are the eighth and ninth wonders of the world, and who says things like, "I would love to be of more help, but I've got to get back to watching women's tennis." We don't need a new big bad, or any new bads at all, really. The fifth-season finale, whatever its faults—Alicia Witt really sells the line, "That would be a real ballsy move, wouldn't it, Darryl. How're ya gonna do it without your balls?"—sets us for a clean, uncluttered, rebooted finale involving all the people we've come to care about, and absolutely no one else.
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There is a danger in this, of over-reaching, of attempting to "stick the landing" when being too humble and laid-back to ever really get airborne in the first place has been central to your show's charm. But there's a difference between a genuinely character-driven show and a plot-driven show that fucks things up royally and has to pretend it was really a character-driven show all along to save face. I have loved Justified all these years for the genial, comforting way it contrasts with the pompous melodrama that surrounds it, the way it conforms to Elmore Leonard's fabled 10 rules for good writing: no weather, no unnecessary details, no adverbs, no exclamation points. "Perpetrating hooptedoodle," is the way he described writing that felt like writing (and thus needed to be rewritten). "Good in a sea of terrible" was a fine look for this show for five years. But it never needed hooptedoodle to be truly great. It's time.
The Concourse is Deadspin's home for culture/food/whatever coverage. Follow us on Twitter:@DSconcourse.I was hoping to continue the story, To Tweak the Nose of the Red Goddess, this week, but I have had a nasty head cold and just have not been able to focus on writing for enough time to get part 2 done. Next Week.
Instead, I present to you, Avorax, the Ascendant Dragonewt, who rules the Rotunda. What's the Rotunda? Read the story and find out.
The fantastic image is by the eqaully fantastic Pacelic!
Avorax was once a priest among the Dragon's Eye Sept. Over a dozen lifetimes of ascendance he grew until he was prepared to step into the heavens in his true form. In 1515, he rose, and failed. He never speaks of why, and is perturbed if the subject is raised, considering it a reminder of his shame.
Avorax left the Dragon’s Eye after his failure – under the too-knowing eyes of his creshmates. After wandering for a while through southern Sartar and into the Holy Country, he heard of the Clanking Ruin and the stories of Dragonewt involvement in the razing of it. He has hired numerous bands to comb the ruins for evidence of dragonewts, and has even ventured within the Old City himself. He considers ANY dragonewt thing retrieved from the Machine City to be his by right. Generally, he will pay for the item, sometimes he takes it by force or intimidation.
Avorax commands a small army of nearly 300 enforcers. Some are retired Wolf Pirates, others are adventurers, even Lunar soldiers fleeing their duty. They are a rag-tag bunch, but effective at maintaining order, and keeping the Lunars off the Rotunda.
Avorax lives on the top level of the Rotunda and rarely ventures out. He is surrounded by at least 30 of his best Enforcers. There is a rumor that he killed the leader of the Lunar Wyverneers in aerial combat. This is not true, the leader lives, but Avorax did kill a wyverneer and her wyvern when the Lunars first settled on the Spire.Friends,
By now, most of you know that we’re focused on creating great products. Beyond products, we’re also about finding a better way of distributing smartphones, one that’s more fair and gives control back to the consumer. And that’s what today’s announcement is about.
Buying a phone in the US is confusing. Convoluted terms and conditions, many middlemen, and (despite some positive change recently) very opaque in terms of what part of your monthly bill goes to the smartphone versus everything else.
For a long time, carriers have been masking the true price of their smartphones through subsidies, and more recently installments. To give consumers the power to fairly compare what they’re paying at a carrier versus on OnePlus.net, we want our customers to have access to all of the payment options they’ve come to expect. Starting today, in our US store you will be able to pay for any order over $99 in installments. In the US, using installments with your carrier is common, but one of the major advantages of our payment system is that it won’t tie you down to a restrictive contract. With our installments plan you can switch carriers on the fly.
And if you ever feel like paying off the full price of your order just like before, you’re free to do so at any time. As just one of the new ways we are looking to evolve our business, the increased flexibility this new service provides is integral to our future payment structure.
All you need to do to pay in installments is select PayPal Credit when completing your order. Thanks to the calculator function you can find on the checkout page, you’ll know exactly how much you’ll be expected to pay on a monthly basis. For instance, if you’re looking to make use of this new payment scheme to purchase a OnePlus 2, you could opt for the 18-month plan which starts at $22.60 a month, and the OnePlus X starts at $16.12. There’s no need to worry about any unwelcome surprises along the way.
We’re proud to be taking another step in our mission to improve the industry and better serve our customers. Recently, we introduced free shipping and removed the OnePlus 2 and OnePlus X from the invite system, and we’re always looking for new ways to make owning OnePlus products easier and more convenient. The new installments option underlines our team’s commitment to keep improving. Let us know what you think!
Never Settle.
Click to expand...Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Stewart Macintosh says many mourners on the streets wept
Crowds of mourners have turned out in Phnom Penh for the start of funeral proceedings for King Norodom Sihanouk, who died in October.
A coffin carrying the embalmed body of the late monarch was paraded through the streets of the capital.
It was taken to a crematorium, where his funeral pyre will be lit by his wife and son, King Norodom Sihamoni, on Monday.
King Sihanouk died of a heart attack in Beijing at the age of 89.
His embalmed body has been lying in state at the royal palace for the last three months to allow people to pay their respects.
Norodom Sihanouk First crowned king in 1941 at the age of 19
Led Cambodia to independence from France
Aligned with Khmer Rouge in its early years, but held under house arrest while regime was in power
Spent long periods in exile in China
Worked in 1990s to bring stability and peace to Cambodia
Abdicated in 2004 in favour of his son, citing ill-health Life in pictures: Norodom Sihanouk
Crowds began lining the streets of Phnom Penh at dawn ahead of the parade.
King Sihanouk's gold casket was carried on a golden float, surrounded by officials wearing white, the colour of mourning.
After cremation, his ashes will be placed in an urn at the royal palace.
King Sihanouk remained an influential figure until death, despite abdicating in favour of his son in 2004.
He became king in 1941 while still a teenager, and led Cambodia to independence from France in 1953.
He was a presence through decades of political and social turmoil in Cambodia, despite long periods of exile overseas.
In later life he emerged as a peacemaker who helped bring stability back to his country, after an ill-fated choice to back the Khmer Rouge in its early years.Earlierthis month, while walking up Alabama Street from Mariposa en route to a show at Project Artaud, Tarin Towers spotted something even more surreal than much of what you’d find in an avant-garde art space.
“I saw two young, well-dressed people carrying two fancy roller bags — each,” she recalls. That’s not who you’d expect to be traipsing along Alabama and Mariposa at twilight; this is a gritty, mixed-use neighborhood with tents and homeless encampments tucked between the parked cars and street signs. But things grew odder still. “They walked up to a pop-up camper with the door thrown open and all kinds of light coming from inside. There was the unmistakable greeting of people expecting each other who didn’t know each other.”
Or, as she put it on social media, “Yoooooo I just saw a young Italian tourist couple checking into an RV parked on Alabama Street as a motherfuckin’ Airbnb.”
For Towers, who has fought mightily to stay marginally housed in this city — and harbors real worries she’ll end up in a tent on Shotwell or a camper on Potrero — this was a deeply distasteful moment. “Folks,” she wrote, “we have achieved the gentrification of homelessness.”
On the next day and the day after that, your humble narrator went and knocked on the door of the RV that met Towers’ description. Nobody answered, which isn’t surprising. Residing in a motor vehicle isn’t legal in this city, and one of the best ways to avoid being rousted by the cops is to simply not answer the door (Or, perhaps, no one was home).
Accordion files were strewn about in the “Grandma’s attic” section above the driver and a plastic owl of the sort you’d use to dissuade pigeons from roosting on your dormers was propped up in the passenger’s seat. This is not decor befitting Italian tourists in dainty shoes. And there is no extant short-term rental listing online that meets the description and location of this RV.
So, just what Towers saw remains a mystery. Perhaps two people decided to go clothes shopping and then practice their Italian while walking to met a man who’s down on his luck but still buys and sells fine roller bags. It’s hard to say.
Ifthis were a “motherfuckin’ Airbnb,” however, it would come as little surprise to Omar Masry. He’s the senior analyst at this city’s Office of Short-Term Rentals, the outfit given the ostensibly Sisyphean task of enforcing this city’s seemingly unenforceable laws reining in short-term rentals. It’s hard to succeed in a government position when powerful elements of that same government don’t want you to succeed — and write the laws thusly. But Masry and his colleagues seem to be making decent progress pushing that stone up a hill. And, along the way, he’s seen some stuff.
In the past couple of years, he says, he’s taken action on 20 or more RVs listed on Airbnb; around a quarter of them, he says, were parked in the Mission. In the same week Towers witnessed whatever she witnessed on Alabama and Mariposa, Masry wrote letters to two different men hawking RVs on Airbnb to visitors looking for a real San Francisco experience (and, it would seem, a late-night piss in the gutter). This guy, offering a stay in his on-street camper for $264 a night, was quick enough on the draw to immediately deactivate his listing.
This guy, flogging the $22-a-night opportunity to sleep in his Vanagon (“There’s NO bathroom & NO shower, but I can point you in the direction of a few coffee shops and restaurants where you can use the bathroom”) was not. Or at least he hasn’t been yet.
Masry has faced off with the van on Airbnb that moved from Bernal Heights parking spot to Bernal Heights parking spot and garnered attention because its residents had a propensity to defecate in the bushes. Its owner, a second-year law school student, initially decided to put his education to work in challenging the city’s regulatory authority, but has since capitulated. The Office of Short-Term Rentals has also curtailed the hawking of yurts atop industrial buildings and in backyards and all manner of 16-to-a-room hostels in residential neighborhoods, some of which were cheeky enough to paint numbers on the interior doors.
There are only six people in Masry’s office. There are many, many short-term listings in this city; this would seem to be a setup akin to playing Whac-a-Mole against an invading army of moles.
Fortunately, however, there are rules in both war and short-term rentals. And, Masry says, these rules are being followed. A settlement between this city and Airbnb, VRBO and Homeaway stipulated the gradual culling of problematic listings. Several weeks ago, dormant listings (“A PERFECT PLACE TO STAY FOR THE AMERICA’S CUP!”) were 86ed, along with below-market-rate units and places where tenants had been jettisoned via the Ellis Act. On Dec. 6, whole units listed for more than the city’s 90-day yearly limit were deep-sixed. And, on Jan. 16, all the outliers will be cut, too; that includes the RVs, the camper vans, the tents in the backyard, unregistered postings, yurts atop warehouses and other “gentrification of homelessness”-worthy offers.
Masryis confident that the settlement is being followed. After the first round of cullings, his office was deluged with calls querying about the Ellis Act — indicating that people offering short-term stays in sites where tenants had been evicted in this manner were being proactively booted off by Airbnb et al.
But how easy is it to evade the rules and offer up inappropriate sites to crash? Your humble narrator decided to give it a whirl and list the newsroom of Mission Local on Airbnb. Yes, for only $42 a night, you could stay beneath the table on the semi-carpeted floors of a real working newsroom! Exposed bricks! Exposed air ducts! A coffee machine! Heat! Keys to the bathroom provided by a put-upon Mission Local staffer! How can you afford to not stay here?
Sadly for comedic possibilities — but not for effective government — our hosting attempt was spurned by Airbnb, which now insists on a registration number from the city’s Office of Short-Term rentals before one sets up shop. The same goes for VRBO and Homeaway.
TripAdvisor, however, is not bound by the city’s settlement. And we were able to register the Mission Local office with them — but only for travelers willing to stay here for more than 30 days lest they violate San Francisco law. You can see the glorious screen capture of our successful attempt to rent out a rented office roughly the size of a Fiat 500 to up to six Italian tourists. But, sadly, fewer than 24 hours later, TripAdvisor suspended our account.
“This is the system at work,” noted Masry. Alas. And, come Jan. 16, “I generally expect that a lot of these sorts of outliers like tents and RVs should go away.”
San Francisco, however, isn’t an island. It’s a peninsula. And when outliers of all sorts are pushed away from here, they tend to roll up in parts nearby. If you’re dead-set on paying good money to sleep in an RV or tent or yurt and gentrifying the homeless experience, you can still do so across the bay.
In fact, here’s one proprietress in Berkeley offering a slice of the “glamping” life. “Glamping,” however, seems to be a malleable term, as the following stipulation would indicate: “If you opt to use the chamberpot, you MUST empty and rinse it daily.”
Yoooooo — fair enough. Piles of unwanted excrement certainly drain the glamor from sleeping in a stranger’s backyard.
Or on Division Street.Heroes of the Storm 2.0 is kicking off with a month-long Open Beta test! This update contains all-new progression and rewards systems, a wealth of new cosmetic items, new Hero customization options, and much, much more. Take a moment to check out the changes listed below, and then join us in playtesting the Heroes of the Storm 2.0 Open Beta.
Heroes of the Storm 2.0 Open Beta
Heroes of the Storm 2.0 will bring significant updates to features that are core to the game, and we’d like to request your help in playtesting during the Open Beta. Your participation will give us lots of data that we can use to make sure our new progression and rewards systems are working as intended. It will also help us discover and squash bugs before release.
We’d love to hear from you once you’ve had time to play some games and level-up a few times! Head to the official Heroes forums to let us know what you think of all the changes that are coming with Heroes of the Storm 2.0.
Open Beta Access Instructions
Head to the Heroes of the Storm tab on your Blizzard launcher. Use the Region selector found above the “Play” button to switch to “Heroes 2.0 Open Beta.” Hit the big, blue “Install” button, and then log in to start playtesting!
Please Note: Items unlocked or purchased in the Open Beta will not transfer to the live version of Heroes of the Storm when the Open Beta concludes. Hero levels, player levels, and progression reward progress earned during the Open Beta will not transfer to the live version of Heroes of the Storm when the Open Beta concludes.
New PC Minimum Specifications
The minimum system specifications required to play Heroes of the Storm have been updated: Minimum CPU Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E6600 AMD® Phenom™ X4 Minimum GPU NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600 GT ATI® Radeon™ HD 4650 Intel® HD Graphics 3000 (no change)
These new minimum requirements are already in effect during the Open Beta, and will come to the live version of Heroes of the Storm at the end of next month. Note that our minimum specifications on Mac have not changed.
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New Hero: Cassia
After shattering the Worldstone, the young Amazon Cassia had changed. She had seen hatred, terror, and destruction firsthand. If the Askari were to survive the coming darkness, they needed an army. She would begin their training immediately.
Trait
Avoidance When moving unmounted, Cassia gains 65 Physical Armor against Heroic Basic Attacks, reducing the damage taken by 65%.
Basic Abilities
Lightning Fury (Q) Hurl a javelin that damages the first enemy hit, and splits into two lightning bolts that deal damage to enemies in their paths.
Blinding Light (W) After 0.5 seconds, Blind enemies in the target area for 2 seconds. Passive: Cassia deals 15% increased damage to Blinded targets.
Fend (E) Charge at an enemy and on arrival channel for 1.5 seconds, damaging enemies in front of Cassia every 0.25 seconds. Deals 50% reduced damage to non-Heroes.
Heroic Abilities
Ball Lightning (R) Throw a ball of lightning at an enemy Hero that bounces up to 6 times between nearby enemy Heroes and Cassia, damaging enemies hit.
Valkyrie (R) Summon a Valkyrie that rushes to Cassia after 0.75 seconds, pulling and damaging the first enemy Hero hit and stunning them for 0.5 seconds at the end of her rush. The Valkyrie knocks back all other enemy Heroes in her way.
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Progression System
Player Progression Updates
Player level progression is no longer capped at 40.
Existing Hero levels have been converted to match new XP requirements without loss of Hero level.
Player level is now the sum of all Hero levels earned beyond 1. Example: If you have 5 heroes at level 5, your player level will be 20.
Player progression badges in the Profile, Score Screen, and Quest Log will display the player’s current level up to 99. Player progression badge art will receive more decoration every 25 player levels. Every 100 player levels, the level displayed in the progression badge will reset, and the badge will upgrade with even more ornate artwork.
The Basic Portrait Border no longer displays the player’s current level. Instead, the Basic Portrait Border will update every 100 levels with new art that matches the player’s progression badge.
Players can still view their total player level by checking their profiles, or by hovering the cursor over their portraits in the game’s menus.
Hero Progression Updates
Individual Hero levels are no longer capped at 20.
Every time players gain a Hero level their player level will increase accordingly.
Hero Level XP Requirements
XP requirements have been slightly increased during the first few Hero levels. This should make early levels feel more meaningful by limiting cases where a Hero could gain multiple levels after a single game. Low level Heroes will not lose any levels after transitioning to these new XP requirements. Example: A Hero who had progressed 50% into level 3 prior to release will not be adjusted down to level 2 in the new system. Instead, that Hero will remain at level 3 with 50% of the XP needed to get to level 4.
XP requirements have been significantly reduced during later Hero levels. This will decrease the amount of play time needed to progress through higher Hero levels by approximately 75 – 80% for the average player. As a result, Heroes who were above level 5 in the previous system will gain one or more Hero levels. Example: Heroes who were level 10 should adjust to approximately Level 15 in the new progression system. A former level 20 Hero will convert to about level 55.
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Progression Rewards and New Items
Loot Chests
Loot Chests are a new way to unlock cosmetic items and other rewards in Heroes of the Storm, and players will now receive a Loot Chest every time they level-up! Open Loot Chests, or purchase new ones, by heading to the new Loot screen added to the top navigation bar in the game’s menus.
Each Loot Chest will award 4 randomized items of varying rarity: Common, Rare, Epic, or Legendary. Click on an available Loot Chest to open it, revealing 4 Nexus Coins, which will shimmer and glow with a color that matches the rarity of their items. Click each coin to unveil the treasures they hide.
There are currently 4 different types of Loot Chests: basic Loot Chests, Rare, Epic, and Hero-specific. While all Loot Chests may drop items of any rarity, Rare and Epic Loot Chests are guaranteed to contain at least one item that matches that chest’s rarity level, or higher. Hero-specific Loot Chests are guaranteed to contain at least one item associated with that Hero.
Re-Roll Loot Chest Rewards The items awarded by a Loot Chest can be re-rolled using Gold. Each Loot Chest can be re-rolled up to 3 times. The first re-roll costs 250 Gold, and the price increases by 250 per additional re-roll on the same Chest. Upon confirming a re-roll, that Loot Chest’s original contents will be permanently discarded, and replaced by a new set of 4 randomized Nexus Coins. Re-roll carefully!
Loot Chest Rewards and New Items
Loot Chest rewards may include Heroes, Mounts, Skins, Stimpacks, and many new items being introduced with Heroes of the Storm 2.0:
New Legendary Skin: Prime Evil Diablo Prime Evil Diablo has joined the Nexus as a new Legendary Skin.
Announcers Replace many in-game announcements with voiceover from one of a variety of Heroes. Hero Announcers will call out takedowns, kill streaks, destroyed structures, and much more.
Voice Lines Equip a line of dialogue from the selected Hero and play it in-game for all nearby players in a match to hear. Voice lines can be played at any time while alive. Default hotkey: I All Heroes will start with one “Nexus” Voice Line unlocked and automatically selected for use in-game.
Banners Automatically plant a stylized flag upon destroying Keeps and Forts, capturing Merc Camps, or completing Battleground Objectives. All Heroes will start with one “Nexus” Banner unlocked and automatically selected for use in-game.
Sprays Tag the terrain with unique icons and artwork that are visible to all players in a match. One Spray per Hero can exist on the terrain at any given time, and will last approximately 8 seconds. Default hotkey: T All Heroes will start with one “Nexus” Spray unlocked and automatically selected for use in-game.
Emoji Packs A massive collection of stylized and Hero-specific chat icons have been added, and can be used during in and out-of-game messages. Each Emoji Pack contains 5 Emojis. View all available Emojis by clicking the new Emoji button added to the out-of-game Chat bar. Up to 10 Emojis can be set as Favorites. Right-click Emojis to add or remove them from Favorites. Use Favorites during a match by clicking the heart button added to the right side of the in-game Chat bar. Players’ Emojis will automatically |
an ill-advised prank and I would advise against such an action.'
The students all studied at Kingston Maurward College, a further education college specialising in agricultural studies.
A spokesman for the college said: 'We do understand that some of our students were involved in the taking of the dinosaur.
'Naturally as a college we don't support this kind of behaviour and we have spoken to those involved.'
The Dinosaur Museum in Dorchester is packed full of life-sized reconstructions of dinosaurs, alongside skeletons and fossils.
Manager Tim Batty declined to comment on the situation until it has been investigated by police.
The museum's website says the models 'beg to be touched by little hands - and that is encouraged, as is the handling of some of the dinosaur fossils.'Get the biggest politics stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Boris' little surprises have a knack of making the Conservative leadership wince and squirm.
Last month's'surprise' struck right at the heart of one of the most sensitive issues facing the Prime Minister, his Chancellor and the Tories. Boris announced that he thought senior politicians should publish their tax returns.
You could almost hear the groans in Downing Street down here in Somerset, 150 miles away.
Despite David Cameron and George Osborne indicating previously that they were "relaxed" about publishing their tax returns, now Osborne says there are "practical difficulties" and Cameron says it's "complicated".
Income tax transparency is already standard practice in countries like Denmark, Norway and Sweden. If you're standing for election in the States, you have to publish your tax return.
Since I recently completed my own tax return, I’ve posted copies from the time I was elected as an MP to my website and anyone can go ahead and look at them online.
There weren't any 'practical difficulties', and I didn't find it "complicated". So, I’m echoing Boris’ calls for politicians to publish their tax returns.
The murky, self-policing way in which our political system operates is a big problem. It leaves space for temptation and corruption.
But worst of all, this murkiness is a root cause of the distrust and suspicion which hangs over our political system, particularly after the 2009 expenses fiasco. It creates the impression that the political establishment has things it wants to hide.
Transparency is important.
Before being elected in 2010, I promised to be a full-time MP.
I’ve kept that promise. My bosses are those who live in my patch. They know I don’t sell my time to private companies, flog favours, get paid to make speeches, or lobby Ministers to promote anyone else's interests.
In 2010, I promised to list all my expenses and the value of any gifts I receive.
I’ve kept this promise too. Everything is on my website.
I said I wouldn't employ members of my family.
I haven't.
I don't claim for food, whether my own or for those who join me for a coffee, snack or meal as my guests in Parliament, even though the 'rules' say I can.
And I promised myself that if I was elected, I would do what I could to root out corruption and rebuild some trust in our politics.
When in 2012 I was promoted to be Vince Cable’s PPS, one of the first things I raised was company transparency and how slack registration in the UK could lead to tax dodging and corruption at a national and international level.
Now the Government is preparing a register of who owns and controls UK companies which everyone can see, which will make it much harder to dodge tax and do shady deals.
And I was one of the MPs who called for an independent, Hillsborough-style Inquiry into child sex abuse. I suggested the Chair should come from outside the British 'establishment' but it took two resignations (and seven months lost), before the Inquiry was set up and the Chair, a New Zealand Judge, started her work.
One of my duties now is to see the Inquiry pursue the truth, ensure those who cover up these hideous crimes account for their actions and omissions - whoever they are, whatever their connections - and make the perpetrators face the full force of the law.
So, I’ve kept this promise too.
I’m proud to have been outspoken on transparency.
I won’t back down. And I'm not finished yet.By Zachary Fagenson
MIAMI BEACH, Florida (Reuters) - A trendy South Beach restaurant has pulled liquid nitrogen cocktails off its menu after a woman was served a drink with too much of the sub-zero liquid and was rushed to the hospital with a burned esophagus.
Luxury "cryogenic cocktails" have become popular, with bartenders using small amounts of liquid nitrogen to create smoking drinks. The liquid can also instantly freeze everything from ice cream to fruit, which then easily shatters into glass-like shards.
In late January, Barbara Kaufman, 61, was attending a fundraiser at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden when she took a sip of the drink and doubled over. "Immediately it felt like my head was truly exploding," Kaufman said.
Nitrogen, which occurs naturally in the earth's atmosphere as a gas, condenses into a liquid at temperatures minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit.
Kaufman was rushed to an emergency room where doctors performed surgery to close holes in her stomach and esophagus, and to allow the nitrogen, which was quickly expanding from a liquid to a gas, to escape her body.
Marc Brumer, Kaufman's lawyer, said she has racked up more than $135,000 in medical bills because of the incident.
Haven Lounge, a Miami Beach restaurant owned by the Haven Hospitality Group, said it was removing the drinks from its menu. A spokesman for the Haven Hospitality Group said the company was not hired to staff the event at the botanical garden and that one of its bartenders was working on his own time.
The Miami Beach Botanical Garden and Kryogenifex, a Miami-based company that provides liquid nitrogen to restaurants and nightclubs, could not be reached for comment.
(Editing by Kevin Gray)With January on the way out, AdDuplex returns with an interesting look at Windows Phone usage for the month. Also worth discussing: Why Nokia Lumia sales were down quarter over quarter in Q4 2013, but actual Windows Phone sales to customers—and thus activations—were in fact up. It's all here in this month's peek at Windows Phone device usage.
As you may remember, AdDuplex bills itself as the largest cross-promotion network for Windows Phone and Windows 8 apps, empowering developers and publishers to promote their apps for free by helping each other. And each month it provides a tantalizing glimpse at which Windows Phone (and Windows) devices people are actually using.
This month, however, there are two things to examine. The Windows Phone device usage stats, of course. But also how we rectify the fact that Nokia's Lumia sales in Q4 2013 were down quarter-over-quarter (but up dramatically year-over-year, which is how we really measure such things), while Windows Phone sales to customers and activations were in fact up quarter-to-quarter in Q4.
Let's look at the AdDuplex usage data first. Some trends from this month's report include:
Lumia 520 is still number one. It's getting a bit boring since the Lumia 520 has pretty much been the Windows Phone story since mid-2013, but—shocker—it's still number one and growing, albeit more slowly, with 31 percent usage worldwide.
Low-end phones rule. When you combine all of the low-end Windows Phone handsets—the Lumia 520, 521, 620 and 625—you can see why Nokia moved more aggressively into this end of the market in 2013: They represent about 47 percent of all Windows Phones in use. And the number is much higher if you just look at Windows Phone 8 handsets, but AdDuplex doesn't provide those numbers for January.
High-end phones drool. The Windows Phone market seems mostly incapable of accommodating high-end handsets. Looking at the top ten worldwide, only one device—the Lumia 920—was ever marketed as a high-end device, and newer entries like the Lumia 1020 and 1520 don't make the cut anywhere. That said, here's one oddity: AdDuplex reports that there are currently more Lumia 1520s in use than there are Lumia 525s (the new low-end handset for China). But neither are anywhere near the top ten.
Nokia is still number one. Not much movement here either, but Nokia now accounts for 92.3 percent of all Windows Phone handsets in use.
Windows Phone 8 vs. 7.x. 78.3 percent of all Windows Phone handsets in use are running Windows Phone 8, vs. 21.7 percent for Windows Phone 7.x.
Windows Phone 8 Update 3 vs. GDR 2 vs. GDR 1. Looking at the three major updates to Windows Phone 8 that happened in the past year, AdDuplex sees that 67.3 percent of Windows Phone 8 handsets are running GDR2, which makes sense since that is the one that was most recently rolled out to most users. Update 3, which is available only to a limited set of device types on a limited range of carriers, has hit 18 percent usage. And GDR 1 is still kicking around on 14.7 percent of Windows Phone 8 handsets.
As for the supposed quandary over Windows Phone sales in Q4—someone on Twitter actually asked me if Nokia was somehow lying about its sales or had conspiratorially underreported Lumia sales in Q4 to assuage investor complains that it is selling its handset business to Microsoft—it's not all that hard to explain. And I was interested to see this week that AdDuplex's Alan Mendelevich agrees with my assessment.
It goes like this.
Back in Q3 2013, Nokia reported record Lumia sales, 8.8 million units, and since Nokia represents about 92 percent of all Windows Phone handset sales, it's safe to say that Windows Phone overall experienced record sales in the quarter too. But then in Q4 2013, Nokia reported that it sold 8.2 million Lumia handsets. That's a huge increase from the 4.4 million it sold in the year-ago quarter—the figure that actually matters—but it's also less than Q3 sales, which caused some handwringing in the less sophisticated parts of tech bloggerdom.
The thing is, the quarter over quarter drop-off isn't notable in any way. In fact, this isn't even the first time Lumia has experience a quarter over quarter drop-off. But since Q4 was the holiday quarter, the worry is that something terrible happened, and that Lumia sales fell through the floor.
Not so. Like most hardware makers, Nokia registers a sale when it one of its handsets is purchased... by the channel. (Since, you know, that's when it gets paid.) So a big part of the record 8.8 million Lumias sold in Q3 was devices that were sitting in retailers and distributors, waiting to be sold to actual consumers. Those consumers purchased the phones in Q4 and in many cases delivered them to others as Christmas presents.
This theory was bolstered when Windows Phone's Joe Belfiore attempted to detune concerns about a supposed Windows Phone fall-off in Q4 in what is unfortunately a typically cryptic and incomplete way: He tweeted that "folks who think [that] holiday sales of [Windows Phone] declined are incorrect... Activations more than doubled last holiday [quarter] and increased [over] each holiday month." And in his own blog post, AdDuplex's Alan Mendelevich provided the same theory I did above to explain how Nokia's sales numbers and Windows Phone activations are in fact perfectly consistent. And he has usage data to back that up.
In fact, Alan's post provides a few interesting bits of data: He estimates that there are now 38 million Windows Phone 8 handsets in use in the world, and 12 million Windows Phone 7.x handsets. These are actual handsets in use, not sales. That means that there were about 50 million Windows Phone users in the world at the end of 2013.
Not too bad.These fish have a combined yearly market value of close to $1 billion, so commercial fishing interests pursue them relentlessly, and the species can’t reproduce fast enough to sustain itself. The population has plummeted to just 2.6 percent of its historic size — dangerously low by any measure, and made worse by the threat of climate change.
Many international agreements and pledges affirm that each nation must play its part to conserve our shared ocean resources. But these binding international laws are too seldom followed or enforced. Rather than acting with caution in the face of uncertainty, some nations continue rampant overfishing of Pacific bluefin tuna, even on the spawning grounds in the Sea of Japan and near Okinawa, where protections are needed most. Management of the Pacific bluefin tuna fishery, which is divided between two organizations composed of countries with economic stakes in the tuna fishery, remains woefully inadequate because the groups lack meaningful plans for the tuna’s recovery. These organizations have ignored scientific warnings and common-sense precautions.
Still, there’s hope. In 2007, a related species, the eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna, was in serious decline. Fishing quotas exceeded what the best science dictated, and poor enforcement of the quotas resulted in an actual catch that was double the allowed level under the already inflated limits. The crisis led to widespread calls for action.
In sharp contrast to their Pacific counterparts, Atlantic fishing nations stepped up to honor their international commitments. They slashed quotas, prioritized national reporting of the catch, and implemented a tracking system to trace the fish from boat to market. Those steps dramatically improved compliance as well as enforcement against illegal fishing. Bluefin tuna in the eastern Atlantic are now on course toward recovery.
In the Pacific, where the situation is far worse, key fishing nations have yet to shoulder their responsibilities and have been unwilling to take the bold action necessary to protect and rebuild this sentinel species because of shortsighted national interests.Ryan Kerrigan’s Five Sacks in Four Games
This is another in a series of posts using the “All-22” Coaches Film from NFL.com to help visualize certain plays and formations and analyze the situation.
Washington Redskins linebacker Ryan Kerrigan entered the Redskins week five bye week tied for the NFC sack lead and showing signs that the third year pro bowler is transforming into a force on the defensive line. Kerrigan already has two multi-sack games this year against the Green Bay Packers and the Oakland Raiders.
The five sacks have Kerrigan on pace for his first double-digit sack total, and he is clearly the best Redskins player on the field so far this season (through four games). Below is a breakdown in pictures of just how Ryan Kerrigan has been terrorizing opposing defenses. (Click on the pictures for a larger view)
Sack #1
At the 10:16 mark in the second quarter of game one versus the Philadelphia Eagles. Ryan Kerrigan is lined up to the right side, the Eagles have right tackle Lane Johnson shifting to the right to try and protect against Kerrigan going to the outside as well as to keep an eye on London Fletcher who is lined upon Kerrigan’s left-hand side.
As the play starts to develop you can see that the inside lane that Ryan Kerrigan takes leaves Philly right tackle Lane Johnson out of position to make any move on him at all. Right guard Todd Herremans shifts just slightly to the left trying to make up for the Redskins defensive line slant movement leaving a clear path for Kerrigan to quarterback Mike Vick.
Sack #2
At the 9:54 mark in the first quarter against the Green Bay Packers Ryan Kerrigan is lined up to the left side of the defensive line and on the outside of Green Bay’s right tackle Don Barclay.
As the play starts to develop the Packers tackle pinches back and in, in response to this Kerrigan comes straight forward and to the right side of Barclay.
Once Packers running back James Starks leaves the pocket to run his route, Kerrigan has his man lined up even with Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers and drives Barclay backward directly into Rodgers. Once Kerrigan has driven his way into Rodgers, the sack comes with ease as Rodgers has nowhere to go and the offensive tackle has been beaten.
Sack #3
On the very next play, at the 9:15 in the first quarter, Kerrigan is this time lined up to the right side and over top Packers left tackle David Bakhtiari with linebacker Brian Orakpo lined up to the right. As the ball is hiked, Kerrigan dips and semi-shifts to the right, and then cuts directly back to the left and behind defensive tackle Barry Cofield.
The cut move to the left confuses the protection plan by the Green Bay offensive line as the guard and center both for a moment are blocking Barry Cofield. The momentary mix-up leads to Kerrigan being in position to make a play on Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers. Kerrigan is able to use his soon-to-be-famous hand swat and almost knock the ball out of Rodgers hands (the arrow is pointing at the ball).
As the play further develops Kerrigan regains control of the situation with his man and brings down Rodgers for his second straight sack of the game.
Sack #4
At the 2: 00-minute mark in the second quarter against the Oakland Raiders, Ryan Kerrigan lines up to the right side of the offensive line and finds himself in a position to be able to make a significant cut move inside of Raiders right tackle Tony Pashos. Which leaves him with a wide open lane pointed directly at Raiders quarterback Matt Flynn.
Flynn has nowhere to go but down, and he does.
Sack #5
At the 8:03 mark in the fourth quarter Kerrigan is again lined up over Raider tackle Tony Pashos. As the play begins to develop Kerrigan pushes forward and around Pashos and cuts back toward Raiders quarterback Matt Flynn.
Kerrigan pushes his way around Pashos and swats (soon-to-be-famous) the ball out of Flynn’s hands (the arrow is pointing at the ball getting swatted) as he gets the sack…his fifth of the season in just four games. The play was ruled a fumble, and Ryan Kerrigan was credited with not only the sack but the forced fumble as well (Redskins recovered).
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Leave a CommentThe most ominous reminder is right along the rafters of Sun Life Stadium.
Decorating the ballpark are tributes to countless athletes who’ve graced Miami with their greatness. There’s Dan Marino, Bob Griese, Paul Warfield, Dwight Stephenson, and on and on. They all have one thing in common.
Not a single one of them played for the Florida Marlins.
On my first visit, I was upset over what I perceived as mistreatment of their baseball tenants. Not only was the venue (at the time) called Dolphin Stadium, but even in the middle of baseball season there was nothing for the eye to explore except the names of old football players. To add insult to injury, I could make out hash marks on the field. I was half-expecting to find the goal posts still up.
I said to myself, “Why don’t these clowns put up any of the Marlins legends! You know, like… ”
And that’s when it dawned on me. Even though the Florida Marlins have two World Series titles (1997 and 2003), they still don’t have a franchise player.
I thought about players like third baseman Gary Sheffield and righthanded pitcher Kevin Brown. They were heroes of the 1997 team, but their Marlins days were just a blip in their careers and they were gone within a year of the crowning. Catcher Ivan Rodriguez was the heart and soul of the 2003 team, yet it was his only season wearing teal. Josh Beckett was the homegrown pitching hero that year and he was traded two seasons later (for a certain shortstop).
Charles Johnson and Jeff Conine spent the most time in Miami and are probably the only ones who’d identify themselves as Marlins above any other team. Both were dealt shortly after the 1997 World Series only to return to Miami where Jeff Conine received another ring with the 2003 Champs. Johnson and Conine were both very good ballplayers, each two-time all-stars, and probably the best candidates to have their numbers retired and displayed on the rafters.
But their longevity, numbers, and names don’t jump out the way a Stan Musial does in St. Louis or an Al Kaline in Detroit. They’re more like their respective Cardinals and TIgers teammates, third baseman Whitey Kurowski and centerfielder Jim Northrup; important contributors but not quite franchise icons.
Because of a perpetually fluctuating roster and bottom-feeding payroll, the Marlins have never developed an identity and this for me is a major reason they’ve yet to maintain a considerable fan following in south Florida.
That’s where Hanley Ramirez comes in.
THE HOPE OF HANLEY
The Marlins stepped up and signed both their superstar shortstop and their ace pitcher to long-term contracts in the last year. While righty Josh Johnson is signed through 2013, Ramirez’s deal goes another year to 2014.
With a retractable domed stadium opening up in Miami for the 2012 season, the Marlins anticipate an increase in revenue which fans dearly hope will be invested back into the roster. Major League Baseball has publically taken the Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria to task about hording their revenue gains. The signings of both Ramirez and Johnson are, if nothing else, a bold statement to their fans that the Marlins are serious about winning in the future.
As good as Josh Johnson is, a perennial Cy Young Award candidate, it is the everyday player who carries the franchise on his shoulder. Johnson can perform wonders every fifth day, but it’s Hanley Ramirez who can do something to affect the outcome of every single game.
Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright are awful good in St. Louis, but it’s Albert Pujols’s team. Johan Santana was outstanding in Minnesota, but the Twins dealt him and gave the money to catcher Joe Mauer. The New York Yankees have had a parade of standout pitchers over the years, but it’s the shortstop Derek Jeter who became the unquestioned leader.
I see it as the same in south Florida. For me, the fate of this franchise rests on Hanley Ramirez. If the Marlins are to became a stable franchise, win another championship, and gain a foothold of support among local sports fans, it will be because of Hanley Ramirez.
There’s no questioning Ramirez’s five-tool talent, he is perhaps the most athletically gifted player in the major leagues right now. He’s put together four very strong seasons for the Marlins culminating with the 2009 batting crown. Ramirez hit 24 home runs, 106 RBIs, and stole 27 bases to go with his league-leading.342 average. He has the ultra-quick feet and powerful arm to make the most difficult plays at shortstop and he’s even cut his errors from 26 to 24 to 22 to 10. To watch a 6’3” man perform acrobatics is plenty impressive, but now that he’s also making the routine plays, it’s downright scary. While I think highly of Jimmy Rollins, who’s won the National League shortstop gold glove the last three years, I believe the N.L. coaches will be forced to consider Hanley for the award in 2010.
In terms of pure talent, pure athletic talent, I’d put Ramirez just a hair below Alex Rodriguez among major league shortstops over the last 30 years I’ve watched baseball. I’d put him just over multi-dimensional greats like Robin Yount and Barry Larkin and believe he’s capable of enjoying every bit the careers they had. At age 27, there’s plenty more to come if he wants it.
IT TAKES MORE THAN JUST TALENT AND NUMBERS TO BE A FRANCHISE PLAYER
I praise Hanley Ramirez as a player now but I was probably his harshest critic just three years ago when I scouted him on my pro coverage for the St. Louis Cardinals.
While I thought the same of his abilities then as now and his numbers were indisputable, Ramirez struck me as a “rotisserie player” when I watched him on a daily basis. I use that term to describe players who are not as good as their stats indicate because they make better fantasy league players than they do flesh-and-blood ballplayers.
I believed that simply because Ramirez choked up in pressure situations. I have no statistic to give you, only that when a key double play needed to be turned, or he needed to put the bat on the ball to get in the go-ahead run from third, Ramirez was a different ballplayer, noticeably uncomfortable and unable to deliver. I questioned his teamwork because he wouldn’t adjust his swing to the situation. The annual 20+ errors always came in the worst situations.
They’re the kinds of things you don’t notice unless you watch the team everyday. Having seen Hanley struggle in those situations during the regular season, I’d feared that he would not be an impact player in the playoffs. I just didn’t see that Reggie Jackson/Kirk Gibson killer mentality to thrive under the hottest spotlight, I didn’t see a franchise player in the truest sense.
I still have my share of doubts in that direction, but I will say Ramirez has improved in the last year. I see a team player today, and a more confident player in the clutch. The defensive improvement is particularly commendable.
So the question remains, can Hanley Ramirez lead the Marlins to another World Series? Is he that kind of player?
A great player not only puts up great numbers, but he makes his teammates better and wins championships. For some reason, you hear that more in other professional sports leagues, like the NBA where Bill Russell’s and Michael Jordan’s worth are measured in rings, not statistics. I believe it should be the same the same in baseball. It’s more of an individual sport in many aspects, but it’s still important for the baseball superstar to have leadership qualities in the clubhouse and the ability to make his teammates better on the field.
I’m not around the clubhouse to say if Ramirez is like that, or if he’s capable of such a presence, but that’s what it’s going to take for it all to come together in every way for the Florida Marlins franchise.
WHEN WILL HANLEY BE APPRECIATED?
For Hanley Ramirez to reach the local pantheon of Dan Marino and Miami Heat superstar Dwyane Wade, it’s going to take more than just putting up great numbers.
In terms of talent and ability, Hanley Ramirez may very well be the baseball equivalent of Wade and Marino. It’s no stretch at all, though you would never guess it by his lack of media attention. Hanley doesn’t do T-Mobile commercials with Charles Barkley or movies with Jim Carrey.
However the national baseball audience did show some level of appreciation last summer. Ramirez decisively defeated Jimmy Rollins in the National League All-Star shortstop vote, 3.2 Million to 2.2 Million, despite the much bigger crowds drawn by the Phillies at Citizens Bank Park.
The advent of internet voting has a leveling effect, but players of teams who draw well at home will always have an advantage. The fact that Ramirez got so much of the national vote is an indication that true baseball fans know all about him even though the local and casual sports fan is less aware.
Though Hanley Ramirez is much less recognizable on the local sports scene than Dwyane Wade, he has the potential to become much more. His Dominican, Spanish-speaking upbringing should have made him even more of a smash hit in Miami, where the populace is largely Cuban and Hispanic. His English is conversant enough that I’m shocked he hasn’t received more local endorsements.
It’s going to take a championship and it’s going to take Hanley at the forefront, as a long-term Marlin and the face of the franchise.
First the Marlins have to hang onto him throughout the remaining five years of his contract. Signing him is one thing, keeping him is another. The way it’s back-loaded and absent of a no-trade clause, the Marlins can still back out of their deal.
Ramirez gets paid $7 Million this year, then $11 Million in 2011. It bumps up to $15M, $15.5M, and $16M the last three years. There’s nothing to stop the Marlins from dumping his contract in the meantime.
Second, Ramirez will simply have to deliver both on the field and in the clubhouse, seize control as the team’s superstar, and take them to new heights. He’s in a unique situation with great pressure but a tremendous reward if he comes through.
As the Florida Marlins embark on 2010, here’s one local baseball fan who wants to see it all happen. Hanley Ramirez needs to become the much-needed face of the franchise and the Marlins must finally stake their claim to a passionate baseball city and become a National League force for years to come.
The two are inseparable.Editor’s note: This piece originally ran in 2016. This week, The Satanic Temple is back in the news over a dispute about religious discrimination with Twitter.
The Satanic Temple seems to have a knack for grabbing headlines.
You may have seen the group’s massive statue of the goat-headed demonic deity Baphomet, in which two children look adoringly as the winged beast sits on a throne. They’ve threatened to “donate” the massive bronze statue to state government areas that are also home to large donated monuments of the Ten Commandments.
In Oklahoma, the move forced the state to remove their Ten Commandments monument from the capital grounds (though, lawmakers are currently trying to get voters to fight for its return).
Recently, a man affiliated with the Satanic Temple has been showing up to municipal meetings in a black, hooded robe to deliver “Luciferian” invocations in the same settings that also allow local Christian ministers to open meetings in prayer. In Phoenix, lawmakers decided to ban prayer altogether instead of allowing a Satanic Temple member from opening the government gathering.
The group has now announced a new initiative, this time aimed at schoolchildren: An “After School Satan Club” at public elementary schools that are also home to Christian after-school programs. In a statement, they explained, “It’s important that children be given an opportunity to realize that the evangelical materials now creeping into their schools are representative of but one religious opinion amongst many.”
Unsurprisingly, parents weren’t thrilled.
What They Believe
On the surface, the agenda of the Satanic Temple seems, frankly, a little terrifying. That is, until you learn what the group is actually about. Not only does the Satanic Temple not believe in God, but they don’t even believe in the devil.
For them, Satan is a work of fiction and a symbol they’ve embraced on purpose: It—very effectively—invokes a reaction, especially in the Bible Belt. As they explain on their site, in their opinion, “Satan is symbolic of the Eternal Rebel in opposition to arbitrary authority, forever defending personal sovereignty even in the face of insurmountable odds.”
Even though they are clearly against any belief in the supernatural (including both Christianity and Satan-worship), they do, believe it or not, have some values in common with proponents of religious liberty.
Two of their seven tenets directly address address individual freedom:
The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions; The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forego your own.
It’s these ideas—not the biblical concept of an actual Satan—that serve as motivation for their high-profile civic activities.
What They Want
At their core, the Satanic Temple seems to mainly be opposed to large institutions that impose ideas and values—particularly religious ones—onto people who are free to adhere to whatever ideas they want. It’s the idea at the heart of the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Sure, their campaigns to open city council meetings with Satanic speeches and to erect demonic statues provoke a reaction, but that’s the point.
They want to challenge the way government—which is supposed to represent all of the citizenry—seems to, in some cases, afford Christians certain platforms that aren’t given to other religions. And in order to get their point across, they’ve used the most extreme imagery possible—Satan himself—as their mascot.
They aren’t out to just challenge Christianity; they are attempting to challenge state-sponsored acknowledgements of it. Individual liberty—to believe whatever you want, even if it is the Bible—is at the core of their message.
David Suhor, the guy who wore a cheap Halloween costume to perform rituals at a Pensacola city council meeting, explained to The Washington Post, “When one group wants their message to be the only one and they try to enlist the agenda of the government, people get angry. True religious diversity means I don’t have to respect what you believe, but I’ll defend your right to believe it.”
Are They Right?
Recently, the State Department released a report that found that 74 percent of the world’s population lives in countries that religiously prosecute people under government authority. Some of the primary offenders are Muslim countries. As the report explains:
In many other Islamic societies, societal passions associated with blasphemy—deadly enough in and of themselves—are abetted by a legal code that harshly penalizes blasphemy and apostasy. Such laws conflict with and undermine universally recognized human rights.
In America, no one is being tried by the government for blaspheming Islam or the Bible. There is freedom to believe whatever you want.
That’s ultimately why the Satanic Temple is doing what they are doing. They are attempting to protect an idea that is increasingly unpopular around the world: That governments shouldn’t enforce religious practices.
Yes, there is historical context for Christianity’s role in American life (it overwhelmingly remains the popular religion in the country), but that’s not what the Satanic Temple is mainly challenging. They want people to be free to practice whatever religion they want.
They just want to make sure the government isn’t preventing them from doing so by elevating one religion over others. Yes, they are vocally anti-religion, don’t believe in the supernatural and want to sway people away from belief in God. But they still think people should be allowed to believe, without having the government influence their outlook.
You may not agree with their methods or even their message. (They seem to relish in offending and frightening people.) But, when it comes to religious liberty, the Satanic Temple is out to make a point: Government favoritism toward one religion is an ideological slippery slope.
What happens when theology becomes a political issue? What happens when other religions demand the same platforms traditionally given to Christians in the U.S.? What happens when religion is legislated? Where’s the line between the allowance of religious displays on government property and the endorsement of religious ideas?
Despite their demonic statues, black robes and creepy videos, the Satanic Temple believes an idea that even most Christians would agree with. We should be free to believe and practice religion without government interference—even if that’s an idea that some people find offensive.NEW YORK -- Critics of affirmative action generally argue that the country would be better off with a meritocracy, typically defined as an admissions system where high school grades and standardized test scores are the key factors, applied in the same way to applicants of all races and ethnicities.
But what if they think they favor meritocracy but at some level actually have a flexible definition, depending on which groups would be helped by certain policies? Frank L. Samson, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Miami, thinks his new research findings suggest that the definition of meritocracy used by white people is far more fluid than many would admit, and that this fluidity results in white people favoring certain policies (and groups) over others.
Specifically, he found, in a survey of white California adults, they generally favor admissions policies that place a high priority on high school grade-point averages and standardized test scores. But when these white people are focused on the success of Asian-American students, their views change.
The white adults in the survey were also divided into two groups. Half were simply asked to assign the importance they thought various criteria should have in the admissions system of the University of California. The other half received a different prompt, one that noted that Asian Americans make up more than twice as many undergraduates proportionally in the UC system as they do in the population of the state.
When informed of that fact, the white adults favor a reduced role for grade and test scores in admissions -- apparently based on high achievement levels by Asian-American applicants. (Nationally, Asian average total scores on the three parts of the SAT best white average scores by 1,641 to 1,578 this year.)
When asked about leadership as an admissions criterion, white ranking of the measure went up in importance when respondents were informed of the Asian success in University of California admissions.
"Sociologists have found that whites refer to 'qualifications' and a meritocratic distribution of opportunities and rewards, and the purported failure of blacks to live up to this meritocratic standard, to bolster the belief that racial inequality in the United States has some legitimacy," Samson writes in the paper. "However, the results here suggest that the importance of meritocratic criteria for whites varies depending upon certain circumstances. To wit, white Californians do not hold a principled commitment to a fixed standard of merit."
Samson raises the idea that white perception of "group threat" from Asians influences ideas about admissions criteria -- suggesting that they are something other than pure in their embrace of meritocratic approaches.
He adds: "While the principle of fairness may be a driving concern in people’s attitudes towards policies such as affirmative action, social welfare, and fair housing, the malleability of white respondents’ attitudes towards the importance of university admissions criteria in response to racial considerations indicates that public opinion about the importance of such criteria is anything but fair, at least if the definition of fairness entails a procedural fairness by which all groups should be subject to the same procedural process, i.e., same weighting of admissions criteria, when determining whether an individual should be admitted to a prestigious public university system, an opportunity that will significantly shape that person’s life outcomes."
And Samson noted in his presentation here that these concerns are not just theoretical. In 2009, the University of California Board of Regents changed the admissions criteria for the system, generally eliminating the requirement of SAT subject tests. Advocates for Asian Americans noted at the time that this shift was taking away a criterion on which Asian-American applicants tended to do better, on average, than other groups.
Further, Samson said that key Supreme Court decisions have been framed as being about meritocracy when -- if different groups had been involved -- they might have been framed differently or not even been brought. For example |
mom was the most important person in her life and if she was dead, Smith felt she had no reason to get out of prison, the officer recounted.
Smith, adopted as a five-day-old infant, also mused who her biological mother was and where she fit into her family.
Phibbs said he talked with her about her feelings and problems because she had no one else, even though management had warned him not to.
'Begging' to strangle herself
Smith also said she wanted to go for proper psychiatric assessments but was told hospitals had no space.
"We made a deal that she would try to go back to sleep. She did."
The next morning, Smith showed Phibbs she had a ligature.
She was "begging" him to let her strangle herself, he said.
"Just let me do it. I won't die. I know what I'm doing."
A short while later, Smith was seen on her cell floor, gasping for breath, a ligature around her neck. By the time the officers went in — Phibbs in the lead — and started pumping her chest, it was too late to save her.
"I thought she was joking around," he said.
When paramedics finally arrived and cut open her gown, Phibbs said he was angry — not because he thought she had died — but because he believed he would be in trouble for being around the exposed female.
Several managers, he said, would act that day as if nothing untoward had happened.
"They all knew."
Smith responded positively
One reason front-line officers videotaped every key interaction with Smith was to show management — to no avail — how difficult it was coping with the disturbed girl, who spent almost three years in segregation cells around the country.
Hours of video show Phibbs and other guards — barred from entering the cell except in an emergency — talking to, or negotiating with, the teen through the heavy cell door.
The videos show Phibbs was one of the few people Smith responded to positively. With him, she is mostly calm, if not always co-operative about his requests to hand over ligatures or glass, or uncover her cell camera.
He appears to be kind, gentle, patient, firm. Sometimes she giggles.
"You're going to seriously hurt yourself one day," he says at one point. "You want to hurt yourself?"
"No."
"What happens if we can't get that off you? What if it's too tight?"
On one occasion, Smith became violent, kicking and punching. Guards used a noxious substance, known as OC spray, to subdue her.
"Instead of having staff handle her, it was easier to spray," Phibbs explained.
Phibbs had experienced that spray.
"You spit. You cough. Your nose runs. Your eyes will burn. Your skin will burn. My skin actually blistered," he said in earlier testimony.
Phibbs was charged with criminal negligence causing Smith's death, a charge that was later dropped.
Asked what might prevent another death like Smith's, Phibbs spoke of accountability. Management did not follow policies and procedures and he felt powerless, he said.
"I had no way of reporting that my warden was not reporting incidents. I had no way of reporting they were using the Mental Heath Act to get a cavity search done."
"They figured they could keep Ashley alive for the rest of her sentence and she would never come back."
The inquest adjourned until Monday, when Phibbs is expected to face about 10 hours of cross-examination.A-Bi Contains articles like Abortion, Advance Directives, African Religions, Afterlife in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Aids, Animal Companions, Anthropological Perspective, Anxiety and Fear, Apocalypse, Ariès, Philippe, etc…
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Sy-Vi Contains articles like Symptoms and Symptom Management, Taboos and Social Stigma, Taoism, Taylor, Jeremy, Technology and Death, Terrorism, Terrorist Attacks on America, Terror Management Theory, Thanatology, Thanatomimesis, etc…BeautifulPeople.com, you may remember, is a dating site that allows members to vote on hopeful enlistees based on their looks, ensuring that people who belong meet certain standards of both attractiveness and shallowness. It bills itself as “a dating site where existing members hold the key to the door.” Turns out, the site maybe should have put them in charge of server security, as well. The personal data of 1.1 million members is currently for sale on the black market, after hackers took it from an insecure database.
The Hack
Last December, security researcher Chris Vickery made a curious discovery while browsing through Shodan, a search engine that lets people look for internet-connected devices. Specifically, he was looking through the default port designated for MongoDB, a type of database-management software that, until a recent update, had blank default credentials. If someone using MongoDB didn’t bother to set-up their own password they would be vulnerable to anyone just passing through.
“A database came up called, I believe, Beautiful People. I looked in it, and it had several sub-databases. One of those was called Beautiful People, and then it had an accounts table that had 1.2 million entries in it,” says Vickery. “When that type of thing comes up and it’s called ‘Users,’ you know you’ve hit something interesting that shouldn’t be available.”
Vickery informed Beautiful People that its database was exposed, and the site quickly moved to secure it. Apparently, though, it didn’t move quickly enough; at some point, the dataset was acquired by an unknown party, which is now selling it on the black market.
For its part, Beautiful People has attempted to explain away the breach by saying it only affected a “test server,” as opposed to one in use for production, but that’s a meaningless distinction, says Vickery.
“It makes no effing difference in the world,” says Vickery. “If it’s real data that’s in a test server, then it might as well be a production server.”
Who’s Affected?
If you were a Beautiful People member before last Christmas—the vulnerability was addressed on Dec. 24—you may well be! You can check for sure at HaveIBeenPwned, a site operated by security researcher Troy Hunt.
Update: In an emailed statement, a Beautiful People spokesperson says: "The breach involves data that was provided by members prior to mid July 2015. No more recent user data or any data relating to users who joined from mid July 2015 onward is affected," and adds that all impacted members are being notified, as they were when the vulnerability was originally reported in December.
How Serious Is This?
In terms of scale, it’s nowhere near as bad as last year’s 39 million-member Ashley Madison hack. The information that’s leaked also isn’t quite as devastating as being outed as an active adulterer, and Beautiful People says no passwords or financial data were exposed.
Still, as you might imagine, a dating site knows a whole lot about you that you might not want broadcasted to the world. Forbes, which first reported the breach, notes that it includes physical attributes, email addresses, phone numbers, and salary information—over “100 individual data attributes,” according to Hunt. Not to mention millions of personal messages exchanged between members.
Even more serious, perhaps, is the issue of database security at large. Until MongoDB improved security with version 3.0 last spring, says Vickery, its default was to ship its software with no credentials required at all.
That’s not ideal, but the onus is still on companies like Beautiful People to put in the effort to lock down the sensitive information with which they’re entrusted. Especially since it’s so easy to do so, as MongoDB understandably wants to stress. "The potential issue is a result of how a user might configure their deployment without security enabled," says MongoDB VP of Strategy Kelly Stirman.
“A trained monkey could have protected [this database],” says Vickery, with a more blunt assessment. “That’s how easy it is to protect. It’s an incredible oversight, it’s massive negligence, but it happens more often than you think.”
Whatever you may think of a site like Beautiful People, the insecurities that prop it up shouldn't extend to its stash of sensitive data.
This post has been updated to include comment from Beautiful People and MongoDB.Political activist squatters who lived for years in a vacant building in Oakland that burned early Wednesday morning were set to be evicted the day before the fire broke out, one of the activists said on Thursday.
The building at the corner of West MacArthur Boulevard and Martin Luther King Jr. Way housed a former RCA repair shop and several apartments, but burned in a one-alarm fire that broke out at about 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, fire Battalion Chief Erik Logan said.
The fire began outside the building and spread inside, causing significant damage to the interior walls and an exterior wall behind the building, where it appears it started, Logan said. The cause of the fire has not been determined.
Logan said that because of a lack of furniture and possessions inside, it appeared that no one was living there at the time the fire started. He said firefighters had difficulty contacting the property owner.
According to the Alameda County Assessor’s Office, the property is owned by Rockridge Properties LLC. That company, which names Joseph Consos as its registered agent, was involved in a long legal battle to evict squatters residing there since 2010 and had an eviction date set for Tuesday. Consos did not return calls for comment.
Squatters occupied the building late in 2010 and used it as a living space, for fundraisers, music shows, meetings and other activities along with an adjacent occupied home on West MacArthur called the “Hot Mess House.” It was frequently adorned with political banners, including on a large billboard on the building’s roof.
Steven DeCaprio, an activist involved in the legal defense of the RCA building, said that the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office was serving an eviction notice at the Hot Mess House on Thursday morning.
DeCaprio said that while people were still staying in the Hot Mess House, he did not know who, if anyone, might have been staying in the RCA building when the fire broke out.
The activists had a lawsuit brought by Rockridge Properties dismissed last year, successfully arguing that when the building was foreclosed on they were not provided adequate notice to attempt to keep the property, DeCaprio said.
He said the ownership situation of the building when they moved in was unclear — when the activists first examined taking over the building in 2010, it had been owned by a company named Grove Park LLC, which was dissolved with its owner in bankruptcy proceedings.
They had intended to occupy the space for five years, pay the back taxes on it, and assume ownership under California law, DeCaprio said. But instead the building was foreclosed on, sold at auction, then sold to Rockridge Properties. Eventually, Rockridge Properties prevailed in forcing the activists out.
DeCaprio said his band played in the space and it was also used for art and lectures. They had hopes for turning it into a social center similar to projects in squatted buildings in New York and Europe.
DeCaprio said:
“The reason why people are fighting so hard for this property is not just for this property alone, but because this property represents the gateway between Ghost Town and West Oakland and Temescal.”
He said the activists are concerned that the property might be used to construct condominiums, raising property values and pushing long-term residents out of the neighborhood:
“I want to make sure we have an inclusive development in our neighborhoods.”
— Scott Morris, Bay City NewsTake a walk down memory lane as ESPN FC recalls the 22 teams to have won the Champions League.
Which ranks as No. 1? Look out for our #UltimateUCL feature, beginning September 8, in which you can vote on the best of the best!
1993: Marseille (#UltimateUCL seed: 18)
Didier Deschamps was the first captain to lift the European Cup during the Champions League era.
The first winners of the Champions League provoke considerable debate, given that they were found guilty of match-fixing in the French league shortly afterward and relegated. The irony was that they had constructed a formidable team, and benefited from fortune. They narrowly pipped Rangers to the final in the group stage that, at that time, replaced the quarterfinals and semifinals, before defeating a great Milan 1-0 in the showpiece through a Basile Boli header.
1994: AC Milan (4)
Milan were too good and the 4-0 final score remains the most one-sided in the Champions League era.
One of the best defences in history, one of the best final performances in history. After a campaign in which they conceded only two goals in 11 games, Fabio Capello's Milan then put four past Barcelona's so-called "Dream Team." It was the Rossoneri that fired the imagination in the final, which was all the more impressive given the solidity of their season.
1995: Ajax (6)
The Dutch side were managed by Louis van Gaal and featured wily veterans like Frank Rijkaard and captain Danny Blind.
A strikingly young team that defied the growing economic reality of the Champions League and went all the way to victory undefeated. The 1-0 win over Milan in the final was their third victory over the defending champions in that campaign, with teenage goal scorer Patrick Kluivert perfectly displaying the youthful vibrancy of the side.
1996: Juventus (7)
Juventus had waited 11 years to win the European Cup for a second time.
The Old Lady denied Ajax back-to-back titles with a penalty shootout win in Rome. Marcello Lippi's team of veterans included Gianluca Vialli, who scored in both legs of the semifinal, as well as Didier Deschamps and Antonio Conte. Juve's youth was provided by a 21-year-old called Alessandro Del Piero, who scored six goals in the tournament.
1997: Borussia Dortmund (17)
Dortmund's third goal was scored by Lars Ricken, a substitute who had been on the pitch for just 16 seconds.
It was Juventus who were unable to retain the trophy the following year as Dortmund pulled off a stunning upset. Ottmar Hitzfeld won the first of his two Champions Leagues with a starting XI that contained eight Germans, one Swiss, one Portuguese and one Scot, Paul Lambert, who set up the first of Karl-Heinz Riedle's two goals and did an effective job shackling Juve's star man, Zinedine Zidane.
1998: Real Madrid (21)
Madrid's starting XI featured four Spaniards and one player each from Germany, Brazil, Argentina, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Yugoslavia.
Juventus may have been the team of the late 1990s in the competition, but they failed in two of the three finals they reached. This time it was Real Madrid, who had not won the European Cup for 32 years at the time, that prevailed, thanks to a goal by Predrag Mijatovic. Managed by a German, Jupp Heynckes, Madrid saw off Bundesliga opposition in the quarterfinals (Bayern Munich) and semifinals (Borussia Dortmund).
1999: Manchester United (5)
Football, bloody hell: the words of Alex Ferguson after his side scored twice in injury time to beat Bayern Munich.
There may never be a finish to a Champions League like that in 1999, and there have certainly been few seasons like it. Alex Ferguson's joyously attacking side were involved in a rip-roaring campaign, from two 3-3 draws with Barcelona to their epic comeback from two goals down against Juventus in the semifinals. It was arguably United's weakness that resulted in such matches, but that only allowed them to show their glorious strengths.
2000: Real Madrid (15)
Fernando Morientes, left, scored the first goal of the final before Steve McManaman and Raul added others.
The first Champions League final to feature two teams from the same country saw the side from Spain's capital earn a comfortable 3-0 win vs. Valencia. The road to the Paris final had not been as smooth, with Madrid pushed hard by each of the previous year's finalists. They eventually saw off Manchester United and Bayern Munich in the quarterfinals and semifinals respectively, dispatching each 3-2 on aggregate.
2001: Bayern Munich (13)
Owen Hargreaves lifts the European Cup. The then-20-year-old, who was born in Calgary, Alberta, anchored Bayern's midfield in the final.
After coming so close two years before, Bayern, managed by Ottmar Hitzfeld, knocked out Manchester United and Real Madrid before finally getting their hands on Europe's biggest prize for the first time since winning three in a row in the 1970s. Valencia were the beaten finalists again, though in more heartbreaking fashion, as Oliver Kahn saved three penalties in a seven-round shootout.
2002: Real Madrid (9)
While Zidane's goal grabbed the headlines, late saves from substitute goalkeeper Iker Casillas were also vital for Madrid.
This was the season in which the so-called Galactico project reached its greatest height and its greatest player touched the sky with a ball dropping out of the sky. Having eliminated Bayern Munich and then Barcelona in superb fashion, a team containing Luis Figo and Zinedine Zidane narrowly bested surprise finalists Bayer Leverkusen thanks to the French playmaker's glorious winning volley.
2003: AC Milan (16)
As part of the victorious side, Clarence Seedorf became the first man to win the Champions League with three different clubs.
Milan beat their city rivals Inter in the last four and then claimed a sixth European Cup with a victory over another Serie A giant, Juventus. Goalkeeper Dida was the penalty shootout hero, stopping shots from David Trezeguet, Marcelo Zalayeta and Paolo Montero. The triumph was especially sweet for Milan manager Carlo Ancelotti, who had been fired as Juventus boss two years earlier.
2004: Porto (20)
A year after winning the UEFA Cup, Porto claimed the biggest prize in European football.
The triumph that created the legend of Jose Mourinho, but only because of his side's ultra-realistic tactics. Porto overcame so many financial gaps by creating a cast-iron defence, out-thinking pretty much every team they played and fostering an intense fighting spirit. The latter was certainly on show in their last-minute round-of-16 win over Manchester United, which made the later games seem so much easier, especially their formidable 3-0 final win over Monaco.
2005: Liverpool (22)
The Anfield club came through a qualifying round and needed a late goal to make the last 16 before finding their form.
The greatest comeback ever? It was all the more impressive because Liverpool's mere presence in the final was something of a surprise. Rafa Benitez's team nevertheless possessed a resilience and tactical edge that saw them overcome so many weaknesses, as well as sides of the calibre of Juventus and Jose Mourinho's Chelsea. The final then seemed insurmountable as a rampant Milan led 3-0 at halftime but Liverpool recovered to ultimately win on penalties.
2006: Barcelona (12)
Barca's hero was substitute Henrik Larsson, who set up both of his side's goals within five minutes of each other.
This team would ultimately be overshadowed by Pep Guardiola's greats, but Frank Rijkaard's side laid a considerable foundation. The reality is also that they had few worthy rivals in Europe that season, as they glided to the trophy with Ronaldinho at his glorious best. The only stumble came in the final as Arsenal took the lead, but Barca showed a grit to go with their great football.
2007: AC Milan (14)
Kaka was the Champions League's top scorer with 10 goals and was also named UEFA Club Footballer of the Year.
Rarely the best in Italy at that time, as they only once won Serie A in the first decade of the millennium, Milan often saved their best for Europe. Kaka, en route to winning the Ballon d'Or that year, helped the Rossoneri motor past Manchester United in the semifinals before they gained revenge against Liverpool for 2005 in the final, with Pippo Inzaghi scoring twice.
2008: Manchester United (8)
A final which ended in the early hours of the day after it began was settled when Edwin van der Sar saved Nicolas Anelka's shootout penalty.
The 1999 team may have been involved in grander occasions, but that's partially because they didn't have the sleekness of this later side. A peak Cristiano Ronaldo added a fluency to a historically good defence. The brilliance of that backline was particularly evident in a narrow semifinal win over Barcelona, before it held firm against Chelsea in Moscow. John Terry missed a cup-winning penalty. He slipped, United didn't.
2009: Barcelona (2)
Lionel Messi and Andres Iniesta were just two of the creative forces which overwhelmed the Champions League holders.
The ascent of the first season of Pep Guardiola's historic team, but Barca had to show a durability to go with the dynamism of their football. They scraped past Chelsea by the thinnest of margins in one of the most dramatic -- and controversial -- semifinals ever seen, before reasserting their superiority by dismantling Manchester United 2-0 in Rome.
2010: Internazionale (10)
Diego Milito's brace made the difference as Inter won the final Champions League final to be played on a Saturday night.
The side that broke Barcelona's dominance, by themselves generating an almost unbreakable spirit. Inter were perhaps the purest example of a Jose Mourinho team as they intensively outplayed Chelsea before outsmarting the Catalans in another epic semifinal. After that, the final was almost a procession, as the Nerazzurri defeated Bayern Munich 2-0 with a hugely accomplished display.
2011: Barcelona (1)
Six of the players that started the 2009 final were in the lineup which beat Man United for the second time in three years.
A 3-1 winning score may not have been perfect, but the performance in the final was. The manner in which Barcelona overwhelmed Manchester United in the Wembley showpiece was the ultimate display of the effectiveness of their possession-pressing game. It was "Total Football" reborn, with the Lionel Messi-inspired semifinal win over Real Madrid at the Bernabeu helping to complete the campaign.
2012: Chelsea (19)
Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Cech saved one penalty in extra time and two in the shootout.
You could say this was the campaign in which Chelsea's previous bad fortune in the Champions League finally evened out, except for the fact that this was a side that fought to make their own luck. Stamford Bridge may have seen superior teams, but few had this one's defiance. Chelsea showed it repeatedly from the last eight on, with a comeback against Napoli, followed by the epic elimination of Barcelona before that grandstand finish to defy Bayern Munich in their home final.
2013: Bayern Munich (3)
Bayern's victory marked the fifth time the club had won the European Cup.
The year the Bundesliga dominated the Champions League saw its best two sides meet at Wembley, where Bayern overcame Dortmund thanks to a late Arjen Robben goal. Jupp Heynckes went into retirement as a European champion, having overseen not only the final victory, but a 7-0 aggregate dismantling of Barcelona in the semifinal.
2014: Real Madrid (11)
It was Gareth Bale's header that ultimately proved to be the winner for the club from the Bernabeu.
Deep into the third minute of injury time and with their city rivals Atletico holding on to a 1-0 lead, Madrid's obsession with winning La Decima, the club's 10th European Cup, looked set to be extended beyond 12 years. But then Sergio Ramos headed an equaliser and Carlo Ancelotti's side went on to score three times in extra time. The last goal went to Cristiano Ronaldo, his 17th of a record-breaking individual campaign.
Starting on September 8, ESPN FC's #UltimateUCL feature will decide which Champions League winners were the best of all-time!More than 400 Chechen volunteers left Russia to join the fighting in Syria on the side of the Takfiri group, ISIL, since the beginning of the war in that region. The fate of most of them for the moment is unknown.
More than 400 Chechen volunteers left Russia to join the fighting in Syria on the side of the Takfiri group, ISIL, since the beginning of the war in that region. The fate of most of them for the moment is unknown.
"A total of 405 people, according to our data, have left Chechnya to join the fighting in Syria on the side of the Islamic State since the beginning of the war in that region," a spokesman for the Russian Interior Ministry told RIA Novosti.
"Among those, 104 have been killed and 44 came back, while the fate of the rest is unknown," the official said, adding that 88 criminal cases have been opened against Chechen residents who fought in Syria.
Syria has been grappling with a deadly crisis since March 2011. The violence fueled by Takfiri groups has so far claimed the lives of over 210,000 people, according to reports. New figures show that over 76,000 people, including thousands of children, lost their lives in Syria last year.
Over 3.8 million Syrians have left their country since the beginning of the crisis. More than 7.2 million Syrians have also become internally displaced, according to the UN.
/149A Liberal MP is heading to Los Angeles this week for a pre-emptive strike against misinformation about Canada's immigration system circulating in the Spanish-language press that officials worry could inspire a new wave of asylum seekers.
Central Americans have long been thought of as the next population primed to make the journey across the Canada-U.S. border due to major changes on the horizon in U.S. immigration policy. That includes the potential end of temporary protected status for nearly 350,000 Salvadorans and Hondurans, meaning all could face deportation to their home countries.
Spanish-speaking MP Pablo Rodriguez had already been tapped as the likely federal point-person for outreach to Hispanics in the U.S., but his trip to L.A. on Friday has been given new impetus.
On Aug. 30, the Spanish-language publication La Prensa reported that the Canadian government was set to welcome Hondurans living in the U.S. with temporary protected status, quoting a community organizer who said he had been contacted by the Canadian Embassy to explore programs.
Except that never happened.
The piece mirrored those that had been circulating in U.S Creole community and social media earlier this summer, cited by some of the Haitians who have arrived in Canada in recent weeks as the reason they decided to come north from the U.S. Since July, some 7,000 asylum seekers have crossed into Canada from Quebec, the majority Haitian.
The surge prompted the Liberal government to hastily arrange for a Creole-speaking MP to visit Miami to try to stem the flow of arrivals. The number of people crossing per day currently sits at under 100, from a high of over 250 this summer. According to multiple government sources, just over 60 people arrived Tuesday.
But the Liberals are mindful that a decline now doesn't mean the problem is over. Rodriguez is being dispatched to "neutralize" any misunderstandings about Canada's system before they gain too much ground, a senior government official said.
Risking protected status
The Montreal MP, born in Argentina, will make the rounds of Hispanic media in L.A. as well as meet with members of the Honduran and El Salvadoran communities and local officials.
"I'll be able to communicate with them and tell them exactly how things are in Canada," Rodriguez said Wednesday. "We have a system in place, a system that works and that has to be respected."
The La Prensa piece was spotted as a result of a much broader monitoring effort launched by the Liberal government at the height of the surge in Haitian arrivals in late July and early August.
Consulates are on alert to keep close tabs on local media for discussion of Canada's immigration and asylum policies, so when officials in Honduras spotted the La Prensa article they flagged it immediately to their bosses in Ottawa.
The reporter at the paper was contacted, and the next day another article appeared clarifying that Canada has no program in the works for Hondurans, and if someone has temporary protected status in the U.S. it is not granted automatically in Canada.
The unnamed government spokesperson in the article also noted that if people seek asylum in Canada, they could risk their protected status in the U.S.
Refugee claims by Salvadorans and Hondurans do appear to be increasing in Canada. In the first three months of 2017, 255 claims for asylum were lodged, compared to 380 in all of 2016.
Canada currently deports failed asylum claimants from El Salvador and Honduras back to their home countries.The following is excerpted from the book The Quarterback Whisperer by Bruce Arians, to be published on July 11, 2017 by Hachette Books, a division of Hachette Book Group. Copyright 2017 Bruce Arians.
Did you know Thursday night is date night in Bruce Arians’s household? That the Cardinals coach once earned the nickname Esquire Smooth? That Joe namath told him he’d outkicked his coverage in marrying his wife, Christine (and that she said she’d leave Bruce for Broadway Joe in a heartbeat)? In anticipation of Arians’s new autobiography, we present for you our favorite mini-excerpts from the page-turner. Consider this: 10 Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know About One of the NFL’s Most Successful Coaches.
1. On that nickname...
My family moved to York, Pa., when I was eight. As a kid I spent virtually all of my free time at Memorial Park, which was just down the street from my house on Springdale Avenue in our blue-collar neighborhood.
Some of the older guys at the park were African American, and I never thought twice about our different skin colors. One of the older black guys was named Eddie Berry. He played offensive line at York High and he gave me my first nickname: S.Q. Smooth.
Esquire Smooth. I loved it. I carved it into the picnic tables at the park. Getting that nickname meant I was accepted at the park, and it did more for my confidence than anything else I ever did as a kid.
The Quarterback Whisperer by Bruce Arians What makes an elite QB? In recent history, one man is the common thread that connects some of the best: Peyton Manning, Ben Roethlisberger, Andrew Luck, and the resurgent Carson Palmer. Buy Now
2. On bartending life...
In what may have been a first in college football history, after home games [at Virginia Tech, where he played quarterback in the mid-’70s] I dished out drinks from behind the bar at a restaurant named Carlisle’s. I probably violated some NCAA rule, but I needed that dollar-an-hour and the free steaks.
Later I left Carlisle’s to tend bar at a basement nightclub in Blacksburg. One evening a man who I knew lived up in a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains sauntered in looking for trouble. He looked like he was straight out of the movie Deliverance. His long Rip Van Winkle–like beard may have been home to several different critters.
“Tonight,” the man declared to me, “I’m going to drink and I’m going to fight.”
“Well,” I replied, “let’s make the beer free for you, but go fight somewhere else.”
A few hours passed. Then the man, filled with liquid fire, started pinching the posteriors of several different young women. I told him he had to leave.
The mountain man pulled out a black handgun and stuck it in my belly. “Throw me out now,” he calmly said to me.
I was terrifed. It’s generally not good when an intoxicated man is pointing a gun at you. But just then the nightclub owner, wielding a blackjack, clubbed the man over the head, knocking him out cold.
That was my last night of bartending. I realized, when that gun was jammed in my gut, that perhaps coaching would be a better career path. My beautiful wife agreed.
3. On an old Cowboys trick...
After my final season in Blacksburg, I got a call from the Dallas Cowboys. A scout said they were interested in me. Then they sent me a letter and a pen. “We hope to sign you to your contract with this pen,” the note said. I was thrilled. I proudly showed off the pen to Coach [Jimmy] Sharpe, who had become my mentor.
“You do realize,” Sharpe told me, “that the Cowboys have sent about a thousand of those pens to college seniors across the country.”
Ah, I hadn’t, but I tried to play it cool. “Of course,” I said. “I’m not holding my breath or anything.”
4. On his first encounter with Peyton Manning...
I got to know Peyton Manning when he was a high school junior and I was the offensive coordinator at Mississippi State. His father, Archie, had been a legendary quarterback at Ole Miss, and it didn’t take a recruiting genius to understand there was no way Peyton would ever come and play for us at Mississippi State, the sworn rival of the Ole Miss Rebels. But I was in charge of recruiting quarterbacks and so I called Archie one afternoon and asked, “Hey, is there any way Peyton would consider coming to play for us?”
Archie laughed so hard he must have doubled over. No, Archie told me in his southern, sugar-polite way, Peyton would not be attending Mississippi State.
5. On later fixing Peyton’s Patriots problem, with the Colts...
Before a December 1999 game against the Patriots, I saw during pregame warm-ups that Peyton was a live wire of nervous energy, crackling with anxiety. He fidgeted like a Mexican jumping bean and he had a frowning, contorted face. Frankly, he looked like he really needed to go to the bathroom, even though he was all clear on that front.
Peyton kept fidgeting with his equipment. This was, in poker parlance, a classic tell, because I knew that whenever he adjusted and readjusted his left kneepad, he was really upset about something. Peyton can obsess with the best of them, and I knew he needed to be calmed down. I approached him on the field, determined to shift his focus.
“Peyton, your footwork is all messed up,” I said. “What’s wrong with you, man?”
Peyton then spent the final 10 minutes of pregame perfecting his footwork, even though I saw that it had been flawless during his warm-up. I wanted him to quit worrying about the fact that we were about to play a team that had been his nemesis, his kryptonite. We’d lost three in a row to the Pats. And sure enough, Peyton’s mind became so locked onto taking precise five- and seven-step drops that his anxiety vanished into the crisp December air.
After I got Peyton to focus on his footwork, it was as if his worries magically melted away. He was one smooth operator, brother. Playing cool, calm and cerebral, he threw two touchdown passes and no interceptions in our 20–15 win over the Patriots, which was Peyton’s first ever victory over those guys.
Peyton Manning and Bruce Arians (right) watch Colts practice during the team's minicamp in 1998. Seth Rossman/AP
6. On the real Peyton...
In Indianapolis he was infamous for not being able to properly use a can opener. One time I visited him at his place and saw that he had pictures that his mom had given him on a closet door, showing what shirts went with what pants and shoes; she had picked out his outfits as if he was still in grade school. |
evolution. That’s a pretty dire thing to publish on the Big Think.
In fact, we do have a good idea how the bacterial flagellum first appeared: it is related to a secretory system that was already present in bacteria. If you want to see a likely explanation, read Pallen and Matzke’s paper in Nature Reviews Microbiology (vol 4:784-790; 2006).
I’m not sure what Thomas means by the murkiness of how new survival skill arise, but we now have several hundred examples of natural selection in action, which is of course is how those skill arise. We have seen the origin of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, insecticide resistance in insects, changes in the size of finch beaks, the darkening of moth colors due to selection in a new, polluted environment, and many other cases (Wikipedia gives some as well, and for many other examples you can read John Endler’s book Natural Selection in the Wild.) These are all, of course, “survival skills”, or rather “reproduction skills”, since the currency of natural selection is offspring number.
3. “Gain of function.”
When I was in school, we were taught that mutations in DNA are the driving force behind evolution, an idea that is now thoroughly discredited. The overwhelming majority of non-neutral mutations are deleterious (reducing, not increasing, survival). This is easily demonstrated in the lab. Most mutations lead to loss of function, not gain of function. Evolutionary theory, it turns out, is great at explaining things like the loss of eyesight, over time, by cave-dwelling creatures. It’s terrible at explaining gain of function.
This again is a creationist trope, which makes me even more certain that Thomas has simply absorbed and regurgitated things from the ID literature (see below as well). Yes, of course most mutations are deleterious, but new ones arise that are advantageous, and those can lead not to loss of function (which we understand about as well as we understand gain of function) but to new functions.
Gene duplication, whereby a single gene simply duplicates, resulting in two or more copies on a chromosome, is a great way to gain functions, as it has in human hemoglobin (the various forms of human hemoglobins, which have different functions, arose from duplication of one ancestral locus). My colleague Manyuan Long in Chicago has shown the origin of new genes in fruit flies—genes with novel functions—by splicing together drastically different genes.
Further, Rich Lenski and other microbiologists have shown the origin of new functions in bacteria in both the lab (ability to digest citrate) or the wild (bacteria that evolved the ability to digest nylon).
We can see new functions originating in the fossil record, too. They come from coopting of old functions, which is how natural selection almost always works. The legs of land animals evolved from the bony fins of ancestral fishes. Feathers started out as small filaments on dinosaurs, useless for flying but perhaps good for thermoregulation. The swim bladders of fish evolved from lungs (people usually get this backwards), and swim bladders surely represent new functions. I could go on and on, but this is enough to show that Thomas is again out of his depth, spewing ID claims without knowing that they’ve already been refuted.
4. The Cambrian Explosion, human intelligence, and other stuff.
[Evolutionary theory] doesn’t explain the Cambrian Explosion, for example, or the sudden appearance of intelligence in hominids, or the rapid recovery (and net expansion) of the biosphere in the wake of at least five super-massive extinction events in the most recent 15% of Earth’s existence.
The mention of the Cambrian explosion, of course, comes straight from Stephen Meyer’s new Intelligent Design book saying that because we don’t understand how many major body plans originated so rapidly (by “rapidly,” we’re talking 20 million years), Jesus must have done it. But our lack of understanding is due not to a paucity of theories, but to a surfeit of theories (oxygen, predators, gene regulation, and so on), and our present inability to distinguish among them.
And yes, we don’t understand how human intelligence arose: again, we have a surfeit of theories but a paucity of evidence. Some scientists, like Dick Wrangham, think that our big brains were the result of the taming of fire, others by sexual selection, tool use, bipedality, or other features. Perhaps some day, when we can unravel the genetic basis of differences in intelligence between humans and other primates, we’ll understand more.
But these are simply the problems inherent in any historical discipline, like science and cosmology. A science that has solved all its problems is a dead science. Here are a few more unsolved problems of evolutionary biology: how did sexual reproduction originate? What is the evolutionary significance in the difference of human morphology among ethnic groups? How does sexual selection operate to create differences between males and females? How important is “neutral” genetic variation in the evolution of trait differences (not DNA sequences) between species and populations?
At the end, Thomas offers a lame disclaimer:
Of course, the fact that classical evolutionary theory doesn’t explain these sorts of things doesn’t mean we should abandon the entire theory. There’s a difference between a theory being wrong and being incomplete. In science, we cling to incomplete theories all the time. Especially when the alternative is complete ignorance.
Note that “Darwin” has now been replaced by “classical evolutionary theory,” which I take to mean “modern evolutionary theory,” or neo-Darwinism. That, after all, is the current state of the art. So why did Thomas drag Darwin into his title? Because he wanted attention.
And yes, Thomas says that, just maybe, evolution theory might not have to be abandoned. But the damage has already been done. In his piece, Thomas raised a number of non-problems with evolutionary theory that will mislead the general reader, and most of those problems are lifted from the Intelligent Design/creationist playbook. That kind of article does not belong on The Big Think. It’s a lame, error-ridden piece designed to bolster Thomas’s self-described penchant for heterodoxy and sacred-cow goring.
“The trouble with Darwin” is a mischaracterization of evolutionary theory, laden with distortions. It’s damaging to the public understanding of science, for the average reader won’t know the relevant science, and it’s contemptible. Shame on The Big Think. And, especially, shame on Thomas.
________
UPDATE: Reader “profon” posted Thomas’s Twitter response to the comments, and many of those responses cited scientific arguments against Thomas’s position. I want to put profon’s capture above the fold, for it shows how clueless Thomas really is about his opposition:
When someone calls their intellectual and scientific opponents “haters,” then you know they’ve lost all credibility. Thomas won’t respond except to ad-hom his “haters”. That’s truly lame.
h/t: AntIt was in the Great Depression years of the mid-1930s that American boys of impressionable age began a final romance with the Old West. There is little mystery in it. Real life was pinched, mothers fretted and fathers spoke sharply, everyone counted pennies. But in the Old West of romance a boy had his own horse, the stagecoach carried gold, a rancher’s fortune was made if he could get his cattle across the river, and the cavalry always came over the hill with a moment to spare. When they appeared the Indians ran or were shot in profusion from their horses.
At the heart of the romance were two great mysteries. One was girls, who saw something boys did not, or did not quite; the other was Indians, who had been exempted by the Great Spirit from the things that made white boys chafe—Saturday night baths, long hours in schoolrooms on sunny days, chopping stove wood, sitting in parlors when guests came. The heart of the Indians’ appeal was this: they did as they pleased. In the fall of 1933 the Chicago Tribune printed a new Sunday comic built around girls and Indians that was written and drawn by an all-around newspaperman from Wyoming named Garrett Price. The strip’s name, White Boy, promised a world of exotic excitements. The hero was just that, a slender, nameless lad who left everything familiar when he was captured by Indians, given to a woman whose own son had been killed by whites, and adopted into the tribe.
Garrett Price (1895-1979) is best known for his work over a half century for The New Yorker, hundreds of cartoons and a hundred covers, including two during the magazine’s first year (“Paris Café” and “Heat Wave,” August 1 and 29, 1925). The long-forgotten three-year run of White Boy (renamed Skull Valley at the halfway mark) has now been republished in its entirety, about a hundred and fifty strips, by Sunday Press Books of Palo Alto, California. It is a big (16 by 10 ½ inches), sumptuous volume in color providing a rich sample of the work of a gifted artist with a sly sense of humor and a sure feel for the line—so sure that the line is pretty much the whole of his style. Price was in his late thirties when he created White Boy to fill a request of the Tribune’s editor, J.M. Patterson, but there was enough of the boy left in him to focus on the mysteries of girls and Indians.
Read now, the strip is politically incorrect in a cheerful way, comfortably calling the principal girl “Little Squaw.” Her given name is Starlight, and she is frankly presented as a long-legged maid in a buckskin dress with kissable lips of the Clara Bow sort who soon has White Boy’s full attention. The Indians are a range of types from central casting: chiefs in feathers, two Indian boys, warriors with oddly chosen names like Trips-Over-a-Dog and his brother, Brother-of-Trips-Over-a-Dog, and a sinister elderly fellow with dark purposes called Snakeface, whose eye is on Starlight. Price’s strips reveal a week at a time what interested him as a writer and an artist. As a writer he is drawn to a kind of camp humor, poking fun at the conventions of the western tale, and as an artist he loves bold composition and grand drama.
In an early strip of only three panels, instead of the usual seven or eight, Price fills his page with a panorama of White Boy and Starlight trapped by a prairie fire and threatened by stampeding buffalo. White Boy searches his pocket and finds a single match with which to start a counter-fire to save them from death. “What is a match?” asks Starlight. In the next strip they get the fire going and are portrayed at the center of one long panel in black, burned-over ground while flames and smoke around them fill a quarter page of the Sunday paper. “White Boy,” asks Starlight again, “what is a match?”
It is obvious that Garrett Price had a good time with White Boy, drawing heavily on his boyhood home in Saratoga, Wyoming, which was serious farming and ranch country but so remote and isolated (about sixty miles east of Laramie) that Price once rode eighty miles to see a circus. The early 1900s was a golden age of Old Timers—the men who had gone west before the Indians were confined to reservations, and the buffalo had been hunted close to extinction. Price’s character Trapper Dan Brown was a familiar frontier type, with a high opinion of himself and a low opinion of Indians.
In one strip Trapper Dan challenges Lark Song, a noted orator in his tribe, to best if he can a song Dan has written. One verse goes:
Oh, I don’t like books
and I don’t like tea,
I wrassled a bear
when I was three.
Ki-Yi-Yippy-Yippy Yea.
Dan tells White Boy he knows Redskins—“one White Man is worth a whole tribe of them.” But Garrett Price has none of the anti-Indian prejudice typical of Wyoming Old Timers when he was a boy. There is nothing threatening about his Indians, who run the usual range of human types. What interests Price most is drawing, capturing the looks and gestures of his characters and the life of the Plains, as he does in one strip (June 3, 1934) devoted to the Indians striking camp. It is full of the romance of times gone by.
But the truth is that Price’s interest in Indians was shallow and I would argue that his early, enamored drawings of Starlight worried his editors. After the early strips she stops hiking her skirt. Near the end of the second year the strip was altered more thoroughly and abruptly. Changing the name to White Boy in Skull Valley was the least of it. The hero is now Bob White, the girl is Doris—same girl, same lips, but wearing short hair, jodhpurs, and boots. The time is more or less modern-day (cars, a boat with an outboard), with assorted bad men, a dude ranch run by a beautiful redhead, a sinister landlord ready to foreclose when the mortgage money is late. The change went unexplained but the editor of the Sunday Press collection, Peter Maresca, guesses reasonably that Price’s boss at the Tribune simply tired of the Indians, and it is likely this also explains the sudden death of the strip in August 1936.
The glory of White Boy is largely found in its opening weeks and later, intermittently, with story lines involving wild beasts and dramatic scenery that interested Price when he had a pen in his hand. Two strips depict a fight between a mountain lion and a black bear in a tree over a raging river. The drawings don’t have much to do with “the story” but are full of tense drama.
Another run of strips are all about buffalo and an Indian who dreams he has become one of them. It’s the buffalo action that interests Price, not what happens to the Indian when he regains his old identity as Good Heart, “the lost son of our chief.” Continuity was the chief motor of the Sunday comic strip in the 1930s. Price was good at setting a story in motion, and he was among the first comic artists to borrow film techniques—the close-up, the unfolding panorama of action, the focus on significant detail. But he had no patience for the week-in, week-out pursuit of characters through the whole of an improbable story.
Garrett Price was a different artist during his later New Yorker years, when he lived in Westport, Connecticut. The subjects in his cartoons have pot bellies at the beach and noses like parrot beaks, are baffled by the world, and cannot remember what it was like to hike a skirt, or to watch it happen. Some of his covers have a stunning, wistful beauty, like a 1956 cover of circus queens riding elephants into the ring, a 1949 cover of a boy all alone on a spring ball field sliding into home plate, and a 1951 cover of autumn leaves falling over a summer house being closed for the winter—a husband sits waiting in the car as his wife gathers a last armful of flowers. Price’s wife died of lung cancer in 1973, his last cover ran the next summer, and Price himself died in 1979. One previous collection of his work, Drawing Room Only, mainly New Yorker cartoons, was published in 1946.
Garrett Price’s White Boy in Skull Valley is published by Sunday Press Books.0 Anti-Trump protesters, Trump supporters met during May Day; here's what happened
SEATTLE, Wash. - When pro-Trump and anti-Trump protesters met face-to-face in Seattle as May Day demonstrations were underway, obviously things started to get heated – until the surprisingly mellow finish.
Let’s take a quick look at how this unfolded.
Among the several protests on Monday was a conservative, gun-supporting, anti-socialist group that gathered in downtown's Westlake Park late in the afternoon. They told KIRO 7 News they gathered as a counter-protest to May Day demonstrations.
After marching several blocks in Belltown, the pro-Trump demonstrators returned to Westlake Park, where they were later approached by protesters dressed in black. An initial exchange was intense. Here’s part of what was said.
— Anti-Trump protester: “You f-------g voted for that p---y grabbing son of a b---h.”
— Trump supporter: “We can’t get anywhere because you won’t have a conversation with me.”
— Anti-Trump protester: No I won’t have a god---n conversation with someone who voted for that god---n racist.
A protester, left, confronts a supporter of President Donald Trump, right, during a May Day protest, Monday, May 1, 2017, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
Police physically separated the two groups as they clashed – yelling their views at one another through the barrier officers built with their bicycles.
The first person was arrested during the shouting match. He threw rocks at a Trump supporter, police said.
For about a minute, the pro- and anti-Trump demonstrators appeared to civilly listen to each other, but shouts arose again when abortion was mentioned.
— Anti-Trump protester “He is approaching upon my reproductive rights He is encroaching on my rights as a woman …”
— Trump supporter: “How is he encroaching on your rights as a woman?”
— Anti-Trump protester: “If I want to have a fucking abortion …”
— Trump supporter: “… You can do that … I just don’t want to pay for it.”
You can watch this exchange from our Facebook feed. Scroll to 1:51 to watch. It continues until nearly 2:01.
The confrontation fizzled when the Trump supporters departed on their second march, but later they returned to Westlake Park.
This time instead of clashing, some rolled marijuana joints on the back of a protest signs.
“Look we all fight, but then we roll some weed and come together,” one protester said.
“Doesn’t matter the political party,” another protester said with a smile.
Pro-Trump and anti-Trump protesters rolling joints on back of protest sign at Westlake... most #Seattle thing ever? pic.twitter.com/6JH35SSTqv — Henry Rosoff (@HenryKIRO7) May 2, 2017
Seattle police still had to issue a dispersal order to demonstrators in Westlake Park. Five people were arrested overall during Seattle demonstrations. Tensions rose slightly later in the evening, but it was mostly between officers and protesters as Seattle police attempted to clear the area.
This year’s unpermitted May Day events were relatively calm in Seattle, compared to the ones since 2012 – the first time in the anarchists disrupted local May Day events with violence. However, chaos hit in Olympia in what police called a riot. Read about Olympia’s May Day here.
© 2019 Cox Media Group.Parfait by Affinitas was one of the first full cup brands that caught my eye, was one of the first full cup brands that caught my eye,
about a year ago, while I was praying on eBay to get my first fitting bras!
I got a Charlotte in 28FF, my usual size, which I've learned to be a mistake...
it was way too small!
Nevertheless, this beautiful pin-up like bra is certainly a looker,
and that's why so many bra lovers couldn't resist it!
What about you?
Parfait by Affinitas foi uma das primeiríssimas marcas de copas grandes a despertar o meu interesse, foi uma das primeiríssimas marcas de copas grandes a despertar o meu interesse,
quando eu, recém apercebida de que o tamanho 32E também não era o meu tamanho certo,
mas sim algo entre o 28FF-G, passava umas horinhas jeitosas pelo ebay,
numa tentativa de substituir os soutiens da Intimissimi que mal serviam!
O Charlotte foi uma das primeiras vítimas do meu desejo de ter um "bra-drobe" de sonho;
apesar de não ter sido a escolha mais perfeita - no vídeo explico porquê - não deixa de ser uma beldade!
Espero que tenham gostado de conhecer um bocadinho melhor a marca!
Se quiserem mais detalhes, não hesitem em contactar-me através daqui,
Espero que as vossas festas estejam a ser uma delícia!
Beijinhos!In the first half of the tenth century, a shipmaster from the Khuzestan region on the Persian Gulf wrote a collection of tales called The Book of the Wonders of India. The author’s preface declared:
God — blessed is his name and glorious his praise — created his marvels in ten parts, and assigned nine of them to the eastern pillar of the earth, and one each to the other three pillars, west, north, and south. Then to China and India he assigned eight parts, and the one remaining to the Orient. [1]
The author seems to assume a square earth; describes God’s marvels as having ten parts, but itemizes them as twelve parts; and apparently divides the east into China, India, and the Orient. Apart from these technical difficulties, the main point is clear: China and India (where India means the region of present-day India and Pakistan) have by far the largest share of the earth’s marvels.
Wide-ranging communication across Eurasia long predates the Internet, telephone systems, and postal systems. Nomads of central Asia have carried goods and ideas from Persia to China for thousands of years. About 2300 years ago, Alexander the Great fought his way from Greece to the Indus River. Roman woman 2000 years ago wore dresses made from Chinese silk. About 570, the Persian physician Borzūya translated and adapted into Middle Persian Indian texts. These included the Panchatantra, known in Sanskrit perhaps 2200 years ago. About 750, ibn al-Muqaffa translated Borzūya’s adaptation of the Panchatantra into Arabic and expanded it to produce Kalīlah wa Dimnah. By 1600, ibn al-Muqaffa’s adaptation had been further translated into Syriac, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Spanish, Italian, German, English, Old Slavonic, and Czech.
The early Abbasid caliphate, which stretched from Egypt to Afghanistan, sought to acquire knowledge from India. The Barmakid family from the cosmopolitan and highly cultured city of Balkh in present-day Afghanistan rose to prominence in Abbasid caliphs’ courts in Baghdad late in the eighth century. The Barmakids encouraged Indian scholars to travel to Baghdad. The Barmakids also commissioned translations of Indian books from Sanskrit into Arabic. With the Barmakids among the Abbasid elite, Indian and Greek physicians vied for prominence in the caliph’s court.
Although courtly intrigue led to the Barmakids being expunged from the caliph’s court in 803, respect for Indian scholarly and cultural achievements endured in the ancient Islamic world. Al-Jahiz was a prominent writer and scholar in the Abbasid court from 816 to about 869. He described Indians as preeminent in astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. He praised Indian singing, dancing, painting, sculpture, their invention of chess, their development of calisthenics and martial arts, and their use of “scimitars from Burma.” He noted that India has a large corpus of poetry and epics, and that Indians are well-versed in literature and philosophy. He declared that Indians are excellent cooks. Al-Jahiz praised Indians from a highly abstract level of personality down to highly specific details of everyday life
They {Indians} are courageous, judicious and possess unequaled patience. They have beautiful clothes and civilised customs, such as toothpicks, toothbrushes, hairdressing, hair colouring and correct posture. They possess beauty, grace and wit and have a pleasant smell. The beauty of their women is legendary. It is from India that aloes wood — the incomparable gift of kings — comes. Meditation came originally from there, as did certain spells that render poisons harmless.
Al-Jahiz, who grew up in Basra, described India business skills with a realistic, personal example plausibly from first-hand observation:
Currency dealers only entrust their cash and the running of their businesses to first or second generation Sindis {Indians} because experience shows them to be the most competent, careful and reliable in matters of exchange. You rarely see a man of Khurasani or Byzantine origin in charge of, or holding the keys to, a currency dealer’s safe. When the dealers and spice merchants of Basra saw the profits in cash and real estate that Faraj Abū Rawh realised for his master, they all went out and bought Sindi slaves to get themselves a piece of the action. This is just one example of Sindi business acumen. [2]
Al-Jahiz served his readers with a variety of enjoyable and informative reading. In describing India, al-Jahiz seems to have combined hyperbolic praise of abstract qualities with realistic, factual details.
Different circumstances produced a much different view of India. The Muslim scholar al-Biruni wrote extensively about India early in the eleventh century. Mahmud of Ghazna was then overrunning much of India, brutally slaughtering and plundering as he went. Al-Biruni wrote under the authority of Mahmud of Ghazna. Al-Biruni deeply, but discretely, disrespected Mahmud of Ghazna’s actions.[3] In contrast to rapacious violence against India, al-Biruni engaged in intellectual struggle against India:
I have found it very hard to work my way into the subject, although I have a great liking for it, in which respect I stand quite alone in my time, and although I do not spare either trouble or money in collecting Sanskrit books from places where I supposed they were likely to be found, and in procuring for myself, even from very remote places, Hindu scholars who understand them and are able to teach me. [4]
Al-Biruni was primarily interested in elite, abstract, true thought, not mundane behavior. He found great difficulties in understanding Hindus:
For the reader must always bear in mind that the Hindus entirely differ from us in every respect, many a subject appearing intricate and obscure which would be perfectly clear if there were more connection between us. … they differ from us in everything which other nations have in common. … all their fanaticism is directed against those who do not belong to them — against all foreigners. They call them mleccha, i.e. impure, and forbid having any connection with them, be it by intermarriage or any other kind of relationship, or by sitting, eating, and drinking with them, because thereby, they think, they would be polluted. They consider as impure anything with touches the fire and the water of a foreigner; and no household can exist without these two elements. Besides, they never desire that a thing which once has been polluted should be purified and thus recovered, as, under ordinary circumstances, if anybody or anything has become unclean, he or it would strive to regain the state of purity. They are not allowed to receive anybody who does not belong to them, even if he wished it, or was inclined to their religion. This, too, renders any connection with them quite impossible, and constitutes the widest gulf between us and them. [5]
Al-Biruni disparagingly described Hindu belief in Hindu cultural and intellectual superiority:
We can only say, folly is an illness for which there is no medicine, and the Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs. They are haughty, foolishly vain, self-conceited, and stolid. They are by nature niggardly in communicating that which they know, and they take the greatest possible care to withhold it from men of another caste among their own people, still much more, of course, from any foreigner. According to their belief, there is no other country on earth but theirs, no other race of man but theirs, and no created beings besides them have any knowledge or science whatsoever. Their haughtiness is such that, if you tell them of any science or scholar in Khurasan and Persis {provinces of present-day Iran}, they will think you to be both an ignoramus and a liar. If they traveled and mixed with other nations, they would soon change their mind, for their ancestors were not as narrow-minded as the present generation is. [6]
Al-Biruni displayed his great scholarly capabilities in part through his work on India. He wrote twenty books on India, including his massive opus, An Accurate Description of All Categories of Hindu Thought. A highly learned German scholar who translated al-Biruni’s work in the 1880s observed, “certainly we do not know of any Indianist like him, before his time or after.”[7]
Indians became highly exotic in the ancient Islamic world. The engagement with India evident in the Barmakids’ positions in the early Abbasid caliphate and in al-Jahiz’s essay became the intellectual struggle that al-Biruni’s work documents. Few were able or interested in building upon al-Biruni’s huge effort.[8] The exotic residents that Europeans subsequently encountered in the Americas the Europeans called “Indians.” Western Eurasian civilization was much more similar to that of Indians to the east than to those to the west across the Atlantic. Disengagement from India in the ancient Islamic world more plausibly resulted from a reconfiguration of scholarly interests than from deep cultural differences.
* * * * *
Read more:
Notes:
[1] Ibn Šahriyār, trans. Freeman-Grenville (1981) p. 1.
[2] Al-Jahiz’s description of India, including the above two quotes, is from Kitab fakhr al-sudan ‘ala al-bidan, trans Colville (2002) p. 49 (The Superiority of Blacks to Whites). Al-Jahiz included Indians and Arabs among blacks.
[3] Al-Biruni observed:
Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the mouth of the people. Their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most inveterate aversion towards all Muslims.
Indica, trans. Sachau (1910) p. 22.
[4] Al-Biruni, Indica, trans. Sachau (1910) p. 24. Al-Biruni presented his work as aiding interaction between Muslims and Hindus:
{a scholar-teacher asked me to write} what I know about the Hindus as a help to those who want to discuss religious questions with them, and as a repertory of information to those who want to associate with them. In order to please him I have done so, and written this book on the doctrines of the Hindus, never making any unfounded imputations against those, our religious antagonists, and at the same time not considering it inconsistent with my duties as a Muslim to quote their own words at full length when I thought they would contribute to elucidate a subject. If the contents of these quotations happen to be utterly heathenish, and the followers of the truth {meaning Muslims} find them objectionable, we can only say that such is the belief of the Hindus, and that they themselves are best qualified to defend it. This book is not a polemical one. I shall not produce the arguments of our antagonists in order to refute such of them as I believe to be in the wrong. My book is nothing but a simple historic record of facts. I shall place before the reader the theories of the Hindus exactly as they are, and I shall mention in connection with them similar theories of the Greeks in order to show the relationship existing between them.
Id. p. 7. A simple historic record of facts is rather different from a diplomatic treatise. Moreover, al-Biruni considered understanding between Muslims and Hindus to be highly difficult, if not impossible. This description is best interpreted as expressing al-Biruni’s peaceful scholarly purpose in contrast to Mahmud of Ghazna’s conquests. A friend’s request to write is a classical rhetorical figure that Galen commonly used. See König (2009).
[5] Id. pp. 19-20. Al-Biruni’s Book on Pharmacy (Kitab al-Saydanah) similarly declared:
As they {Indians} overemphasize purity to the point of exagerration and avoid impurity as far as possible, there is no possibility of a dialogue between us.
Trans. Said (1973) p. 7. I’ve replaced the words cleanliness/uncleanliness with purity/impurity in the translation. At this same time, al-Biruni’s described a Hindu doctor’s successful treatment of a difficult illness. Al-Biruni declared:
These people {Indian doctors} employ a Hippocratean kind of treatment. Whatever they have adopted they are loath to change, even though the circumstances might have changed. I have seen them use wondrous treatments but their description would be too long.
Id. p. 6.
[6] Id. pp. 22-3.
[7] Sachau (1910) preface, p. xxiv (quote), xxvii (twenty books).
[8] The Mughal Empire under Akbar was open to Indian culture. The influence of Indian art can be seen in the magnificent Hamzanama created under Akbar. On Muslim scholars who sympathetically considered Indian religion, see Friedmann (1975).
References:
Colville, Jim, trans. 2002. Al-Jāḥiẓ. Sobriety and mirth: a selection of the shorter writings of al-Jāhiz. London: Kegan Paul.
Freeman-Grenville, Greville Stewart Parker, trans. 1981. Buzurg Ibn Šahriyār. The book of the wonders of India: mainland, sea and islands. London: East-West Publications.
Friedmann, Yohanan. 1975. “Medieval Muslim Views of Indian Religions.” Journal of the American Oriental Society. 95 (2): 214-221. DOI: 10.2307/600318
König, Jason. 2009. ‘Conventions of prefatory self-presentation in Galen’s On the Order of my Own Books‘, Ch. 2 in Gill, C., Wilkins, J. and Whitmarsh, T. (eds) Galen and the World of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press.
Sachau, Eduard. 1910. Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Bīrūnī. Alberuni’s India. An account of the religion, philosophy, literature, geography, chronology, astronomy, customs, laws and astrology of India about A.D. 1030. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.
Said, Hakim Mohammed, trans. 1973. Abu-’r-Raiḥān Muḥammad Ibn-Aḥmad al-Bīrūnī. Al-Biruni’s book on pharmacy and materia medica. Karachi: Hamdard National Foundation.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Mohammed Allie was there to see the statue of the British colonialist removed from the university campus
South Africa's University of Cape Town (UCT) has removed a statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes that had become the focus of protests.
The monument, taken down in front of cheering protesters, will be stored for "safe keeping", UCT's council said.
Students have been campaigning for the removal of the statue of the 19th Century figure, unveiled in 1934.
Other monuments to colonial-era leaders have also been the target of protest in South Africa.
The BBC's Mohammed Allie told Focus On Africa radio that there was a "festive atmosphere" as students, academics, members of political parties and ordinary Cape Town residents came to witness a "historic moment for South Africa".
The crowd cheered as the statue was being lifted of its plinth. Once it was removed some students jumped on it and started hitting it with wooden sticks and covering the face with plastic.
At the scene: BBC's Mohammed Allie
Image copyright AP Image caption The campaign to remove the statue was also about tackling continued racial inequality
When the crane removed the Cecil Rhodes statue, it was a huge victory for black South Africans fed up with a lack of education and job opportunities more than 20 years after apartheid ended.
"We finally got the white man to sit down and listen to us," said a student who had campaigned for it to be taken down. Some were chanting "one settler; one bullet" - a sign that anger could boil over if the lives of black people do not improve.
There was a mixed crowd watching - with many white academics and students also supporting its removal.
But the whole affair serves as a wake-up call to South Africans to tackle racial inequality. People point to the fact that at the University of Cape Town there are only five black South African-born professors.
Why South Africa should keep the statue
Rhodes - a controversial figure
Five other removed statues
The "Rhodes Must Fall" campaign began in March after activist Chumani Maxwele smeared excrement on the statue as a protest against Rhodes' racism and its legacy at UCT.
The protesters said that the statue had "great symbolic power" which glorified someone "who exploited black labour and stole land from indigenous people".
For the latest news, views and analysis see the BBC Africa Live page.
The campaign led to the university's 30-member council voting on Wednesday for the statue's removal.
The council defended the decision saying it had canvassed the views of students, academic staff, alumni and the public before coming to a conclusion.
"This is exactly how a university should work and we believe is an example to the country in dealing with heritage issues," it added.
Backlash
The campaign has triggered attacks on other statues around the country seen as representing South Africa's racist past.
Image copyright EPA Image caption The decision to remove the statue was taken after consultations with students and staff
Image copyright EPA Image caption Green paint was thrown on the statue of Paul Kruger, who is revered by Afrikaners
But it has also led to a backlash with some white South Africans rallying to protect the statues of the 19th Century president Paul Kruger in the capital Pretoria, and 17th Century colonialist Jan van Riebeeck in Cape Town.
Kruger, a contemporary of Rhodes, was |
balling in the sheets. "Ruby...if you are very, very certain, I won't push anymore. God knows I want you head between my legs right now...but please, don't push yourself farther than you can. You're exhausted, you're trying your best, but you don't have my stamina...please go get some proper rest."
Ruby could feel her eyes drooping. Shaking her head to stay awake, she sighed and nodded. "O-" She yawned once more. "-kay...Coco and Velvet will probably be there, so we'll...tag them in."
Blake huffed a chuckle. "Some wrestling match this is." Reaching over, she shook Weiss, who awoke with a start.
"Pickles!" Weiss exclaimed. "Oh B-" She yawned. "Blake, sorry I fell asleep."
Blake smiled, gently cupping Weiss' face and leaning in for a kiss. Weiss blearily melted into it, attempting to follow when Blake pulled away. "Go with Ruby, get some rest." Weiss opened her mouth to object, but Blake lay a finger on her lips, silencing her. "No arguments. Go, now. I love you both."
Weiss pouted, but gave in when a half-dressed Ruby threw her nighty and underwear at her. "What about you?" Weiss pulled on her panties, and Blake reached over to Ruby's desk drawer, pulling free a bag of rolled blunts and a lighter.
"Catnip will take the edge off." Blake replied. "If Coco and Velvet are up for it, they'll come over...Weiss, are you sure you're comfortable with that."
Weiss pulled her nighty on before fixing Blake with a frown. "I would prefer to be here at the time, but I stand by my words Blake."
Blake smiled, waiting for Weiss to shrug on a robe before pulling her into a hug from behind, burying her nose in Weiss' hair and drinking in her scent. "I love you. Did I ever tell you that?"
"Once or twice." Weiss smirked. "But a few more will never hurt."
"I love you." Blake chuckled. "Ruby...Ruby."
Dozing on a chair, Ruby shook awake and jumped top her feet. "I'm awake, I'm awake...group hug?"
Weiss opened her arms, and Ruby ambled over with a smile on her face, falling onto Weiss and wrapping around both her girlfriends. "Hmm, comfy and warm."
"Don't fall asleep again." Weiss ordered.
"Mngno promises." Ruby mumbled.
"Alright, come on." Weiss pushed Ruby away. "Before you pass out, kiss Blake goodnight.
Blake poked her head around Weiss, and Ruby gave her a final, sleep kiss. "Gnight Blakey, play nice."
Blake shuddered, then grinned, rubbing her nose against Ruby's. "No promises."
Coco was just slipping off her robe when a knock rung from the door. She sighed, giving Velvet, who lay nude beneath the covers, a tight grin. "Soon babe." Velvet pulled the covers further up to her chin, face flushed. With medication her flares were very rare now, but they still hit fairly hard when they arose. Neon had probably come by. Whenever Sun was off doing something she tended to hang around with them. She'd probably join in anyway. As Coco pulled her robe's sash tight something thumped against the door.
"I'm awake!" Ruby exclaimed.
"Ruby?" Coco opened the door to reveal a rather bedraggled Weiss holding Ruby by the scruff of her top, the girl in question rubbing her forehead.
"Sorry, I kinda' dozed off." Ruby apologized.
"Are we interrupting anything?" Weiss asked.
"Uh, no." Coco lied. "Come in. I guess Blake went into heat?" She closed the door as the pair walked in. Ruby flopped onto Blake's bed and fell asleep on the spot.
Weiss sighed, sitting on the bed's edge to face Coco. Noticing Velvet, she smiled apologetically. "Sorry for the short notice, but we've been too busy to talk to anyone."
"Emphasis on busy I take it." Coco smirked.
Weiss huffed, rubbing her eyes. "She's voracious...hello Velvet...are you okay?"
Velvet held the sheets up to her nose, face flushed even deeper. "You smell really strong."
Weiss twitched, at first offended before she realized what Velvet meant, and flushed herself. "Oh, sorry Velvet."
"It's okay...it's really nice." Velvet said. "Is Blake uh...is Blake handling things well?"
"Well enough I suppose." Weiss replied. "She convinced us to leave for the night, to get some rest...and if you're willing, she would appreciate the company."
Velvet perked up, a hungry look on her face. "Oh fuck yes!" In a burst, she flung off the covers, baring her entire body to Weiss, who froze as the Faunus crossed the space to hug her, mushing Weiss' face into her rather generous chest. "You guys sleep tight and we'll take good care of her."
"Velvs, honey, boobs, shirt." Coco grinned.
Velvet hastily let go of a rather shellshocked Weiss, allowing Coco to slip a shirt over her head. "Sorry Weiss, I forgot."
"U-uh it's fine." Weiss stammered. "It's fine, I'm fine, you're fine, they're fine...I should get Ruby beneath the covers. Weiss shook her head free of the cobwebs and turned away from the still half-nude Velvet to wrestle the covers from beneath a comatose Ruby, who mumbled in her sleep, snuggling into the pillow.
"Weiss." Coco called. Weiss turned to her, and she took her hand. "Are you all really sure about this?"
Weiss smiled and nodded. "Goodnight Coco, Velvet, and thank you." After they left, Weiss slipped beneath the covers, wrapping her arms around the sleeping girl and pulling her close as exhaustion finally caught up to her. "Goodnight Ruby, I love you."
Weiss awoke to the sound of a door closing.
"Crap." Neon mumbled.
"Mng?" Weiss groaned.
"Sorry Weiss." Neon whispered.
"Neon?" Weiss yawned.
"Afternoon sleepyhead." Neon greeted. "Been worried about you guys."
Weiss allowed herself a drowsy smile. "You worry too much…" She yawned again. "Mnwe, we're fine...just busy."
Neon chuckled and Weiss suddenly picked up the rich scent of caramel mocha. "I know, I can smell it. Also, Velvet texted me. I brought muffins and a mocha, and a hot chocolate for Ruby, if she ever wakes up."
Weiss looked down at her sleeping partner, who had turned around during the night, huddling into Weiss' arms, head laying on her shoulder, her red streaked hair flowing gracefully over her back. It had grown substantially since the start of the year, slowly but surely, not nearly to Weiss' or even Blake's length, but still a far cry from the near bob cut she sported when they met. It was beautiful. Weiss could not help but run her fingers through it. Looking up at Neon, she smiled. Neon sat on Velvet's bed, a tray of cups in her lap and a plate of muffins in her hand. "Thank you Neon."
"Ah, it's no problem." Neon shrugged. "Heat's taxing on loved ones."
"Believe me, I know now." Weiss agreed. "I was honestly expecting yours to come first however."
"Mine tends to come some time before Solstice, so not much longer now!" Neon noted. Weiss shifted into a more seated position, not waking Ruby who continued sleeping like a stone, cuddling into Weiss' stomach and whining sleepily. "Everything she does is adorable." Neon passed over a mocha, taking her own from the tray before putting it on the bedside table along with the muffins.
"Too adorable, it's criminal." Weiss nodded. "Thank you." Taking a sip, she nearly moaned as the hot, creamy liquid coated her tongue. "God I love you right now."
"Only right now?" Neon giggled.
Grinning at the jab, Weiss still felt the need to reassure her friend. "Come over here." Putting aside her cup, Neon moved to kneel beside Weiss, who leaned over to bump her nose against Neon's. "I love you." Weiss murmured, before catching Neon in a gentle kiss.
"Well, when you put it that way…" Neon's gaze lowered. "Heya Ruby."
Looking down, Weiss was met with sleepy silver eyes and a smirk. "Hey you two, ha-" Ruby yawned. "Having fun without me?"
"Just waiting for you sleepyhead, c'mere." Neon leaned down and began peppering Ruby's face with kisses. Ruby laughed and giggled until Neon caught her lips, ending the assault with a final strike.
"You taste like chocolate." Ruby noted.
"Hot chocolate." Neon confirmed. "I brought you one."
Ruby perked up. "Oh, she's a keeper Weissy."Mark Richt is not blowing smoke when he addresses the difficulty in building a recruiting fence around Georgia’s borders.
Football coaches across the country recognize the wealth of talent that exists in the Peach State, and they frequently make Georgia a key area in their recruiting game plans. However, the greatest threat to the Georgia coach’s in-state recruiting success comes from programs in the Southeast -- particularly from the Bulldogs’ rivals in the SEC.
Ole Miss' Robert Nkemdiche, the No. 1 overall recruit in the 2013 recruiting class, is one of many stars to be recruited out of the Atlanta area. Joe Robbins/Getty Images
The last decade unquestionably belonged to the SEC, with conference schools claiming seven straight BCS titles, beginning in 2006. Then the conference boasted the BCS runner-up (Auburn) at the end of the 2013 season and a College Football Playoff participant (Alabama) at the end of last season.
But where did the players come from in what certainly ranks as the golden age of SEC football? More than any other location, they hailed from Georgia – specifically from the Atlanta area.
We examined the signing classes for every SEC program over the last decade (2006 through 2015) to see which states and metro areas were the most fertile for SEC programs and also reviewed trends in in-state and out-of-state recruiting. Over the next two days, we will reveal some of those trends for teams from the SEC West and then the SEC East.
Here are some of the statistical trends that became evident while reviewing nearly 3,500 players who signed with SEC programs over the last decade:
GEORGIA IS ON TOP
With 582 SEC signees between 2006 and 2015, Georgia easily took the crown as the conference’s top talent-producing state.
Every SEC program signed at least two players from Georgia and most signed far more than that. In fact, seven of the 13 SEC programs outside Georgia (Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee and Vanderbilt) looked to the Peach State more than any other for out-of-state talent. Georgia had 435 prospects sign with out-of-state SEC programs, which was also the most for any SEC state.
Top 10 states for SEC signees, 2006-15 State Signees Georgia 582 Florida 520 Texas 419 Alabama 318 Mississippi 275 Louisiana 255 Tennessee 198 South Carolina 135 Arkansas 98 Missouri 91
In Kentucky’s case, the Wildcats actually signed more Georgians (50) than Kentuckians (49). And South Carolina came close to matching that trend, signing 71 players from its home state and 70 from Georgia.
Given their considerable size advantage, it’s no surprise that the SEC’s three most populous states (Texas, Florida and Georgia) also produced the most SEC players. Those states are also known as recruiting hotbeds, which further explains why Florida (520 SEC signees) and Texas (419 – and to be clear, we’re counting all Missouri and Texas A&M signees as SEC signees even before the Tigers and Aggies joined the conference in 2012) rank second and third in SEC signees over the last decade.
Speaking of Missouri and A&M joining the league, it will be interesting to see how their SEC membership affects these recruiting trends in another decade. As we’ll cover in another section, Texas A&M’s signing classes are composed of more in-state talent than any other SEC program, so Kevin Sumlin’s staff doesn’t necessarily need to leave the state to find elite prospects. But the Johnny Manziel era raised the Aggies’ national and regional profile, and that might help Sumlin look elsewhere more often, should he decide to do so.
ATLANTA BOASTS TOP METRO AREA
If the Metro Atlanta area were a state, it would have produced more SEC players in the decade than all other states except Florida and Texas. Overall, 345 players from the Atlanta area signed with SEC programs, which was more than twice as many as the next metro area (Dallas with 159).
Top metro areas for SEC signees, 2006-15 Metro area Signees Atlanta 345 Dallas 159 Miami 117 Houston 111 Memphis, Tenn. 98 New Orleans 97 Tampa-St. Pete, Fla. 97 Jacksonville, Fla. 86 Birmingham, Ala. 83 Mobile, Ala. 69
Further, the top two high school programs for SEC talent – Stephenson with 25 SEC signees and Buford with 18 – are both within the Metro Atlanta area, as are six others that produced at least 10 SEC signees.
But let's not just talk numbers. Let's talk names. The area produced some of the SEC's top performers over the last decade: a Heisman Trophy winner and No. 1 selection in the NFL draft (Auburn's Cam Newton), arguably its top defensive back (Tennessee's Eric Berry), a Ray Guy Award winner (Georgia punter Drew Butler), ESPN's top two overall prospects in 2013 (Ole Miss' Robert Nkemdiche and Auburn's Carl Lawson) and a long list of NFL draft picks.
The other most fertile SEC recruiting areas -- Dallas, Miami and Houston – also rank among the most populous areas in the South. Those cities’ spots on the list won’t surprise anyone, but mid-size Southern city Mobile, Alabama, ranking ahead of Nashville and Orlando might. The Mobile area produced 69 SEC signees, including stars such as Alabama’s Julio Jones, C.J. Mosley, D.J. Fluker, Mark Barron, T.J. Yeldon and AJ McCarron and Auburn’s Nick Fairley and Reese Dismukes, among others.
EXAMINING IN-STATE TALENT PHILOSOPHIES
In any conversation about the nation’s top football talent-producers, states such as California, Texas, Florida and Georgia will figure heavily. So it makes sense that Texas A&M (78.8 percent of its signees between 2006 and 2015 hailed from Texas), Georgia (62 percent) and Florida (60.3) boasted the most in-state talent of all SEC programs over the last decade.
It’s interesting to review the philosophies of SEC programs that share the same state. In Alabama, both Auburn (34.8 percent) and Alabama (37.5) sign similar numbers of in-state recruits. Same with Tennessee (26.4) and Vanderbilt (17.5) although both of those programs are forced to look outside their state’s borders far more often, as Tennessee is among the less-fertile football states in the Southeast.
Meanwhile, Mississippi State (56.9) and Ole Miss (29.6) employed considerably different recruiting strategies when it came to talent from their home state. While Mississippi State had more in-state talent than nearly any other SEC program, Ole Miss ranked 10th out of the 14 teams, frequently looking to Florida, Georgia and Tennessee to fill out its recruiting classes.
Percentage of in-state signees, 2006-15 School Percentage of in-state signees Texas A&M 78.8 (189 of 240) Georgia 62.0 (147 of 237) Florida 60.3 (143 of 237) Miss. State 56.9 (145 of 255) LSU 53.2 (132 of 248) Alabama 37.5 (94 of 251) Auburn 34.8 (89 of 256) Missouri 32.9 (75 of 228) Arkansas 29.8 (78 of 262) Ole Miss 29.6 (79 of 267) South Carolina 29.0 (66 of 250) Tennessee 26.4 (66 of 250) Kentucky 19.2 (49 of 255) Vanderbilt 17.5 (37 of 212)
Programs in states that aren’t as rich in talent had to employ similar recruiting strategies. Kentucky simply isn’t a great state for high school football, which partially explains why only 11 Kentuckians signed with any out-of-state SEC program in the decade, and why Kentucky signed just 49 in-state players out of its 255 overall signees.
Or take a school like Arkansas. Sure, the Razorbacks have signed some solid players from their home state in recent years, but on their current roster alone, standout players hail from Texas (Jonathan Williams), Florida (Alex Collins and Denver Kirkland), Oklahoma (Keon Hatcher), California (Sebastian Tretola) and Colorado (Dan Skipper).
For its size, Alabama is a solid talent producer, but one secret to the success of the state’s football powers is supplementing their homegrown talent with recruits from elsewhere. That’s what can help a program go from good to great, which Alabama has certainly accomplished since Nick Saban took over as head coach in 2007.
Run down the list of Alabama’s top offensive players in the Nick Saban era. Sure, there are Alabamians such as McCarron, Jones and Yeldon at the top of the list, but the Crimson Tide also made use of players from Louisiana (running back Eddie Lacy), Florida (receiver Amari Cooper and running backs Trent Richardson and Derrick Henry), Michigan (running back Mark Ingram), Texas (quarterback Greg McElroy) and Georgia (quarterback Blake Sims) to keep the offense clicking.
Likewise, Auburn would not have won SEC titles in 2010 and 2013 were it not for Georgia-born quarterbacks Newton and Nick Marshall, and Gus Malzahn’s running game would not have been nearly as dangerous without out-of-state running backs Michael Dyer (Arkansas), Tre Mason (Florida) and Cameron Artis-Payne (Pennsylvania).
Coaches at every program want to make the home state their first priority, but sometimes they must develop more creative recruiting philosophies in order to produce competitive teams. Most SEC programs recruit at a high level, but the ones that win most consistently are generally those that do the best job of complementing their in-state talent base with elite prospects – frequently at the offensive skill positions – from other locales.
METHODOLOGYColbert Report temporary suspends production due to family emergency
EDIT, 2/20 – Early this morning, audience members for today’s taping were emailed confirmation that it will be going ahead as scheduled. Some media is stating that Stephen will address the absence on tonight’s show, but do not mention a source, so it’s best to take this as a (good) guess on their part.
EDIT, 2/19 – Comedy Central has confirmed that Monday’s taping of the Colbert Report will go ahead as scheduled. Still no official confirmation of the reasons behind Colbert’s absence from the show.
EDIT, 2/18 – At this point, it appears that Colbert is planning to go ahead with Monday’s taping. The automated ticket system was re-releasing cancelled tickets throughout the day Saturday, and there has been no update to the guest listings. As for the cause of the absence, it’s likely safe to translate Colbert’s tweet to be confirmation of reports that his mother is ill.
EDIT, 2/16 – Earlier today the The Wall Street Journal cited “family emergency” as the cause behind Stephen Colbert’s absence from the air, while The Huffington Post quotes unnamed sources in its reports that it’s due to the ill health of his mother, Lorna Colbert. The latter has been the most common hypothesis among viewers as well, due in part to Lorna’s advanced age (91). Comedy Central is saying that next week’s Colbert Report tapings are expected to be a go.
Original post, 2/15:
The Colbert Report has temporarily suspended production for at least two nights, for as of yet unknown reasons.
According to users on Twitter, tonight’s taping was cancelled as of late last night. The show’s audience department sent out a notification email, reading in part “Due to unforseen circumstances, we have canceled our taping for the date of your ticket reservation, February 15, 2012.”
The show’s website now lists reruns for Wednesday and Thursday, bumping previously scheduled guests Claire Danes and Susan Cain.
A last-minute cancellation is highly unusual for Comedy Central’s fake news shows. The Daily Show has suspended production last-minute due to personal reasons twice during Jon Stewart’s reign: once when his second child was born, and once when a staff member passed away suddenly. If this week’s reasons are of a similar nature, it would be a first for the Colbert Report.
It should be safe to rule out Colbert himself being ill, since he’s previously taped shows with a freshly broken wrist, a cut on the bridge of his nose from a boating mishap, and a nasty case of the flu (as seen below).In an attempt to better document the American underground press, or at least the sharp, rusty sliver of it that infected me 20-some years ago, I’ve given myself the task of interviewing all of the zine folks that I respected back in the day, during the period which many of us still consider to be the golden era of self-publishing. Today’s interview is with Robert Helms, the man behind the journal for human research subjects, Guinea Pig Zero (GPZ).
MARK: My guess is that Guinea Pig Zero came about after you’d already been a human test subject for some time. Is that correct?
ROBERT: Yes. When I released the first issue, in May of ‘96, I’d already been doing medical studies on a regular basis for over a year. I’d also tried to do one back in 1990. I got cut from that one, though, because I fainted. I was all set up on PK Day – that’s when they dose you and the work begins – and, as soon as they put the catheter in my vein, I passed out. It happens to beginners. It’s called a vasovagal syncope. That’s when you pass out suddenly as your vein is punctured, or, sometimes, when you’re having a crap. It has something to do with the body experiencing fear, but I forget the details…
MARK: Do you recall when the idea for the zine came to you? Was there, perhaps, a specific experience that caused you to say to yourself, “I really need to start documenting this?”
ROBERT: I’d heard the idea floated by a guy who was already a guinea pig, and who knew about zines. (I’d known about zines then too, but only slightly.) This person who mentioned the idea of a guinea pig’s zine, coincidentally, was the same one who later went temporarily nuts from a drug study, which led to my article, “The SmithKline Beecham Debacle of 1996,” which in turn led to my being threatened with a lawsuit by the company. My friend (which he was at that time) never wrote a word about being a guinea pig, nor created any zine. His remarks on the idea got me thinking, though, and I ran with it.
MARK: Do you remember when it was that he first brought the idea up, and what the circumstances were? Were you and he having beers after a hard day of guinea pigging, or were you, maybe, laying next to one another, on gurneys, being dosed with something?
ROBERT: He and some other friends lived in a squat on Cedar Avenue in West Philly called the Brew Squat (the residents being caffeine addicts), and we shared an office on the ground floor. We were in the kitchen, shooting the breeze with one or two other folks, and he started talking about how guinea pigs had a shared workplace culture, and how a zine about that culture would be cool.
MARK: Where were you living at the time, and what, if you don’t mind my asking, did you need an office for?
ROBERT: In the years when I published GPZ, I lived in a few different places in Cedar Park, the neighborhood where the Brew Squat was, and where all sorts of radical activity goes on. (It’s affectionately called the “anarchist ghetto” by some.) I never resided in a squat because I had a huge library in those days, and I’d never risk losing or ruining my books. Also, I always keep cats, and giving them a stable environment is part of the deal. Anyway, I moved a few times during that period. (Some of the time I was in France, living as a visitor.) As for the office space in the squat, we used it to agitate for IWW campaigns, and to publish a paper called the Free Voice. The letter “i” was dotted with a circled A. It was a local anarchist paper, and a good one, too. It’s preserved in a few archives now.
MARK: How was publishing the Free Voice similar or dissimilar from publishing the zine?
ROBERT: The Free Voice ran for about five months, and there was an editorial committee. So there were conflicting opinions about content, which I found annoying. We all felt that it was well worth the effort, though.
MARK: And, with the GPZ, I imagine that, while you had input and contributions from others, it was somewhat more autocratic in nature… Was that liberating as an editor, not having to run things by other people, and build consensus?
ROBERT: I had total control of the zine at all times. That was the best way. And I believe that’s why GPZ was so successful.
MARK: Speaking of the success, do you think that you could have leveraged it to have had a career as a writer?
ROBERT: When I started GPZ, I had no reason to believe that more than just a few people would read it. Other zine writers, even when they loved GPZ, would tell me, “Don’t quit the day job.” For me, it was a writing experiment.
Later, when I was all over the media, I probably could have found a way to write for the rest of my life. But I didn’t catch the ball. I wasn’t focused enough. And I only write well when I’m writing about something that makes me mad. The New York Times Magazine invited me to write an article on Prozac once. I said I didn’t know much about it, hoping that they’d give me something else, but the editor wanted only that. I promised the article, but I never wrote it. I just didn’t want to become the guy who, after a weekend of hurried research on a current mental health issue, could turn out a few clever sentences. Ever since, I’ve wondered if I should have done exactly that. I know I could have pulled it off, but it didn’t feel right. The upshot is, to write for a living, your situation has to be on a steady course, and mine just kept changing in all sorts of ways.
MARK: You mentioned that you were somewhat aware of zines when starting GPZ. How did you become aware of them?
ROBERT: I knew Jeff Kelly, the editor of Temp Slave, because we were both Wobblies. And I’d read a few job-zines… namely Dishwasher, which was the best one out there. When I started writing articles for that first issue of GPZ, in late 1995, though, the rest zine world was unknown to me.
MARK: When you say that you knew Jeff, as you were both Wobblies, do you you mean you knew of one another through IWW publications, internet usenet groups, and the like, or were you actually living in the same town at the same time, involved in some of the same IWW campaigns?
ROBERT: Jeff lived in Northeast Pennsylvania, in the Lehigh Valley. And, when we started the IWW branch in Philly, in 1991, Jeff and other Lehigh Valley Wobs came to the event, which was a little concert. He and I were involved in a few campaigns after that, and we stayed friends after he moved to Wisconsin. I haven’t seen him for quite a while now, though.
MARK: I need to track him down for an interview. The last I’d heard, he’d gotten married and was working in a cheese factory. I may be remembering this all wrong, but I seem to recall him telling me that it was his job to walk around these giant tanks of milk, sprinkling in enzymes, or some such thing…
ROBERT: He turned milk into cheese by doing what cheese people do in big cheese factories, and the pay was good. Europeans try the average piece of cheddar in the U.S. and they simply refuse to call it cheese. Same with Hershey’s Kisses. They’re not chocolate, to anyone who has eaten good chocolate. If you feed a Hershey’s Kiss to a Belgian, there might be punches thrown. As for Jeff, I heard some new development, not too long ago, but I forget what it was. He’s still in Wisconsin, though, I think.
MARK: One of the great things about zines is that, through them, we get to know people who, more often than not, don’t have a voice in the media. They’re not politicians, entrepreneurs and celebrities. They’re dishwashers, temp workers, and, in the case of Guinea Pig Zero, the people who we, as a society, test our cosmetics and erectile disfunction drugs on. They’re marginalized individuals who, for whatever reason, have decided to make their voices heard. There’s not always a political motivation at play, of course, but there often is. And I’m curious, in your case, to what degree you saw GPZ as an organizing tool. When you set out, were you consciously looking to raise awareness about the issues encountered by human test subjects? Or were you just looking to share interesting stories?
ROBERT: When I started the zine, I was just finishing up four years as a salaried union organizer in the healthcare field. At the same time, I was also very active in the anarchist movement in West Philadelphia. So, when I got into being a guinea pig, it was impossible to view the matter in any way other than as an organizer who saw something that needed doing. Also, I’ve always been a hog for history. And I knew that the history of medicine, just like all mainstream history, was leaving out the poor slobs. So, I caught the subject when I was on a roll. I was passionate about it, and people wanted to hear about things they weren’t used to hearing about.
MARK: Was Temp Slave the first zine you ever read?
ROBERT: I’m not sure what was the first, but it might have been. I must have perused whatever Wooden Shoe Books had in stock back in 1989, but I didn’t think about them enough to recall them now.
MARK: What did you think of Temp Slave?
ROBERT: It took what I’d refer to as a “rip ‘em a new asshole” approach when discussing abusive, stupid management in the workplace. This was, and still is, badly needed. The mainstream discussion takes care not to seem angry. It doesn’t use the harsh language that working people actually use when their boss is being a total asshole. Jeff never cut them any slack.
We need people like Jeff Kelly in the mix. Several times, I’ve followed news stories about workplace shootings, where a shooter walks around with the gun, shooting bosses and supervisors, but simply ignoring co-workers. He just walks past them, or leans to the side to get a clear shot at a boss, but not hit the rank and file person. Obviously, this should be called “bossicide,” but, when it happens, and every reporter in the country is examining the event, the talk goes straight to the shooter’s mental health, his troubled home life, and simply anything but this phenomenon that is bossicide. Once it happened in the sign shop of the Philadelphia Department of Streets. A guy I knew worked in a different part of the department, and he told me that every single dead person had been an obnoxious, belligerent, abusive, power-drunk scumbag. The shooter didn’t harm the workers who were sitting right beside them. Bossicide is the elephant in the room. And only a writer like Jeff, who doesn’t give a shit about the tender feelings of stupid assholes, will point out the obvious and clear pattern you see in cases like that.
MARK: Are you still a human test subject? If not, when did you stop, and why?
ROBERT: No, I stopped doing studies almost entirely in 2003, when I turned 46, because 18 – 45 was the age range that the good studies in the U.S. were asking for. After that, the tests aren’t going to be often enough to plan one’s life around.
MARK: So, from 1995 to 2003, selling your services as a human test subject was your primary source of income?
ROBERT: It was a major part of my income – sometimes the primary source – during those years. I was also a house painter and a handyman/carpenter’s helper.
MARK: I wasn’t aware that these tests happened with enough regularity that one could expect to be able to keep jumping from one project to another. Would I be right to assume that this required you to travel quite a bit between different cities, and test units?
ROBERT: I traveled to some studies, but, living in Philadelphia, I was close to many units already. Philly has been a major center of medicine and the sciences since Colonial times. Of course, one has to lie, and say that the last study you did was at least four or five months ago.
Each research group has its own private list of volunteers. The way it works in the U.S. – unlike in, say, France – there’s no central database that keeps track of how many studies a person does, and how close they are together. So it’s simple, as long as you and the research staff stay in character. All experienced guinea pigs know, and every single doctor and nurse involved in such studies knows, 99% of the volunteers lie to qualify. If you’re too truthful, you get no work. And, If they get obsessive, and catch too many guys lying, they’ll wind up with too few reliable guinea pigs. For long or complicated studies, if the volunteer has never done studies before, there’s no way they’ll get it right. We pros would laugh like crazy at the mistakes new guys would make. The recruiters know all this, and it’s basic stuff for them. But they can’t say it on the record. If they did, they’d be stepping out of character.
The farthest I ever drove for a study was Kenosha, Wisconsin. I took that trip with Dishwasher editor Pete Jordan, who was living in Pittsburgh at the time. He entered a study, which he later wrote about for GPZ, and I was planning to do it with him. We both screened and qualified for the study in Kenosha. (It was at Abbott Labs, I think.) Before the test was supposed to start, though, I got an offer to start a union consulting gig back in Philadelphia, so I dropped out of the study before it started, and drove home to Philly. Otherwise, I stayed within an hour or two of Philadelphia… I did one in Delaware, one in Baltimore, and about five in Neptune, New Jersey… But I wasn’t a workaholic about it. I knew many guys, though, who would carpool a thousand miles at the drop of a hat, year after year.
MARK: How did you print that first issue of GPZ? Did you pay to have it printed, or did you find a way to scam it? I have this vision of you sneaking out of your bed, while participating in an inpatient study, sneaking down a darkened corridor, and breaking into an office to use the photocopier of a pharmaceutical company. Is that how it happened?
ROBERT: No… It was actually just as secretive, but far more complicated than that.
This brings us to another layer of the big onion. Remember, when you interviewed Pete Jordan, and he described the system that existed for scamming free services from Kinko’s? Well, to put it very mildly, it wasn’t just something that happened in the lives of a few isolated zine publishers. It was a huge affair, happening all over the country. I’d say, though, that Philly was either one of the biggest centers of it, or perhaps the biggest. My production of Guinea Pig Zero was just a tiny fraction of the operation. We had a guy who worked there, on the graveyard shift, for about two years, maybe more. During his shift, we brought in our own crew, sometimes up to about six people. By the way, our inside man at Kinko’s was the same guy who lost his marbles in that drug study, and who originally mused about making a guinea pig zine. Well, he calculated very precisely how much we could get away with. He strategized how to produce whatever we had in the queue, so we didn’t exceed the normal margin of waste of paper, which Kinko’s accounted for in its business plan. We produced many tons of pamphlets, flyers, posters, laminated cards, and zines. We even published 3,000 copies of Anarchism and the Black Revolution.
We would lay out a spreadsheet, and each person would do what they had the skills for. And, if they had no skills, they’d collate some regular Kinko’s job. If they could operate one of the machines, they would, either for a Kinko’s job, or for one of the anarchist jobs. And, at the end of the shift, the day manager would come in and be amazed by the huge amount of work that had gotten done overnight.
You’ve heard of Mumia Abu-Jamal? Well, he’s not only alive, and famous, but no longer on death row. Well, if not |
Fletcher Building has issued two profit warnings, announced the departure of its chief executive over financial problems at some of its largest projects and faced calls for its entire board to submit to elections to be reappointed.
On Tuesday, a day before protesters were due to picket outside the company's annual general meeting, Fletcher Building was granted a trading halt, meaning its shares cannot be traded on stock exchanges in New Zealand or Australia until the company provides an update on its finances.
Fletcher Building said it had asked for the halt because it was reviewing the performance of the Building + Interiors unit, which was being assisted by a second review by KPMG into the units two largest projects.
READ MORE:
* Fletcher Building workers to picket outside the company's headquarters
* Fletcher's problems highlight construction's age-old strains
* Fletcher Buildings expects earnings could be up to $150m less than forecast
The company has refused to say which projects are covered by the KPMG review, whether the company expects the review to offer good or bad news for investors, or even why it opted to seek a trading halt a day before the announcement.
In a statement to the ASX, Fletcher Building said the "review" was ongoing, without saying whether it was referring to its own review or KPMG's.
Shares were expected to remain in the trading halt until Wednesday. "The company is taking the necessary time to carefully consider this matter."
Analysts said the statement was so limited it was hard to draw any conclusion about Wednesday's update, but negative sentiment surrounded the company.
"Coming from a once bitten, twice shy, or twice bitten, thrice shy even, then it's understandable people will be taking a fairly negative view until they get the actual numbers through," Grant Davies said, investment advisor at Christchurch-based Hamilton Hindin Greene said.
Fletcher Building has had well publicised problems with the Justice Precinct in Christchurch, which has been hit by a series of repeated delays and cost increases.
Other major projects in the division include the convention centre at SkyCity and Precinct Properties' Commercial Bay development, both in Auckland.
At a time when the New Zealand sharemarket's benchmark NZX-50 is surging to new highs, investors in Fletcher Building have suffered, with shares falling more than 15 per cent in 12 months.
In March the company cut its guidance for the 2017 financial year, which ended on June 30, by $110 million because of troubles in some of its major projects.
In July it announced another profit warning as it announced chief executive Mark Adamson was leaving the company.
Days after the second profit warning, the New Zealand Shareholders Association (NZSA) called for the company's entire board of directors to put themselves up for reelection at Wednesday's AGM.
NZSA chief executive Michael Midgley said on Tuesday that it was difficult to read anything into Fletchers' statement because of the limited information, but shareholders would await Wednesday's announcement with interest.
"There'll be an awful lot of people listening with acute interest."Google and Discovery expand the Discovery VR app with new VR travel series.
Since launching August 2015, the Discovery VR app has accumulated over four million downloads and 123 million organic views. Now if those sound like impressive numbers to you, that’s probably because they are. But of course Discovery, being the endlessly ambitious group that they are, is now expanding their already flush catalog of immersive content with a new first-of-its-kind VR series.
Discovery TRVLR is a brand new 360° storytelling series that takes you across the globe to visit fascinating locals such as “the Guru,” “the Renegade,” “the Entertainer” and “the Explorer,” who will regale their cultures historic traditions and unique rituals. Over the course of 38 episodes spread throughout seven chapters, you will travel throughout North America, South America, Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe and Antarctica in the first virtual reality series to cover all seven continents. Each experience opens with a stunning sunset from the location being covered in that particular episode and closes with a gorgeous sunset.
“Discovery’s viewers look to us for innovation and expect to be taken places that satisfy their desire for exploration and adventure,” said Rebecca Howard, SVP Emerging Platforms and Partnerships, Discovery VR. “Like Discovery, Google’s VR team shares a passion for VR storytelling and we are thrilled to partner with them on ‘Discovery TRVLR,’ our most ambitious endeavor to date.”
Discovery TRVLR’s first chapter drops November 3rd exclusively on YouTube, Discovery VR and the Discovery VR app. You can view the action in VR using the Google Daydream View headset and Google Cardboard, or on the web via Android and iPhone devices.
The series was written and directed by Addison O’Dea and produced by NYC-based immersive production studio, Here Be Dragons, with the exception of episodes filmed in Antarctica that were directed by Barry Pousman and filmed by Yes Please Thank You. Emmy Award-winner Saschka Unseld was also onboard as Creative Producer.
This is just another win for Discovery Communications, Discovery VR and Google’s talented VR team, all of whom continue to support their investments with a constant stream of quality updates and engaging content. It’s especially interesting to see a VR travel series focus on unique human beings from various backgrounds. VR has already proven itself to be an excellent means of inducing empathy. Hopefully this series helps others better step into the shoes of their fellow man and gain a new understanding.While Leftists Celebrate “Change,” Obama Appointees Suggest Massive Expansion Of Bush War Doctrine
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, November 20, 2008
While naive, giddy and myopic establishment leftists have been celebrating the great “change” heralded by the election of Barack Obama, the President elect has been busy appointing people to key positions who advocate the same Neo-Con imperialist foreign policy crafted during eight years of the Bush administration.
The New York Times, widely recognized as the voice of the establishment Democratic left, set the tone of what we can expect from an Obama foreign policy in a lead editorial last Sunday entitled, “A military for a dangerous new world.”
The editorial calls for U.S. military imperialism not to be scaled back under Obama, but to be vastly expanded both in terms of budget and scope.
Iran, China, Somalia, Russia and Pakistan are all listed as potential targets of U.S. military aggression and the paper echoes what Obama himself has said he will implement – an addition of nearly 100,000 more soldiers and marines to American ground forces, bringing the total to 759,000 active duty forces, at a cost of $100 billion dollars over the next six years.
Does this sound like a “change” from the Project For a New American century framework of endless “multi-theatre warfare,” the inspiration for eight years of Bush administration militarism, or an expansion of that very doctrine?
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
Obama’s announced appointees and those that are expected to follow differ only from their Bush administration contemporaries in proficiency and competence, their zeal for military adventurism is coequal, while others that shaped eight awful years of spying, torture, eviscerations on freedom and unprovoked military attacks on sovereign nations will merely stay on in their roles.
Welcome to the “change that you can believe in”.
Obama’s likely selection of Hillary Clinton for the position of Secretary of State highlights the brazen hypocrisy with which the “change” agenda has begun to be implemented since Obama won the election two and a half weeks ago.
Hillary Clinton
Clinton voted for the invasion of Iraq, a point on which she was attacked by Obama during the phony punch and judy show of the debates. Obama also denounced Clinton for voting in favor of a Senate resolution branding the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. Clinton promised to “obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel, a mantra echoed by Obama when he assured AIPAC, the notorious Israeli lobby, that military strikes against Iran were very much on the table.
Does this sound like the language of diplomacy or a change from eight years of the Bush doctrine?
Likewise, one of the favorites to become Obama’s Defense Secretary is Michèle A. Flournoy, deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration and president of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) think tank.
As Alex Lantier writes, “Members of CNAS, a rather small Washington think tank with a staff of 30 employees founded in 2003 by (John) Podesta and Flournoy, play an outsized role in the Obama transition team.” “So many CNAS members are likely to join the Obama administration that CNAS officials told the (Wall Street) Journal they were concerned the think tank might fold after Obama’s inauguration.”
CNAS has opposed a set timeline for withdrawal from Iraq, has advocated the deployment of more troops in Afghanistan and has called for U.S. troops to be stationed in Pakistan. CNAS has also urged military spending to be beefed up in order to compete with China’s growing Navy.
“CNAS publications, many of which are publicly available on its web site, make it clear that the Obama administration’s foreign policy will have a thoroughly imperialist character,” notes Lantier.
How does this represent a “change” from eight years of Bush administration foreign policy? How does this represent a shift from a strategy of diplomacy based on intimidation, invasion and occupation?
Robert Gates
Obama’s advisors have also been floating the likelihood of Robert Gates remaining as Obama’s Secretary of Defense, so it looks like we’re either going to have a warmonger or a warmonger in the position – what a choice!
The Financial Times reported this week, “President-Elect Barack Obama and Robert Gates are negotiating terms under which the defense secretary would remain as Pentagon chief in the new administration.”
Gates of course has a history of entanglement with the military-industrial complex having pushed for the U.S. bombing of Nicaragua when he was deputy director of the CIA and later being indicted for his involvement in covering up the Iran Contra scandal.
Gates was the primary advocate for the Iraq “surge” which increased the U.S. military presence in the country.
Obama’s decision to appoint Eric Holder as Attorney General caused a flutter of controversy considering Holder’s involvement in ensuring billionaire fugitive investor Marc Rich received a presidential pardon at the end of Bill Clinton’s term, but the real dirt on Holder is far more shocking.
Eric Holder
After leaving the Clinton administration, Holder, who played a key role in the 2005 re-authorization of the Patriot Act, which Obama voted for, set up the legal and lobbying firm of Covington & Burling. The firm’s most high-profile case was its defense of Chiquita Brands International, Inc, whose executives were facing charges of aiding terrorists for bankrolling and arming right-wing death squads in Colombia.
As Bill Van Auken writes, “Using his longstanding ties at the Justice Department, Holder managed to get Chiquita off the hook with a fine that amounted to 0.55 percent of its annual revenue. This was despite the overwhelming evidence—and the company’s own admission—that it had paid out millions of dollars to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (known by its Spanish acronym AUC), as its gunmen carried out the massacre, assassination, kidnapping and torture of tens of thousands of Colombian workers, peasants, trade union officials and left-wing political activists.” “Holder’s record is not that of a champion of civil and democratic rights or a defender of the oppressed, but rather a legal servant of the corporations and the state, complicit in their criminality and repression.”
Holder’s law enforcement deputy in the Obama administration is likely to be Robert Mueller, who will remain as FBI Director despite his involvement in the use of National Security Letters to illegally spy on American citizens via the collection of email, telecommunications and financial records.
Robert Mueller
Obama’s head of the CIA transition team is none other than John Brennan, an aide to former CIA director George Tenet and a key participant in the formulation of policies that led to the torture scandal, extraordinary renditions and secret prisons.
Van Auken notes, “Brennan, like Tenet, deserves to confront a war crimes tribunal, yet he is shaping intelligence policy for Obama.” “Given these appointments, a report published Monday by the Associated Press that the incoming Obama administration “is unlikely to bring criminal charges against government officials who authorized or engaged in” torture hardly comes as a surprise.”
Then we have Rahm Emanuel, “the enforcer”, and Obama’s new chief of staff.
Emanuel is the son of a member of the Zionist terrorist group Irgun, which was responsible for bombing hotels, marketplaces as well as the infamous Deir Yassin massacre, in which hundreds of Palestinian villagers were slaughtered.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Upon news of his appointment, Emanuel’s father, Dr. Benjamin Emanuel, told the Jerusalem Post, “Obviously he will influence the president to be pro-Israel. Why wouldn’t he be? What is he, an Arab? He’s not going to clean the floors of the White House.”
But forget sins of the father, Rahm Emanuel himself is a former Israeli IDF soldier who has a penchant for making death threats against his political enemies while crazily slamming a knife into a dinner table. Sounds like a diplomatic kind of guy.
Rahm Emanuel
When Emanuel’s appointment was confirmed, top Israeli newspaper the Maariv Daily hailed the news with the headline, “Our man in the White House.”
Another Israeli news outlet, Y Net, reported, “Emanuel is pro-Israeli, and would not be willing to consider accepting the job unless he was convinced that President-elect Obama is pro-Israel.”
Recall that President elect Barack Obama’s first act of “change” upon winning the Democratic presidential nomination back in June was to don a joint US-Israeli label pin, head on over to AIPAC and prostrate himself in front of the Israeli lobby, vowing to keep military action in mind for Iran and promising to hand over another $30 billion of American taxpayers’ money in military assistance to the Zionist state.
It seems that Obama has already answered the question of whether he can be a more hardcore Israel hard-liner than George W. Bush – ‘yes he can’!
When are left-wing establishment liberals going to overcome their inane idolatry for Obama and realize that the people he is putting into positions of power are the same and in some cases worse than the Neo-Cons who ran eight years of Bush foreign policy?
When are leftists going to get over their petty power trips and understand that the mantra of “change” is a mere illusion to provide left cover for a massive expansion in U.S. imperialism the likes of which the Bush administration could never have accomplished?
When are liberals going to stop behaving like gloating children and understand that Obama’s exalted messiah status and political capital, allied with his publicly stated agenda and the nature and track record of those he has appointed to key positions, is a recipe for a new wave of militarism and an expansion of the pre-emptive Bush foreign policy doctrine that Obama himself campaigned against with his rhetorical and empty promises of “change”?
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Over the last few days, unlike scores of other left-wing websites who are still in a zombiefied trance over their new “ObaMassiah”, WSWS.org have put out a series of excellent articles concerning the “change” illusion and we encourage you to read them via the links below.
Obama’s “seamless transition” to endless war by Bill Van Auken
Obama’s transition: A who’s who of imperialist policy by Alex Lantier
Obama’s attorney general pick and the illusion of change by Bill Van Auken
This article was posted: Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 12:04 pm
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Comment on this articleBeginning in the second half of 2015, MMA promotion World Series of Fighting (WSOF) will enter the pay per view (ppv) market. Once they do enter the ppv game, WSOF says it will share 50% of all net revenue from live pay per view telecasts with the fighters on said cards.
At present, the only consistent presence in MMA pay per view is the sport's leading promotion, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Up to this point, WSOF events have been been broadcasted solely on NBC networks.
The WSOF has many of the world's top, though not yet very well-known fighters, including champions Marlon Moraes, Justin Gaethje, and former UFC title challengers like Jake Shields and Jon Fitch. The promotion must now feel confident that it has developed the brand recognition to entice fight fans to pay for their content.
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It also claims to feel strongly about equitable revenue sharing with its fighters. WSOF president Ray Sefo himself is a coach and former fighter and says that fighters deserve to earn a larger share of what their promotion makes.
“If fighters can’t earn a fair share of the money at the top, the fighters lose hope or become disenchanted with the sport, which impacts their commitment to training and preparing properly for title fights. That is about to change," Sefo says.
Sefo went on to say that he hopes the WSOF ppv revenue sharing system "create a better opportunity for the fighters who put everything on the line every time they step inside the cage." The WSOF has not yet detailed how much they plan to charge for their pay per view events, when - exactly - they plan to put on their first ppv card, or how many ppv events they expect to put on in 2015.
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The promotion has also not yet specified platform availability for their planned 2015 pay per view events, and whether it will include some combination of cable, satellite, and web stream. We will keep you posted with updates on this story as they are available.
Follow Elias on Twitter @EliasCepeda & @YahooCagewriterBully galaxy rules the neighbourhood
In general, galaxies can be thought of as sociable, hanging out in groups and frequently interacting. However, this recent NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image highlights how some galaxies appear to be hungry loners.
These cosmic oddities have set astronomers onto ‘the case of the missing neighbouring galaxies’. Located half a billion light-years from Earth, ESO 306-17 is a large, bright elliptical galaxy in the southern sky of a type known as a fossil group. Astronomers use this term to emphasise the isolated nature of these galaxies. However, are they like fossils – the last remnants of a once-active community – or is it more sinister than that? Did ESO 306-17 gobble up its next-door neighbours?
Gravity brings galaxies together and bigger ones swallow smaller ones. There is evidence that our own Milky Way galaxy has ‘snacked’ on numerous smaller galaxies that strayed too close. ESO 306-17 and other fossil groups may be the most extreme examples of galaxy cannibalism, ravenous systems that don't stop until they've devoured all of their neighbours.Bayern need depth at full-back, but the future of Bastian Schweinsteiger is their biggest question mark at present.
There's a widely held perception that the Bundesliga's appeal has been severely diminished by Bayern Munich's dominance over the past three years. One UK newspaper, which fundamentally misunderstood the minimal impact of financial fair play rules on a division that neither wants nor allows club takeovers by rich owners, even went as far as blaming UEFA president Michel Platini on the "ruination" of the league. Yet the bare facts speak quite a different language.
Average crowds of 43,500 per game made the Bundesliga the most-visited football league in the world once again. Domestic TV figures were up for both terrestrial highlights programmes in 2014-15 compared to the season before, while pay TV channel Sky Deutschland grew their customer base to a new high of 4.2 million. The value of international TV rights is expected to break the €200 million barrier for the first time next year.
That's still not a patch on the Premier League international rights, estimated to be worth around €1.3 billion from 2016, to be sure. But considering that foreign broadcasters only paid a paltry €15 million to show the Bundesliga in 2004, the rise in earnings from overseas over the past decade has been quite remarkable.
The flip-side to the increased visibility of the German top flight is that many clubs, most notably in the financially buoyant Premier League, have woken up the potential of Bundesliga-based players. Their relatively low value, professionalism and excellent footballing education have made them prime targets, and we could well see an influx of German or German-based players like in the mid-1990s, when internationals like Jurgen Klinsmann, Karl-Heinz Riedle, Steffen Freund, Dietmar Hamann, Christian Ziege and Markus Babbel (among others) pitched up in England.
At the same time, the creme de la creme of the Bundesliga have been remarkably unwilling to heed the call of the pound sterling in recent years. It's still early in the summer, but here's the latest state of play of the ins and outs (confirmed or otherwise) in the top German division.
Bayern Munich
The champions have signed Stuttgart keeper Sven Ulreich as backup for Manuel Neuer, meaning that Pepe Reina is on his way out. Mitchell Weiser joined Hertha BSC on Thursday morning after his contract at the Allianz Arena was not renewed. Weiser had put in some decent performances as a right-back at the end of the season but it wasn't enough to convince the Bavarians that he was quite Bayern material.
The search for a right-back continues, as do the attempts to sign a winger as cover for the injury-prone duo of Franck Ribery and Arjen Robben. Raheem Sterling was briefly considered, but neither the asking price nor the player's wage demands made that a viable option. Bayern might turn to Atletico Madrid's Antoine Griezmann but he too is rather expensive.
Bayern's frustration in the market reflect their reluctance to pay more than €50 million for an established star like Angel Di Maria and their doubts about gambling on players with the potential to make the step up, like Southampton's Sadio Mane or the supremely talented but inconsistent Roberto Firmino from Hoffenheim. A way out of that impasse could arrive via a look at France, and Lyon's Nabil Fekir, where prices are much more realistic.
As far as departures go, Bastian Schweinsteiger's future has become a hot debating point. There are rumours in Munich that the Germany captain might be tempted to move abroad in the summer but the veteran midfielder has also managed to make uncertainty work in his favour in the past.
It seems more likely that he seeks a contract extension at Bayern beyond 2016 rather than a move to a different league in the season before his last international tournament with the national team. The club ruling out a move for Borussia Dortmund's Ilkay Gundogan has strengthened the case for him staying as well, especially in view of Xabi Alonso's age.
VfL Wolfsburg
Wolfsburg are determined to avoid a repeat of the 2009-10 season, when they came third in the Champions League group stage and lost their way in the league as well. Max Kruse, a €12 million arrival from Borussia Monchengladbach, will strengthen the attack and the Volkswagen-owned club are still pursuing the option of selling Dutch striker Bas Dost to make room for Mario Mandzukic. It would be a serious upgrade but sporting director Klaus Allofs has cited the limitations placed on them by financial fair play considerations.
As far as other possible Premier League targets are concerned, there's little to no chance that the financially well-supported runners-up will contemplate either the sale of holding midfielder Luiz Gustavo or star performer Kevin De Bruyne, who is close to agreeing to an improved contract that will keep him in Lower Saxony for at least one more season. There's an acceptance on the player's behalf that he will be better served as a guaranteed starter in the league and in Europe at Wolves rather than fight his way into a squad where he'll be just another name.
Borussia Dortmund
New coach Thomas Tuchel has privately ruled out selling any players before training restarts next month. The 41-year-old wants to see whether he can turn around last year's disappointing recruits, Ciro Immobile and Matthias Ginter, whose proposed move to Gladbach has been vetoed by BVB. The young manager is also conscious of the fact that Dortmund's extensive Europa League commitments -- they start their campaign on July 30 -- will require a deep squad.
Midfielder Sebastian Kehl has retired, while Gundogan is very likely to be sold unless he's adamant about running down his contract. It's a risky strategy, considering his ambition to start at the Euros in France. Since Dortmund's incentivised players' contracts don't leave them out of pocket significantly after missing out in the Champions League, it's not unlikely that they will continue with their policy of letting only one first-team player leave each season. That could mean Gundogan.
Will Ilkay Gundogan leave new-look Dortmund this summer? If so, expect him to be the only one.
In addition, Tuchel might find that a number of squad members have become too fragile physically and therefore look for a more extended clear-out. Right-back Lukasz Piszczek looks most at risk in that respect, but he's not the only one.
Like Bayern, Dortmund have already secured the services of a new goalkeeper in Freiburg's Roman Burki. The Swiss stopper is expected to challenge Roman Weidenfeller for the top spot, with Mitchell Langerak's position coming under pressure. But once again, Tuchel will have the last word.
Schalke 04
The Royal Blues would love to unload Kevin-Prince Boateng, whose chronic knee problem and attitude issues have stopped him from performing consistently. Schalke don't have to sell any other players after the departure of Christian Fuchs to Leicester and can continue to count on the services of much-coveted World Cup winner and captain Benedikt Howedes.
They would be powerless to stop Julian Draxler leaving if somebody paid the €45.5 million release clause for the German international, however. Thankfully, the 21-year-old has hinted at his preference to rediscover his best form under new S04 coach Andre Breitenreiter having endured a difficult, injury-ravaged season.
Other clubs
Borussia Monchengladbach have once again shown that they're one of the sharpest operators in the business, picking up Hannover 96 captain and box-to-box specialist Lars Stindl for only €3 million (release clause) and pacy striker Josip Drmic for €10 million from Bayer Leverkusen. Hannover have also lost Spanish forwad Joselu to Stoke City for €6.5 million. The Real Madrid B team graduate has pace and good finishing ability, but might take time to adapt physically to the Premier League.
Josip Drmic could prove a steal for Gladbach after the sale of Max Kruse to Wolfsburg.
Mentioned above, Firmino is reportedly also a target for various English sides. The Brazilian international, a second striker or playmaker, was outstanding for Hoffenheim in 2013-14 but dropped a notch in the last campaign.
While his agent Roger Wittmann has talked up a move to the Premier League, it's worth remembering that he also ruled out the sale of Luiz Gustavo (who wanted a move to Arsenal) only to transfer him to Wolfsburg later that summer in 2013. If Man United are really in for him, he'll be more of a squad player and it would make more sense for him, career-wise, to opt for a slightly smaller club in terms of squad quality.
Later in the window, it would be a surprise if there weren't at least attempts to go for Leverkusen winger Karim Bellarabi and Stuttgart centre-back Antonio Rudiger. Both will be command lower fees than after the Euros in France, but will also naturally wary to scupper their chances with the national team by seeking a new challenge now. Watch this space.
Raphael Honigstein is ESPN FC's German football expert and a regular guest on ESPN FC TV. He also writes for the Guardian. Twitter: @honigstein.Almost two out of three young hospital doctors say their physical or mental health is being damaged because pressures on the NHS are putting them under intolerable strain.
Many are so relentlessly busy that they go through entire shifts without eating or drinking, while others suffer stress, burnout, exhaustion and sleeping problems. Relationships with family and friends are also deteriorating as a result of the struggle to cope with the fast-rising demand for care.
A survey of the working lives of 2,300 trainee anaesthetists has found that six out of seven – 85% – are at risk of becoming burned out, despite only being in their 20s and 30s. Respondents identified long hours, fears about patient safety, the disruption of working night shifts and long commutes to their hospital as key reasons for their growing fatigue and disillusionment.
The survey, by the Royal College of Anaesthetists (RCoA), found that 64% of trainees in that speciality below the level of consultant felt their job had affected their physical health and 61% their mental health. Anaesthetists play a key role in both adult and children’s intensive care units and pain management, as well as in all surgery.
“We are exhausted, frustrated and burned out. I see lapses in safety daily and, even if somebody cared, there is no money or staff to do anything about it,” one trainee anaesthetist said. Another said: “I have reached a point where my physical and mental health have been seriously adversely affected, and I wonder whether I’m suffering from burnout.”
Among respondents, 62% had gone through a shift in the last month without a meal and 75% had not had adequate hydration while at work. Almost all (95%) stay on after their shift, 68% had stayed up to two hours longer in the last month, and 28% had done more than two hours unpaid overtime at least once. Chronic understaffing in hospitals means that trainees are typically being asked to work six extra shifts a month to cover for gaps in rotas, the survey found.
I am shocked by some of the results of this survey# Dr Liam Brennan, RCoA president
“I am totally fed up with this current system,” one doctor said. “No on-call rooms. No time or place to have food. Have to come early to see my patients and leaving late, ensuring they are safe. I really love my job but it keeps taking more and more from me while giving less and less back.”
Some said widespread low morale and poor work-life balance meant they were considering quitting, with some looking at careers outside medicine and others looking at going abroad to practise in countries such as Australia. “The long hours of the job itself and exams means there is very little time for family and friends. This puts a huge strain on developing a reasonable work-life balance and on maintaining meaningful relationships with family and friends,” said one anaesthetist.
Another said: “Having a hectic schedule takes a huge toll on the family and kids. It gets difficult to the point where it feels like having a family is a crime.” And another said: “There is nowhere provided for us to sleep off a shift, and I worry about having a crash [on the way home]”.
Dr Liam Brennan, the RCoA’s president, said: “I am shocked by some of the results of this survey. The reports of deteriorating physical and mental health and burnout in doctors at the beginning of their career is a major concern. It is clear that it is the beleaguered system which is under intense pressure that is the cause of these worrying findings.”
The General Medical Council, which regulates the medical profession, warned that the strain on anaesthetists could endanger patient safety. “These findings echo many of our own recent National Training Survey results, and raise concerns not just for trainees but also for patients and employers. The pressure the NHS is under is placing doctors under greater stress, as well as eroding time for training, development and the recuperation necessary to remain resilient,” said Charlie Massey, its chief executive.
“Unless trainees are given the time needed to develop their knowledge and skills then we risk harm to all doctors, especially those training to be the senior doctors of the future, as well as the patients they care for,” he added.
The Department of Health declined to respond directly to the findings. A spokesman said: “Staff are working hard on the frontline, and we’re supporting them with 1,500 more anaesthetists compared to 2010 and over 3,500 in training each year. We are also investing £10bn in the NHS to transform services and improve patient care, including almost £4bn this year.”CE marking Expansion Conformité Européenne Effective region European Economic Area Product category Various Legal status Mandatory Website CE Marking homepage
CE marking example
CE marking is a certification mark that indicates conformity with health, safety, and environmental protection standards for products sold within the European Economic Area (EEA).[1] The CE marking is also found on products sold outside the EEA that are manufactured in, or designed to be sold in, the EEA. This makes the CE marking recognizable worldwide even to people who are not familiar with the European Economic Area. It is in that sense similar to the FCC Declaration of Conformity used on certain electronic devices sold in the United States.
The CE marking is the manufacturer's declaration that the product meets the requirements of the applicable EC directives.[2]
The mark consists of the CE logo and, if applicable, the four digit identification number of the Notified Body involved in the conformity assessment procedure.
"CE" originated in 1985 as an abbreviation of Conformité Européenne, meaning European Conformity,[3] but is not defined as such in the relevant legislation. The CE marking is a symbol of free marketability in the European Economic Area (Internal Market).
Meaning [ edit ]
Existing in its present form since 1985, the CE marking indicates that the manufacturer or importer claims compliance with the relevant EU legislation applicable to a product, regardless of the place of manufacture. By affixing the CE marking on a product, a manufacturer effectively declares, at its sole responsibility, conformity with all of the legal requirements to achieve CE marking which allows free movement and sale of the product throughout the European Economic Area.
For example, most electrical products must comply with the Low Voltage Directive and the EMC Directive; toys must comply with the Toy Safety Directive. The marking does not indicate EEA manufacture or that the EU or another authority has approved a product as safe or conformant.[4] The EU requirements may include safety, health, and environmental protection, and, if stipulated in any EU product legislation, assessment by a Notified Body or manufacture according to a certified production quality system. The CE marking also indicates that the product complies with directives in relation to "Electro Magnetic Compatibility"[5] - meaning the device will work as intended, without interfering with the use or function of any other device.
Not all products need CE marking to be traded in the EEA; only product categories subject to relevant directives or regulations are required (and allowed) to bear CE marking. Most CE-marked products can be placed on the market subject only to an internal production control by the manufacturer (Module A; see Self-certification, below), with no independent check of the conformity of the product with EU legislation; ANEC has cautioned that, amongst other things, CE marking cannot be considered a "safety mark" for consumers.[6]
CE marking involves self-certification only in case of minimal risks products. In most cases a notified body must be involved. In these cases the CE mark is followed by the registration number of the Notified body involved in conformity assessment.
Countries requiring the CE marking [ edit ]
CE marking is mandatory for certain product groups within the European Economic Area (EEA; the 28 member states of the EU plus EFTA countries Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein) plus Switzerland and Turkey. The manufacturer of products made within the EEA and the importer of goods made in other countries must ensure that CE-marked goods conform to standards.
As of 2013, CE marking was not required by countries of the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA), but members Republic of Macedonia, Serbia, and Montenegro had applied for membership of the European Union, and were adopting many of its standards within their legislation (as did most Central European former member countries of CEFTA that joined the EU, before joining).
Rules underlying CE marking [ edit ]
Responsibility for CE marking lies with whoever puts the product on the market in the EU, i.e. an EU-based manufacturer, the importer or distributor of a product made outside the EU, or an EU-based office of a non-EU manufacturer.
The manufacturer of a product affixes the CE marking to it but has to take certain obligatory steps before the product can bear CE marking. The manufacturer must carry out a conformity assessment, set up a technical file and sign a Declaration stipulated by the leading legislation for the product. The documentation has to be made available to authorities on request.
Importers of products have to verify that the manufacturer outside the EU has undertaken the necessary steps and that the documentation is available upon request. Importers should also make sure that contact with the manufacturer can always be established.
Distributors must be able to demonstrate to national authorities that they have acted with due care and they must have affirmation from the manufacturer or importer that the necessary measures have been taken.
If importers or distributors market the products under their own name, they take over the manufacturer's responsibilities. In this case they must have sufficient information on the design and production of the product, as they will be assuming the legal responsibility when they affix the CE marking.
There are certain rules underlying the procedure to affix the marking:
Products subject to certain EU directives or EU regulations providing for CE marking have to be affixed with the CE marking before they can be placed on the market.
Manufacturers have to check, on their sole responsibility, which EU legislation they need to apply for their products.
The product may be placed on the market only if it complies with the provisions of all applicable directives and regulations and if the conformity assessment procedure has been carried out accordingly.
The manufacturer draws up an EU declaration of conformity or a declaration of performance (for Construction Products) and affixes the CE marking on the product.
If stipulated in the directive(s) or regulation(s), an authorized third party (Notified Body) must be involved in the conformity assessment procedure or in setting up a production quality system.
If the CE marking is affixed on a product, it can bear additional markings only if they are of different significance, do not overlap with the CE marking and are not confusing and do not impair the legibility and visibility of the CE marking.
Since achieving compliance can be very complex, CE-marking conformity assessment, provided by a notified body, is of great importance throughout the entire CE-marking process, from design verification, and set up of the technical file to the EU declaration of conformity.
A guide |
3 9.4 28 9.6 20.7 Nebraska 25.9 6.6 25.3 11.9 30.4 Nevada 31.8 5.0 29 9.4 24.9 New Hampshire 20.3 3.8 30.4 14.6 31.0 New Jersey 26.5 4.1 26 10.7 32.6 New Mexico 39.6 7.8 20 11.3 21.3 New York 30.9 4.2 29.6 10.3 24.9 North Carolina 33.8 4.7 26.6 10.0 24.9 North Dakota 28.2 6.2 26.2 11.9 27.5 Ohio 30.5 5.7 27.7 11.0 25.1 Oklahoma 35.4 6.4 24.3 9.6 24.2 Oregon 23.6 6.6 28 11.3 30.5 Pennsylvania 30.5 5.5 29.1 10.1 24.8 Rhode Island 27.8 4.6 29.1 12.4 26.2 South Carolina 35.1 6.2 28.2 9.7 20.8 South Dakota 27.0 7.2 26 12.9 26.9 Tennessee 36.9 6.4 24.7 9.8 22.2 Texas 36.0 7.7 22.2 8.2 25.9 Utah 23.8 5.4 31.5 12.1 27.3 Vermont 24.4 5.7 26.3 13.9 29.7 Virginia 29.9 4.9 25.2 11.3 28.8 Washington 20.0 4.6 29.4 13.0 33.0 West Virginia 35.9 5.0 31.1 10.9 17.2 Wisconsin 24.8 4.6 27.8 15.1 27.6 Wyoming 25.7 6.1 28.3 14.7 25.1
Last updated: July 2013CLOSE While in Huntsville, Alabama, President Trump said, 'Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, 'get that son-of-a-b**** off the field right now, out. He's fired.'' USA TODAY
Green Bay Packers tight end Martellus Bennett (80) holds his fist in the air during the national anthem prior to the game against the Seattle Seahawks at Lambeau Field. (Photo11: Jeff Hanisch, USA TODAY Sports)
President Donald Trump spoke of stamping out NFL players' protests during the national anthem, but his comments at a Friday night rally and subsequent tweets on Saturday could end up amplifying the number of demonstrations before Sunday's games.
“It’s going to happen. I am so interested to see what’s going to happen tomorrow. This has sent ripples throughout the league,” former NFL player and current political activist Donte’ Stallworth told USA TODAY Sports. “The only way to stop a bully is to stand up and show him you can’t bully me. If you are going to try to bully me, there is going to be push back. I’m glad players have been tweeting about it and speaking up about it. But it has to go further than tweets.”
During his comments at a Huntsville, Ala. rally Friday night, Trump singled out former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick for protesting during the national anthem last season. But a handful of NFL players have continued some form of silent protest for social justice during the 2017 season, even as Kaepernick remains unemployed.
Seattle Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett and Kansas City Chiefs cornerback Marcus Peters are among those that have chosen to sit, and several players, including Philadelphia Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins and Los Angeles Rams linebacker Robert Quinn, have raised a fist. A group of about a dozen Cleveland Browns players knelt in prayer during the anthem before a preseason game in August.
BRENNAN: Trump missed the memo: Don't pick on football players
UNDETERRED: NFLPA vows Trump's comments won't deter protests
GOODELL RESPONDS: Calls Trump's comments 'divisive'
But in the wake of Trump’s comments aimed directly at NFL players, there are signs the protests could grow or become more organized.
ESPN reported Saturday that Buffalo Bills players were so “emotional” after hearing the president’s remarks that players were considering various forms of protest and would discuss at a team meeting on Saturday.
Other current and former players suggested similar on Twitter.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers wide receiver DeSean Jackson wrote he "definitely will be making a statement," though he did not provide further details.
Chiefs receiver Chris Conley, who has not previously protested, wrote: “When will people learn that fear won’t make someone sit down. It quite possibly will make more stand up for what they believe in.”
“Stick to sports boy... Sit down and do what your told. Say or do something we don’t like and your fired” Well I hate to break it to ya... — Chris Conley (@_flight17_) September 23, 2017
When will people learn that fear won’t make someone sit down. It quite possibly will make more stand up for what they believe in. — Chris Conley (@_flight17_) September 23, 2017
Former Houston Texans and Denver Broncos tight end Owen Daniels, who is white, tweeted that “Everyone should take a knee this Sunday and Monday.”
Everyone should take a knee this Sunday and Monday. — Owen Daniels (@owendaniels) September 23, 2017
One current NFL agent told USA TODAY Sports he had texted all of his clients on Saturday regarding potential protests, encouraging them to do so if they desired. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
To Stallworth, there were clear racial undertones to Trump’s comments on Friday, in which he called protesting players “sons of [expletives],” and NFL players are hearing that message and it could serve to galvanize a movement.
“It’s more of a bullhorn, and again, I don’t know why we continue to act surprised. From day one, he’s shown us who he is, and what his ideologies are,” Stallworth said. “I’d like to see players continue to condemn him. Don’t even make it about him, make it about people who think like him.”
Follow Lindsay H. Jones on Twitter @bylindsayhjones.
PHOTOS: Trump and footballintelligence agencies will see a 5% drop in funding under a proposed 2015 budget, officials have said, after a year marked by controversy over far-reaching
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said yesterday the requested budget for most of the country's 17 spy services came to $45.6 billion for fiscal year 2015, which begins October 1.
The proposed budget, which must be approved by Congress, is lower than the 2014 national intelligence program budget, at $48.2 billion.
The Pentagon is also planning for a slight drop in funding for intelligence activities that support the military, requesting $13.3 billion for next fiscal year, officials said.
The 2014 budget had allocated $14 billion for the military intelligence program.
In keeping with past practise, Clapper's office, or ODNI, did not divulge any further details or provide a breakdown of the budget.
"Any and all subsidiary information concerning the National Intelligence Program budget, whether the information concerns particular intelligence agencies or particular intelligence programs, will not be publicly disclosed," ODNI said in a brief statement.
Given the secrecy surrounding America's spy agencies and their funding, it remains unclear if the fallout from ex-intelligence contractor Edward Snowden's leaks has had any impact on the National Security Agency's 2015 budget.
The trove of classified files disclosed by Snowden since June included documents - leaked to The Washington Post - that shed some light on the so-called "black budget" that funds for different spy operations and programs.
The documents gave a breakdown on proposed intelligence spending for 2013, with the CIA budget ranking first at $14.7 billion, followed by the at $10.8 billion and the National Reconnaissance Office at $10.3 billion.
The NRO operates America's network of spy satellites.If you wanted to support their previous crowd-funded product but were unable to do so, now is your chance to do so. The makers of Air Dock, the wireless mobile device charging station built for your car have now come up with an updated version with more mounting options and better features as well. Unsurprisingly, it’s called Air Dock 2.0, and it’s once gain asking for your support through IndieGoGo.
If this is the first time you’ve heard of Air Dock, it’s a device that you mount on your car and uses Qi inductive charging technology that transfers energy between your smartphone and the dock itself. For mounting purposes, it uses nano suction foam so there is no need for clamps or wires to attach your phone. You simply place it on the dock. For version 2.0, there are now four mounting options. You have a standard mount for smooth surfaces, another one for textured surfaces, a long flexible mount that can be bent into many positions, and a CD mount, for when your car’s CD player is useless and instead you can use it to mount the Air Dock.
There are other changes in Air Dock 2.0 and that includes a new Qi transmitter that lets you use thicker phone cases because it now has a longer charging range. It is now also NFC-enabled so you can now trigger events on your smartphone using the Air Dock. Design-wise, it also has several improvements like relocating the USB port and making it thinner.
There are 57 days left in their campaign where they have to reach $85,000 to start the production of the Air Dock 2.0. The earliest estimated delivery date is February 2015, so if you want your car to have this charging dock by then, better support this project through IndieGoGo.
SOURCE: IndieGogoA house in Indianapolis, where two children, Aaron Blackwell, 16, and his sister, Emma Blackwell, 13, were said to have been abducted on March 2 for ransom money. The two teenage siblings were released unharmed. (AP Photo/The Indianapolis Star, Justin L. Mack)
A frustrated reader wrote The Fact Checker concerning a statement that had appeared during a NBC Nightly News report on Jan. 16: “According to the FBI’s latest study, more than 58,000 kids were abducted by non-relatives in one year.”
The reader had written to the network complaining about the use of the statistic, with copious research about its failings, but had never received a response. So he asked The Fact Checker to call attention to the misuse of this statistic, as we had recently done on such claims as women having only 10 percent of worldwide income or that 1,800 college students die a year from “alcohol-related causes.”
We don’t necessarily want to single out NBC. A quick search finds that in recent years that ABC News also improperly cited this statistic, though some additional context was included. It is also listed as a “key fact” by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Where does this statistic come from and how is it misused?
The Facts
First of all, this is relatively old data. (Media reports often get around this uncomfortable fact by often calling it “the latest data.”) The number is derived from data collected between 1997 and 1999, mainly from a telephone survey in 1999 of 16,111 adult caregivers and 5,015 youths. The results were then weighted based on U.S. Census data.
The 1999 results were released in 2002 by an arm of the Department of Justice in a series of reports, as part of the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway Children (NISMART).
In other words, these numbers come from an era that predates the wide use of mobile phones, which allow parents to keep much closer track of their children, or the creation of the Amber alerts (which are also on phones, in Facebook news feeds and so forth). There is an update in the works, but the results will not be released until sometime later this year.
So, first off, you see this is an estimate, based on a survey, not based on actual incidents. NBC News claimed this was FBI data, which makes it sound like real crimes, but instead this was simply derived from a study conducted by academicians for the Justice Department.
David Finkelhor, a University of New Hampshire professor who is director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center and a key author of the study, readily said that the media frequently misunderstand and misreport this figure. “I don’t think it is a reliable estimate, and I don’t use it very much,” he said. “I am really not crazy about any of these numbers.”
The DOJ reports provide ample warning that the data should be handled with care, though sometimes you have to look hard at the footnotes. Two key components of the 58,000 figure are children who are reported missing by their caretakers or children who were missed by the caretaker for at least an hour but no report was filed. (Note: The “reporting missing” number is a subset of the “caretaker missing” figure.)
But the report warns that “both of these numerical estimates are quite imprecise and could actually be quite a bit smaller or larger because they are based on very small numbers of cases.” One of the footnotes is emphatic: “Estimate is based on an extremely small sample of cases; therefore, its precision and confidence interval are unreliable.”
As an example, the number of children reported missing is estimated at 12,100 — but the possible range (within a 95 percent confidence interval) is between less than 100 and 31,000. Similarly, the number of children whom a caretaker missed at some point is estimated at 33,000, with a possible range of 2,000 to 64,000.
Finally, the overall figure of 58,000 also includes children whom the caretaker did not miss at all. The report gives numerous examples: a 17-year-old girl on a date who was detained by force and sexually assaulted; a 15-year-old lured into a school bathroom and assaulted; a 17-year-old detained and assaulted in a parking lot at a high school football game. Either the children did not tell their caregivers, or they did and the caregivers never filed a report, sometimes because they saw no injury or did not believe the child.
Here, the range is 24,100 to 92,400. The difference from the two earlier ranges is mostly a function of the sample size, Finkelhor said. “There is not much we can say about these figures with precision,” he said.
These incidents may meet a legal definition of “abduction” but generally do not conform to the public’s understanding of an abduction, as many also might be considered assault. In news reports, the number is often cited in conjunction with a very distinct crime of kidnapping. (The ABC News report, for instance, was pegged to the case of an 8-year-old who was killed by a stranger after getting lost on the way home from camp.)
In an effort to highlight the distinction, Finelhor said the report included an estimate for the number of “stereotypical kidnapping victims” in a year. (Such crimes are “abductions perpetrated by a stranger or slight acquaintance and involving a child who was transported 50 or more miles, detained overnight, held for ransom or with the intent to keep the child permanently, or killed.”)
The number of stereotypical kidnappings is significantly smaller: 115.
We should also note that the most recent (2014) FBI data on abductions by a stranger in a single year is 332, which is presumably the figure that NBC News should have used, since it claimed to have cited FBI data.
The Pinocchio Test
Finkelhor noted that the Denver Post in 1986 won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for exposing the dubious and exaggerated statistics associated with missing children. Yet, here we are, nearly 30 years later, with the media still misusing the data in a frightening and unhelpful fashion.
The DOJ studies, as written, are fairly clear about the limitations of the data, though perhaps the update, when it is released in 2015, could more clearly highlight the caveats in bold type. Sometimes reporters need to be hit over the head with a two-by-four.
In the meantime, Four Pinocchios to any news organization that lazily cites this statistic without noting its limitations — and how old it is. The issue of missing and abused children is too serious to be waylaid by fishy statistics.
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Follow The Fact Checker on Twitter and friend us on FacebookA modern mining disaster: Bitcoin facility goes up in flames
Modern mining for precious commodities has gone digital, and with that comes what may be the first big digital mining disaster. A Bitcoin mining facility in Thailand recently went up in flames, with three buildings burning to disastrous proportions, taking the servers with them. The mining facility is said to belong to Cowboyminers, and reportedly the hardware was not insured, making it look unlikely it’ll be back up and running any time soon. According to Spondoolies-Tech, which made the hardware, the data center’s wiring wasn’t up to code.
It seems the fire itself happened back on October 14, and that since then it has been discussed heavily over on the BitcoinTalk forums, where images of the blaze were posted and both companies — Spondoolies-Tech and Cowboyminers — have chimed in on the disaster. The information is scattered, and it isn’t entirely clear what caused the blaze.
Though Spondoolies-Tech stated on the forum that the data center’s wiring didn’t meet US electric code standards, Cowboyminers posted saying that wiring was not the cause:
it was NO overload on any cables or transformers. We Had 200% margins on the cables, No cheap or quick job. No density or heat problems. All sp30 and other miners where running cool and fine. No fire has started by the miners for sure, or any electrical problem in the setup.
Ultimately, the fire’s cause is unknown, and will perhaps remain so. Any number of things could have gone wrong, and at this point it serves as a big example to other Bitcoin mining facilities: make sure everything is up to snuff or risk disastrous consequences.
VIA: GizmodoMedicare Benefits Schedule review to get rid of 'unnecessary, out-of-date' procedures
Updated
More restrictions could be placed on a range of medical tests and procedures subsidised by Medicare, with the Federal Government carrying out a "spring clean" of the entire system.
There is concern that invasive procedures such as knee arthroscopies and tonsillectomies are being ordered unnecessarily or for the wrong people.
Health Minister Sussan Ley has commissioned a review of the 5,700 of medical services subsidised under the Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS).
"There are examples that see too many procedures for a particular cohort of patients with little evidence of benefit," Ms Ley said.
"The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care has, for example, drawn our attention to knee arthroscopy — examination of the knee joint.
"Another example is lower back pain — a lot of people with lower back pain get sent for a barrage of scans, when really, the evidence is telling us now that physiotherapy and exercise are probably the first line of treatment."
Labor's health spokeswoman Catherine King said the review was another attack on the health system by the Coalition.
"The Government is going about this like a bull in a china shop," Ms King said.
"To come out and say that every single Medicare Benefit Schedule item is on the table, potential cuts to Medicare benefit items basically means that there will be patients who will suffer as a result of this cut.
"They also need to have brought the professions along with them, so the colleges, the associations, all of the people who are out there on the coalface every single day, talking to patients, conducting these procedures... if you don't bring them with you, basically what you're going to end up [with] is at loggerheads with the profession."
Other services flagged for review include bone mineral density testing for older people, especially those over age 70, and colonoscopies.
The review began earlier this year and is being carried out by working groups of doctors and medical experts across the country.
Ms Ley said the Health Department was now seeking feedback from the public about their experience as patients.
"Only patients know if they actually benefit from what happens and get better or whether they are unwell and incapacitated for a long time for no real improvement," she said.
Topics: health-administration, health-policy, health, government-and-politics, federal-government, australia
First posted1891 advertisement for J. Collis Browne's Chlorodyne
1891 advertisement for a rival brand of Chlorodyne
Chlorodyne was one of the best known patent medicines sold in the British Isles. It was invented in the 19th century by a Dr. John Collis Browne, a doctor in the British Indian Army; its original purpose was in the treatment of cholera. Browne sold his formula to the pharmacist John Thistlewood Davenport, who advertised it widely, as a treatment for cholera, diarrhea, insomnia, neuralgia, migraines, etc. As its principal ingredients were a mixture of laudanum (an alcoholic solution of opium), tincture of cannabis, and chloroform, it readily lived up to its claims of relieving pain, as a sedative, and for the treatment of diarrhea.
Imitations [ edit ]
Chlorodyne sold extremely well for many years; as its active ingredients were well known, local chemists' shops would also make up cheaper generic versions for sale to their customers. Here is an example of such a generic formulation, from Materia Medica by William Hale-White & A.H. Douthwaite, 21st edition (1932):
"Tinctura Chloroformi et Morphinæ Composita intended to be an imitation of the proprietary medicine called chlorodyne. Mix chloroform 75, tincture of capsicum 25, tincture of Indian hemp 100, oil of peppermint 2 and glycerin 250 with alcohol (20 per cent) 450. Dissolve morphine hydrochloride 10 in the mixture. Add to it diluted hydrocyanic acid 50 and enough alcohol (90 per cent) to make 1000. Strength. 1 millilitre contains chloroform 7.5 centimils; morphine hydrochloride 1 centigram; acidum hydrocyanicum dilutum 5 centimils. Dose 5 to 15 minims - 0.2 to 1ml
Besides the generics, a number of rival sellers marketed their own branded versions of the formula, brands such as "Freeman's", "Teasdale's", and "Towle's". It can be seen from the illustrations that the authenticity of these rival brands was hotly contested.
Decline [ edit ]
Though the drug was effective in many ways, its high opiate content also made it very addictive,[1] and deaths from overdoses, either accidental or deliberate, became a frequent occurrence. A common feature of the coroner's report in such cases would be the description of the deceased's body being found in a flat or bedsit littered with empty Chlorodyne bottles. Over the decades of the twentieth century, the cannabis was removed from the formulation, and the amount of opiates in the medicine were progressively reduced. The name of Collis Browne lives on in Britain in a mixture sold under the trade name "J Collis Browne's Mixture" for the relief of coughs and diarrhea. This modern formulation contains morphine and peppermint oil.The activist who threatened to lead an armed march on Washington on July 4 has canceled the event but is urging people to converge on the 50 state capitols to protest gun regulations, according to his recent appearance on an Internet talk show.
“Please don’t come to Washington, D.C. Appeal on a state level,” Adam Kokesh, an Iraq war veteran, said in an interview Tuesday on “The Pete Santilli Show.” “We shouldn’t be begging the government to change. We should be hoping they respect our rights.”
In the interview, which was first reported by the Media Matters Web site, Kokesh said a friend is coordinating the state protests. It was unclear whether people were being urged to come armed.
“We have a couple of tricks up our sleeve in terms of what’s going to be happening the day of the event,” Kokesh said. “People can do whatever they want, whatever they feel is appropriate in their home state.”
Kokesh’s original plans for at least 1,000 people with guns to march across Memorial Bridge from Virginia into Washington attracted the attention of law enforcement officials, who worried about a confrontation on an already busy holiday.
D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier went on television to say that she would enforce the District’s strict gun laws, which forbid the carrying of loaded weapons. “There’s a pretty good chance we’ll meet them on the D.C. side of the bridge,” the chief promised.
Kokesh, who has been repeatedly arrested at protests, did not return phone calls or text messages seeking comment. The media hotline number posted on his Internet site has been disconnected.
Sgt. Paul Brooks, a spokesman for the U.S. Park Police, said his agency had heard through the media that the D.C. event was being canceled but had not confirmed it. District police spokeswoman Gwendolyn Crump also said her department had heard that the event was off.
Kokesh had said he would not get a permit for the D.C. march, and police officials said he did not reach out to them to discuss logistics. D.C. police as well as the Park Police had drawn up contingency plans to put more officers on duty.Saif and Kareena made a curious choice for the name of their first-born, Taimur Ali Khan Pataudi, and the ensuing social media uproar has been dizzying in its scope and scorn. The name is reminding a lot of people of the Turko-mongol invader Temur Lang or Tamerlane who raided Delhi in 1399 AD and massacred a quoted estimate of 10,000 Indians.
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Part of the pandemonium is the price a celebrity Bollywood couple is forced to pay for being ultra-visible in the digital age, even in their private moments as a newly formed family. Some of it is, however, plain absurd, wherein the illustrious Ali Khan Pataudi family is being maligned and their loyalty to the nation questioned. Truly, the late Iftikhar Ali Khan Pataudi and his son Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, both celebrated erstwhile captains of the Indian cricket team, could have not imagined that the day of the birth of a (great)grandson of theirs could be mired with anti-national accusations.
The prevailing clime since 2014 elections is unfortunately one in which claims of anti-nationalism and sedition have gained a certain bravado. The imagery of the accusation also uncannily resonates with the global wave of Islamophobia, triggered by terrorist organizations and weapon-brandishing invaders like Islamic State that have massacred minorities like Christians and Yazidis.
The facts, too, appear twisted in these vitriolic reactions. Massacres, in much of medieval and modern history, have been used as weapons by invaders for claiming thrones, capturing cities and establishing fear among the common people. India in the 14th century denoted the land beyond Indus – the entire Indian subcontinent, with Sultanate Delhi under the Tughlaq dynasty – thus it was hardly the complex, unified nation-state that we live in today. As an invader, Temur had a special stake in India and in Delhi, as it was one of the richest cities in his day. He began his rubble-and-massacre military campaign in the Persian cities of Herat and Isfahan before moving towards India. There isn’t incontrovertible evidence that Temur only singled out members of a particular faith in the Delhi massacre – unless one erroneously believes that all Indians in Delhi at the time were Hindus. After Delhi, Temur continued attacking and committing massacres in Aleppo, Damascus and Baghdad. So it is unreasonable to give a specifically anti-Hindu bent to the naming of a child when all peoples in the Delhi of 14th century suffered terrible consequences of the invasion. It is curious in the same way that Pakistan frequently names its missiles over foreign invaders that first wreaked havoc over the very same territory that forms much of modern Pakistan.
However controversial the name may seen, interpretation is the right of the one who is interpreting. Although not common, names like Duryodhana (meaning ‘one who can’t be defeated’) and Dushasana (meaning ‘one who can’t be ruled’) do exist in India. Temur means iron and symbolizes strength in several languages. Another famous “Temur” in history was Temüjin (a derivative of “Temur” and “jin”), better known to the world as Chengez Khan who founded the great Mongol empire in 13th century. Although much touted by Temur, there is no conclusive proof of shared bloodline between the two rulers.
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When we let a Leopold and a Stalin be – however despotic and exterminating their namesakes may have been – or closer to home, an Ashok and a Sikander be — names of great kings who led bloody campaigns for conquest — why project so much historic hate on a child whose life has just begun? None of the politics can take away from the fact that naming a child is the prerogative of his or her parents. A name is not a jagir or a stronghold of any one personality. If his parents will him to be so, the baby would be called Taimur and the rest of us must mind our own business. If anything, he holds the possibility to bring a better recollection to his name.In recent years, Jim LeCorchick would take his dog Gypsy with him to work.
While LeCorchick talked about sports or politics, or whatever happened to be on his mind that day, she would perch near the radio studio's windows at 1 Boston Store Place in downtown Erie overlooking State Street.
Sometimes, Gypsy, a border collie mix he rescued after making an appearance at the Humane Society of Northwestern Pennsylvania,�could be overheard on the air barking at passing snow plows.
As far as Allan Carpenter is concerned, there is no better way to sum up who LeCorchick was and what he was about.
"A lot of times when people pass we say they were one of a kind, and usually that's not true," said Carpenter, LeCorchick's longtime colleague at WJET-AM/1400. "He really was, especially in the world of broadcasting where a lot of us spend a lot of time trying to sound professional. Jimmy was never interested in being anything but Jimmy."
LeCorchick died Thursday morning after collapsing at the WJET studios. He was 69.
EmergyCare medical personnel and Erie firefighters responded to reports of cardiac arrest at 6:10 a.m., around the time when LeCorchick was to go on the air for his 6 to 9 a.m. morning show on WJET-AM/1400.
LeCorchick walked into the nearby Rocket 101 radio studio at around 6:05 a.m., said "call 911," and collapsed, said Carpenter,�news director for WJET radio and on-air personality at Rocket.�
"He was taken to (UPMC) Hamot, but I think he had already passed," Carpenter said. "I think he was just coming out of a news break. He may have just started his show."
Erie County coroner Lyell Cook confirmed the cause of death but had no additional information.
LeCorchick served as a commentator for both the WJET-AM and the WFNN-AM/1330 Sports Blitz afternoon show. He also served as a play-by-play and color commentator for a variety of area college and high school sports throughout the years.
He was known for his outspoken opinions, his vast knowledge of Erie sports, and his signature use of the words "tremendous" and "unbelievable."
"He really provided a perspective on the history and the names from the past that's lacking with young athletes today," said Seneca High School football coach Dave Frank, an Iroquois High School graduate who grew up listening to LeCorchick and called in to his afternoon show on Monday. "There's just a huge void now. I don't know if one person can fill it."
LeCorchick frequently talked politics on the WJET morning show. On the�WFNN website he described his political leanings as "Independent,�dislike all politicians equally."
He also operated a website called JRLSports.com that focused on local coaches and athletes and frequently included his online exchanges with site visitors on a variety of topics.
The Cathedral Preparatory School graduate was a fan of the Cleveland Browns, Cleveland Indians and Notre Dame football. LeCorchick also�was a writer for the Erie Times-News decades ago.
Lifelong friend Jim Marnella, who met LeCorchick when the two played in the same Little League, graduated two years ahead of him at Prep and later worked dozens of football games with him.
"I'm sure he's up in heaven right now and he's angry that he's not going to be able to watch the Indians and Toronto Blue Jays," Marnella said of the American League Championship Series, which opens Friday night. "I'm going to miss him."
John Reilly first met LeCorchick in 1987 when Reilly was hired as an assistant by Gannon basketball coach Tom Chapman. The two became friends and frequent racquetball partners.
When Reilly returned as Gannon's head coach in 2005, they picked up where they left off.
"It would be hard to find someone with a deeper love of Erie sports than Jim," Reilly said. "He loved Gannon, and he was very loyal. He was always somebody I felt was on my side through the good times and the tough times."
Staff writer Gerry Weiss contributed to this story.
John Dudley can be reached at 870-1677 or by email. Follow him on twitter at twitter.com/ETNdudley.We’ve all had a bad haircut. It sucks, but it’s not the end of the world.
So it’s difficult to see why the government would have a compelling interest—let alone a legal justification—for putting would-be barbers through expensive, lengthy processes before they can legally earn a living.
But that’s exactly what happens in too many states. It’s called occupational licensing, and it’s ridiculous (emphasis added):
To understand just how out of control occupational licensing is, first consider the relatively reasonable example of emergency medical technicians. The Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public-interest law firm, estimated in 2012 that the average EMT license costs $85 and requires 33 days of education and training. Now compare that to other professions where the stakes aren’t so high — barbers, for instance. Alabama is the only state that doesn’t license them. On average, a would-be hair trimmer must spend more than a year in training and fork over $130. This may not seem like much, but it may be a serious barrier for a low-income job seeker who cannot afford to quit one job to train for another profession, often at his or her own expense and without a paycheck. In Nevada, the education and training requirement for barbers is 890 days — about two-and-a-half years. Cosmetologists must be licensed in all 50 states, and the average cost is $142, plus more than a year of education and training, and two exams. Commercial carpenters and cabinet makers, licensed in 29 states and the District of Columbia, fare even worse. They’re looking at about $300 and roughly 450 days in school.
Cosmetology involves skills like applying makeup and painting fingernails. In other words, it’s even lower risk than cutting hair. Bad service is fixed as easily as washing your face, writing a critical Yelp review, and finding a new cosmetologist.
Why is this a job that requires more training than being an EMT, which literally involves saving lives?
And in case you were wondering about how these licensing laws are enforced, in some places it gets real serious, real fast.
In Orange County, Florida, for instance, the local sheriff’s office sent an actual SWAT team to raid barber shops, making 34 arrests for the apparently super scary crime of “barbering without a license.” The SWAT team ran into the shops wearing masks and with their guns drawn, even though in some cases there were children present (!).
Other occupations—in fact, 25 percent of today’s workforce—are also affected by absurd occupational licensing requirements (emphasis added):
The list goes on — and gets increasingly more ridiculous. Seven states regulate tree trimmers, forcing them to fork over $174 and spend 369 days learning the ropes. Upholsterers and packagers — people who put things in boxes — also have the privilege of paying the government to ply their trade. And God forbid you want to become an interior designer in Nevada, Louisiana, Florida, or the District of Columbia. You’d better have nearly $400 and six years of time to get a license.
You read that right: in some places, you need a license to put stuff in boxes for a living.
The good news is that this issue is finally getting the attention it deserves. The libertarian law firm, the Institute for Justice, has been working against onerous licensing laws for a long time, and even the White House noticed last year that occupational licensing is a real problem.David Vitter criticizes gay marriage while failing to note his own infidelities.
Senator David Vitter (R-LA) is coming to the defense of a public school accused of proselytizing students by hanging “prayer boxes” around campus and affixing its newsletter and website with religious messages, Fox10 reports.
The ACLU accuses Airline High School in Bossier Parish of pushing Christianity on students with “prayer |
have fallen in love with brick. I carry in my head a taxonomy of drainpipes and cement and scaffolding; I’ve become, in the last decade, a night climber. A while ago I climbed up the side of Battersea Power Station, up the great smoke stacks, to look at the world as it lay below. It’s the largest brick building in Europe, and I wanted to see it before it disappeared.
It’s easier than you would think to get onto the walls of Battersea. You shin up a lamppost and drop down over a wall and there’s the power station, huge and already part dismantled, lying like an upended dinosaur in a sea of churned earth. I went with a friend – a barrister with anarchist leanings and the kind of physical daring I’d previously seen only in soldiers and toddlers – who had been to Battersea before. ‘The guards are fine. The worst that can happen with them is you get put in a cell for a night. But if you see a dog, get up high, because they’ll bite.’ Which is fine, except Battersea Power Station is next door to Battersea Dogs Home. Every few minutes I heard a bark and froze, ready to abandon my friend and run for the wall.
The first part of the climb isn’t hard. That night there was scaffolding, as easy to scale as a jungle gym, and we went silently, not speaking and trying not to breathe loud enough to attract the possible dogs. I left behind a little blood from my knuckles, but not much. The view gets more intricate, and the sky grows larger, as you leave the other buildings behind. Every few levels of scaffolding, pigeons took off. Battersea doesn’t look like a skyscraper, but it’s more than a hundred metres high. You come out at the top by pulling up over a ridge of bricks and scaffolding onto an expanse of grey slate, big as an empty town square, between two of the great white chimneys.
Giles Gilbert Scott believed in thoroughgoing industrial beauty. We found as we explored that the insides of the four great smoke stacks are lined with green-grey iridescent ceramic tiles. I’ve seen few things as beautiful; you could build a wall in them and outdo a king. Scott must have known that almost nobody would ever see them, but their presence is a bold and lovely fact. There are, too, flourishes built onto the walls, constellations of bricks like the work on the side of a cathedral, up near the top and too high to be seen from the ground. It’s this, the hidden life of buildings, that makes climbing seem a reasonable wager, to bet your safety against the promise of beauty.
At the very top, at the foot of the chimney, we decided it was high enough to risk noise. The air is sharper and colder up high. We played music, and danced a bit. Climbing the chimneys is a different enterprise; there are iron rungs set in the brick, like a ladder, but they are flush against the brick and were ice cold. I tried anyway. The river, seen from those chimneys on a cold clear night, looks sketched out in golds and silvers; it is a thing worth hunting for. But the wind was picking up enough to make my eyes water too badly to see, and my feet and hands were growing numb, so I climbed down without reaching the top. Another night, I hope.
Battersea, in fact, is a fairly simple climb, made ready by the builders who are destroying it. I began night climbing at Oxford, with a few friends, crawling out of windows and up drainpipes – the circular ones, never the more ornate square ones, which are likely to peel away from the wall – to see the city we were still in awe of from above. Oxford can be an uneasy place for teenagers not reared on self-belief and champagne, and it was emboldening to walk it from above; the closest you could get to conquering the city. But it was more than that; I have always loved to be up high, and I have always loved the electricity it puts in the blood.
Night climbing, when it goes well, works on the joy of quick and necessary decisions, on improvising in the two seconds in which your stomach and brain are in conflict. It is unmooring your sense of fear and self-preservation from your sense of hope and danger and adventure. There are moments that can’t be replicated anywhere else; nowhere at ground level offers the same pleasures as sitting with your back against chimney pots, or walking the apex of a rooftop, or looking down on the Tetris pattern of masters’ gardens and college quads. I discovered that All Souls has gargoyles with moss growing on their tongues. The former warden John Davis tells a story about the historian David Cox, who, as an undergraduate, climbed onto the Codrington Library and stole the weather vane from the Christopher Wren sundial. When he was elected a fellow, he climbed back up and replaced it. Nobody, as far as he could tell, had noticed its absence.
The world is huge up high. I’m not daring in most things – I cross roads at the green man and wear my seatbelt on a plane even when the captain has switched off the light – but heights offer a brick-dust puzzle-solving shot of joy that nothing else matches. Climbing walls make good rough drafts, and smell enticingly of chalk and human palms, but they’re not like the outside. Outside, the most real danger is from yourself. Philippe Petit, who strung a high-wire between the Twin Towers in 1974, was wise about vertigo. ‘It cannot be done all at once. To overpower vertigo – the keeper of the abyss – one must tame it, cautiously.’ When I stand on the edge of buildings I’m not afraid I’ll fall, I’m afraid I’ll jump. But so far I’ve had no accidents beyond a few twisted ankles, blistered fingers, and some deepish grazes that left my knees and shins patterned for a few years like a Turkish carpet.
‘I neglect God and his angels,’ Donne wrote in a sermon, ‘for the noise of a fly … a memory of yesterday’s pleasures, a fear of tomorrow’s dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an any thing, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayer.’ He was right: but if you want to know what it is to have one thought only, go climbing without ropes. I am not elegant on the ground, but on a wall I feel I am and there is nobody who can see well enough in the midnight to contradict me. It’s a cheap high but a very real one, to swing so close to disaster. Night climbing is better than most sex. Whipplesnaith, the author of The Night Climbers of Cambridge, puts it best: ‘If you slip, you will still have three seconds to live.’
I will never be anywhere near as good a climber, though, as Whipplesnaith was. His real name was Noël Howard Symington and he recorded the exploits of the night climbers in the 1930s in a book first published in 1937 and recently reissued.[*] The photos in it are remarkable: I wear flexible clothing to climb, black leggings and dark sweaters; the photographs show young men in brogues and spectacles, shirts and ties and corduroy trousers fastened high with a belt. The book evokes a certain kind of student – adult schoolboys with architectural jawlines and the right amount of money. Boys in love with one another’s brilliance and daring. Many of them went on to be true mountaineers; Wilfrid Noyce climbed in the 1953 expedition to Everest, and Symington went up Mount Kenya. Sometimes barefoot, in their respectable trousers, they climbed many of the hardest walls in Cambridge, and the book offers a guide for those coming after them: ‘Your feet are on slabs of stone sloping downwards and outwards at an angle of about thirty-five degrees to the horizontal, your fingers and elbows making the most of a friction-hold against a vertical pillar, and the ground is precisely one hundred feet directly below you.’ There are diagrams, carefully labelled: ‘Second overhang with parapet just above. C: Chess-board, at which point the stone becomes crumbly.’ It sounds so efficient, but there are moments at which their youth is very obvious: ‘This climber has developed a peculiar habit of saying “Goodie, goodie” at the end of every climb.’ Best of all, though, is the unexpected clarity with which Symington explains why they put themselves at risk: ‘The imagination, through its violent and constant use in climbing, receives a permanent increase in strength.’ And:
There is a kind of fear which is very closely akin to love, and this is the fear which the climber enjoys. It is, to use a contradictory term, a brave fear; a fear which announces its presence, perhaps very loudly, but raises no insuperable barrier to achievement. The climber enjoys being frightened, because he knows fear is no impediment.
A few years ago, there was a question in the All Souls fellowship exam: ‘What should we do with Battersea Power Station?’ Nobody who has seen it up close could believe that the solution the developers have come up with – flats, a shopping centre, a yoga studio and treatment rooms – is the right answer. The smoke stacks will be knocked down and rebuilt, without the ocean-grey ceramic to their insides. I am not, I know, clear-headed and politically unbiased on the question – but as a child I wanted to fly on dragons. The vast, brutal beauty of Battersea is the closest I am going to get.The world’s top competitive video gamers are facing off in China over the next few weeks for the League of Legends 2017 World Championship, one of the premier tournaments in the fast-growing world of esports.
Hosted by Riot Games, the company that makes the popular League of Legends (LoL) online game, the tournament’s early rounds turned in a fair amount of excitement and upsets, though last year’s champion is still standing. The Korean professional esports team SK Telecom T1 remains a favorite in a field that also features teams like Samsung Galaxy (sponsored by the South Korean electronics giant) and the North American team Cloud 9.
If none of those names ring a bell, then the rapid ascension of esports has likely passed you by. Competitive gaming’s popularity around the world has exploded in recent years, and the esports industry is now expected to generate more than $1.5 billion in annual revenue by 2020, according to one estimate.
Meanwhile, major professional sports teams like the New York Yankees and Cleveland Cavaliers are throwing money at esports, while tech giants like Amazon and Google compete to lure gaming fans to stream live gameplay and competitions on their digital video platforms, Twitch and YouTube, respectively. Last year, Riot Games (which is owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent) signed a reported $300 million streaming rights deal with Walt Disney’s BAMTech, and this year’s LoL world championship tournament is available for streaming around the world on Twitch and YouTube.
The influx of media rights deals has also opened the door for a range of high-profile corporate sponsors, with Riot Games landing sponsorships in recent years from the likes of Acer Gaming, Coca-Cola, T-Mobile, and Mercedes-Benz.
This week Fortune caught up with Jarred Kennedy, the co-head of esports at Riot Games, to discuss the world championship (the finals will take place Nov. 4 at the Bird’s Nest National Stadium in Beijing) as well as the overall growth of the esports industry and Riot’s plans, much like rival Activision Blizzard, to remodel its own esports league after major professional sports leagues like the NFL and NBA.
The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Fortune: What are some of the big storylines fans will be following heading into the quarterfinals of the LoL World Championships this weekend?
Kennedy: Where to begin? We’ve got some great teams that have made it through. Lots of regions are still alive. You’ve got your defending champions, SK Telecom T1, where they always are, which is contending. But, you’ve got teams that are potentially going to give them a run for their money. I think if [Chinese team] Royal Never Give Up and SK Telecom T1 wind up meeting in the semifinals in Shanghai that could be incredible. Honestly, any of the match-ups with the teams we have right now are going to be really fun to watch, because they’ve all proven themselves to get to this stage. And, the competition just keeps getting better and better the deeper we get into the tournament. That’s one of the reasons that worlds is so compelling.
Courtesy of Riot Games
How has the media rights aspect of the esports business expanded in recent years for Riot?
I think what you’re seeing is the maturation of our sport. With esports, I wouldn’t say it’s entered the mainstream, but it is increasingly an option that marketers look to. And, that’s great for us, because what we’re trying to do is build up the overall ecosystem, and having those increases in revenue coming in on that side allows us to invest in the professional players, the teams, and it allows these players to make a career out of this in a really meaningful way.
That leads into the bigger question of the esports industry’s overall growth trajectory. What are the areas of business that you think are most ripe for increasing revenue in the industry?
There are lots of different pools of revenue. Big ones would include media rights, which not unlike the NFL, NBA, or the Premier League, media rights are a large driver. For some games, including ours, there’s in-game content, and that’s something that’s unique to esports, as opposed to stick-and-ball or traditional sports, where there’s an opportunity for teams to participate in some of the in-game revenue streams. I think those are probably the biggest ones, but we’re always on the lookout for new ways to engage with fans of our sport.
You used to work at Sony Pictures Television. Would it benefit esports to make that leap to being more of a presence on traditional TV networks?
We don’t feel the need to go to TV as a point of validation. We’ve found that a lot of our fans of this sport are online, they tend to consume digitally, and thus the BAMTech deal and some other things we’ve done—negotiations with Twitch, YouTube, etc.—is just to serve them where they are. But, we’re not looking to be on NBC at 8 p.m. on a Saturday broadcasting to all of America, because we don’t think that’s where our fans want to watch, and we think it would probably be casting too wide of a net.
Why model Riot Games’ North American League of Legends Championship Series league after major professional sports leagues with revenue-sharing and a players association?
We’ve always looked at professional sports, not because we want to model exactly what other sports do, but even when you’re attempting to innovate, sometimes there are things that already exist in the world that work really well and work for a reason, and we shouldn’t be afraid to use some of that. Our goal is to have sophisticated owners of teams that can operate at a high level, know how to build businesses, know how to build sports, and who aren’t going to be working against each other, but are going to be collaborating in the best interests of fans around the world.
Going back to your point about esports not yet being in the mainstream, what needs to happen to put esports on the same level as one of the major professional sports leagues?
It takes time to get to the scale of where major sports are today, and I don’t think we have any illusions that we’re going to be able to do that overnight. We do have the advantage of being a digital property that tends to grow faster and can grow more virally. Friends tend to bring their friends into the sport, we found. We’re looking to build the best ecosystem for our fans that we can and we hope that by doing that it will thrive and grow, and over time we’ll have a chance to be as big as some of the major sports that exist today. But our primary goal is delivering value to fans day in and day out. And, if we can do that, then the rest will take care of itself.FACEBOOK SELLER: Charlotte Hurst of Pakuranga, pictured with her son Lincoln, uses Facebook rather than TradeMe to sell items online.
Thousands of East Auckland residents are turning their backs on TradeMe in favour of social media sites like Facebook to buy, sell and trade. But there are pitfalls if sales go bad.
Pakuranga, Botany and Howick Buy and Sell is just one of many Facebook group pages that enable members to publicly post photographs and descriptions of items they wish to sell.
The page has nearly 4500 members selling everything from cars to furniture, toys, and clothing.
Charlotte Hurst of Pakuranga said she started using Facebook to trade nearly a year ago because it was less hassle than TradeMe.
"I don't use TradeMe because you have to pay for it. You also have to list things individually and put them into categories. But on Facebook you just whack it all up at once and it sells really quickly."
Originally she used Facebook to sell clothing that her son Lincoln had grown out of, but has since sold toys, maternity clothing and furniture.
She said users can even buy alcohol and cigarettes, but there is a level of risk for buyers.
"Sometimes people get abusive or don't follow through with the purchase. Or they sell faulty or stolen goods."
Hurst said she watched a public witch-hunt unfold on the Facebook page after a man was "ripped off" by a woman who sold him a faulty television.
"He had copy of her photo and then asked people on Facebook if they could help him find her. Basically, the photo was shared and it went viral until they caught her."
Counties Manukau East area commander Inspector Wendy Spiller said police are working closely with second-hand dealers in the district to curb the trade of stolen property.
That includes the use of the anonymous tip line Crimestoppers. Facebook is an international site, but anyone trading in New Zealand is subject to this country's trading regulations.
"It is illegal to sell alcohol online without a licence. People can be fined up to $10,000, and police are certainly interested in hearing about people illegally selling alcohol without a licence, whether it is on Facebook or otherwise."
Meanwhile, head of TradeMe's trust and safety team John Duffy said the site hasn't seen any dents in trading due to Facebook commerce. But it understands TradeMe sellers are supplementing sales with Facebook selling.
He said social networking sites are great at connecting people, but don't do much to regulate trading conduct.
"We understand it's generally small and fraught with risks around fraud and lack of support when things go bad. Our team works hard to make sure TradeMe is a safe, trusted place to buy and sell."
Phone 0800 555 111 to contact Crimestoppers.Anonymous submission to Conflict Minnesota
Fire to the prisons!
Fire to the prisons!
We don’t need no water
Let that motherfucker burn!
– chant from the noise demo
At 8pm, answering the call for a noise demo in solidarity with the September 9th prisoner’s strike and to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the Attica uprising, people gathered in Elliot Park preparing to march on the juvenile detention center. A small black bloc arrived, carrying a banner that read “FIRE TO THE PRISONS” and began marching through the park. Flyers were handed out along the way to some of the people gathered at the park for a barbecue and to play soccer. Once we took the streets, construction barricades were dragged into the street to block them off for the march and to slow down any advancing police. We arrived at the youth jail after passing by the obnoxious new Vikings stadium and got some shouts of approval from skateboarding teenagers who even briefly joined us in shouting “Fuck 12!”
Once we arrived at the jail, fireworks were lit, pots and pans were banged together, drums were pounded, horns and whistles and even flutes were blown, and the cacophonous noise reached our friends on the inside who responded by dancing, pounding on the windows, and flickering the lights.
We stayed at the youth jail and made noise for about 10 to 15 minutes before moving on to our next target: The Hennepin County “Public Safety” building which houses adult detainees and sends a strong message that “public safety” to them means locking up black, brown, and Native folks disproportionately and punishing poor and homeless people for existing. On the way to the adult jail we paid a visit to prison profiteers Wells Fargo and a paint bomb found itself flying towards their windows.
The march continued snaking around downtown Minneapolis, attracting a lot of attention from drivers and pedestrians and giving us an opportunity to hand out some flyers explaining the reason for the noise demo and the prison strike. More construction barricades were dragged in the street, windows were smashed, and when the police finally did manage to catch up with us a dumpster was hurled towards them and slowed their advance. When we finally arrived at the “Public Safety” building there were some bystanders already there who joined our chants and briefly joined the noise demo outside the adult jail, some of them dancing.
The message of “fuck the police” and “fire to the prisons” resonated with many people, with some drivers honking their horns in support, residents of the Elliot Park neighborhood coming outside to watch with some of them showing support with raised fists, and the dancing inmates at the youth jail.
We returned to the park victorious and dispersed without incident, with the police not making any arrests or really trying to interfere at all other than a few bike cops trailing behind. We stand with all prison rebels fighting to end prison slavery and strike against white supremacy!
From Holman to Minneapolis
fire to the prisons!Cast iron skillets, before seasoning (left) and after several years of use (right)
Commercial waffle iron requiring seasoning
Seasoning is the process of treating the surface of a cooking vessel with a stick-resistant coating formed from polymerized[citation needed] fat and oil on the surface.
Some form of post-manufacturing treatment or end-user seasoning is mandatory on cast-iron cookware, which rusts rapidly when heated in the presence of available oxygen, notably from water, even small quantities such as drippings from dry meat. Food tends to stick to unseasoned iron and carbon steel cookware, both of which are seasoned for this reason as well.
Other cookware surfaces such as stainless steel or cast aluminium do not require as much protection from corrosion but seasoning is still very often employed by professional chefs to avoid sticking.
Seasoning of other cookware surfaces is generally discouraged. Non-stick enamels often crack under heat stress, and non-stick polymers (such as Teflon) degrade at high heat so neither type of surface should be seasoned.
Methods of seasoning [ edit ]
Food sticks easily to a new bare metal pan; it must either be oiled before use, or seasoned. The natural coating known as seasoning is initially created by a process of layering a very thin coat of oil on the pan. Then, the oil is polymerized[citation needed] to the metal's surface with high heat for a time. The base coat will darken with use. This process is known as "seasoning"; the colour of the coating is commonly known as its "patina".
To season a pan (e.g., to season a new pan, or to replace damaged seasoning on an old pan), the following is a typical process:
cleaning the cookware to remove residues from manufacturing or manufacturer-applied anti corrosion coating and expose the bare metal, applying a thin layer of animal fat or cooking oil (ranging from vegetable oil to lard, including many common food-grade oils), and heating the cookware to generate the seasoned coating.[1][2][3][4]
If it is not pre-seasoned, a new cast iron skillet or dutch oven typically comes from the manufacturer with a protective coating of wax or shellac, otherwise it would rust. This needs to be removed before the item is used.[5] An initial scouring with hot soapy water will usually remove the protective coating. Alternatively, for woks, it is common to burn off the coating over high heat (outside or under a vent hood) to expose the bare metal surface. For already-used pans that are to be re-seasoned, the cleaning process can be more complex, involving rust removal and deep cleaning (with strong soap or lye,[6] or by burning in a campfire or self-cleaning oven[7]) to remove existing seasoning and build-up. Once the pan has been heated, dried, and thinly layered with oil or fat, it is placed in an oven, grill, or other heating enclosure for the oil to be polymerized onto the metal's surface. The process of polymerization is dependent on the oil, temperature of the enclosure, and the duration. The precise details of the seasoning process differ from one source to another, and there is much disagreement regarding the correct oil to use. There is also no clear consensus about the best temperature and duration. Lodge Manufacturing uses a proprietary soybean blend in their base coats as stated on their website. Others use lard, or animal fats. Some advocate the use of food-grade flaxseed oil (a drying oil).[8] The temperature recommended for seasoning varies from high temperatures above 260 °C (500 °F) to temperatures below 150 °C (302 °F). Some say that a temperature around the smoke point of the oil or fat should be targeted since this will allow vaporization of the lighter hydrocarbons from the oil, leaving behind heavier molecules for optimal polymerization and carbonization to occur. And, there is also no consensus on the correct duration of heating: from half an hour to an hour is often recommended.
Seasoning a cast iron or carbon steel wok is a common process in Asia and Asian-American culture. While the vegetable oil method of seasoning is also used in Asia, a traditional process for seasoning includes the use of Chinese chives or scallions as part of the process.[9]
Surface chemistry [ edit ]
The seasoned surface consists of a polymerized and plasticized coating[citation needed].
The process of heating a pan to cause the oil to oxidize is analogous to the hardening of drying oil used in oil paints, or to varnish a painting. But whereas the curing of oils is the result of autoxidation at room temperature for a painting, for a pan, the thermoxidized oil undergoes a conversion into the hard surface of the seasoned pan at the high temperatures of cooking.
When oils or fats are heated in a pan, multiple degradation reactions occur, including: autoxidation, thermal oxidation, polymerization, and cyclization.[10][11] Often seasoning is uneven in a pan, and over time the distribution will spread to a whole pan. Heating the cookware (such as in a hot oven or on a stovetop) facilitates the oxidation of the iron; the fats and/or oils protect the metal from contact with the air during the reaction, which would cause rust to form. Some cast iron users advocate heating the pan slightly before applying the fat or oil to ensure that the pan is completely dry.[12][13]
The surface is hydrophobic, and oils or fats for cooking will spread evenly. The seasoned surface will deteriorate at the temperature where the polymers break down. This is not the same as the smoke point of the original oils and fats used to season the pan because those oils and fats are transformed into the plasticized surface. (This is analogous to how the smoke point for crude oil and plastic are different).
Care [ edit ]
As with other cast iron vessels, a seasoned pan or dutch oven should not regularly be used to cook foods containing tomatoes, vinegar or other acidic ingredients,[citation needed] as these foods will eventually remove the protective layer created during the seasoning process. Cast iron ovens are best suited to cook food high in oil or fat, such as chicken, bacon, or sausage, or used for deep frying. Subsequent cleanings are usually accomplished without the use of soap. Detergent soaps and dishwashers can remove the seasoning on cast iron, so some cookbook authors recommend only wiping the pans clean after each use, or using other cleaning methods such as a salt scrub or boiling water.[14] The protective layer itself is polymeric[citation needed] and not very susceptible to soaps, and many users do briefly use detergents and soaps. However, cast iron is very prone to rust, and the protective layer may have pinholes, so soaking for long periods is contraindicated as the layer may start to flake off.
Other surface types [ edit ]
In the process of bluing, an oxidizing chemical reaction on an iron surface selectively forms magnetite (Fe 3 O 4 ), the black oxide of iron (as opposed to rust, the red oxide of iron (Fe 2 O 3 )). Black oxide provides some protection against corrosion if also treated with a water-displacing oil to reduce wetting and galvanic action.
See also [ edit ]The embalmed bodies of a couple who died more than two decades ago are to be buried after their son lost a legal battle with the council.
Lord Mulholland granted Edinburgh City Council the authority to bury Eugenois and Hilda Marcel after their son made no arrangements to do so, keeping their remains at a property in Edinburgh for several years.
Hilda Marcel died on February 10, 1987 aged 68, while Eugenois died on August 31, 1994 aged 91.
In May 2002, police investigating another matter discovered that the couple had not been buried but were stored in their son Melvyn’s premises at Gilmore Place.
The embalmed bodies were moved from there to the city mortuary, where they are currently stored.
Prosecutors were told of the discoveries but no proceedings were brought and the procurator fiscal said the bodies could be released for burial or cremation.
Edinburgh City Council has been discussing the burial of the couple with Mr Marcel since 2012, but applied for permission to bury them after he made no arrangements to do so.
In his written judgment, Lord Mulholland said the council understood Mr Marcel planned to build a refrigerated unit in his residential property within which the bodies would be stored.
200 Voices: find out more about the people who have shaped Scotland
This would be a temporary measure until an above-ground vault was built.
It is understood Mr Marcel’s ultimate intention was to have the bodies of his parents transferred to the West Bank in the Middle East for burial.
Giving his judgment at the Court of Session in Edinburgh on Friday, Lord Mulholland said the city council has a “statutory duty” to dispose of the remains.
He pointed out that continuations of the case during the legal proceedings had given Mr Marcel time to make his own arrangements for burial of his parents, but he had not done so.
He wrote: “He has not taken up this opportunity and vague suggestions during his submissions (and in the pleadings and correspondence) that he intended to apply for planning permission for a mausoleum to house his parents’ bodies did not seem to me to be realistic or anything more than a vague statement of intent.
“He has had ample opportunity to make arrangements to dispose of his parents’ bodies in accordance with his and his family’s wishes.
“It should be noted that the bodies of the defender’s parents have been in the city mortuary for many years, no doubt at some cost to the City of Edinburgh at a time when the public purse is under significant constraint.”
Lord Mulholland said it would be helpful for the city council to “give due consideration to any realistic requests made by the defender and his family as to the arrangements for disposal of his parents’ bodies” and said it is important that the local authority “undertake their statutory duties sensitively and with respect, as I am sure they will do”.
A council spokesman said: “We acknowledge the Court of Session’s decision and will take the necessary and appropriate steps to bury the bodies.”The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is poking around for more information on the spurious dossier leaked to the media ahead of President Trump’s inauguration – this time, homing in on Andrew McCabe, the second in command at the FBI.
In a March 28 letter, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, told FBI Director James Comey he wants a detailed description on the involvement of Deputy Director McCabe in the investigation of Russian ties to Trump associates.
Grassley also wants to know whether McCabe’s involvement in the probe “raises the appearance a conflict of interest in light of his wife’s ties with Clinton’s associates” and whether it would merit McCabe recusing himself from the investigation.
Grassley was referring to McCabe’s wife having accepted $700,000 in political contributions facilitated by Hillary Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe, the Virginia governor, for her state Senate run.
As reported by The Washington Examiner, Grassley noted McCabe already is being looked at by the inspector general for his involvement in the Clinton email investigation, despite his wife's ties.
The Senate committee’s probe began March 6.
Given the latest letter, the panel appears to be looking to see whether McCabe faces similar conflict of interest concerns on Trump matters.
Grassley asked Comey for answers to 12 detailed questions into McCabe, including whether “anyone within the FBI filed a complaint with the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General regarding Mr. McCabe’s involvement in the investigation?” and whether anyone from the DOJ or the Inspector General had raised concerns “as to whether Mr.McCabe’s alleged partisan conflict would also apply to the investigation of Mr. Trump’s associates?”
The Senate Judiciary Committee is, more broadly, investigating whether the FBI wrongly included political opposition research from Trump’s opponents in its probe, and then paid the author of that controversial dossier, a former British spy, to work for the FBI on its investigation.
McCabe has periodically faced scrutiny for his family ties to the Clinton world.
Fox News reported last month that McCabe did not list his wife's 2015 donations or his wife’s salary in financial disclosure forms -- though such disclosure was not technically required.
Grassley, in his recent letter, revived concerns about McCabe's involvement in the Clinton email case.
“While Mr. McCabe recused himself from public corruption cases in Virginia – presumably including the reportedly ongoing investigation of Mr. McAuliffe regarding illegal campaign contributions – he failed to recuse himself from the Clinton email investigation, despite the appearance of a conflict created by his wife’s campaign accepting $700,000 from a close Clinton associate during the investigation.”This morning, I was feeling a little stir-crazy from being cooped up in my office, so I decided to stretch my legs and go to the cornerstore down the street. I got a bag of chips and while paying, asked the guy behind the counter how he was doing. He responded with a heavy sigh and said “Tired, man. I need a million dollars and i need to travel. Things are bad right now, man.” He made a tired half-joke about how maybe he’d win the lottery scratcher this week.
He didn’t offer any more info and I didn’t want to pry, so I told him that I hoped things would pick up for him, paid for my chips, and left. Walking home, I couldn’t shake a feeling of sadness about the conversation. I know what it feels to have life kick you in the teeth, and feel like you just need to get away from everything. How many times have I thought to myself “If only I had a million dollars.” However, I’ve come to realize that the wishful desire to have an arbitrarily large amount of money is a reflection of lazy thinking.
That sounds harsh, I know. Don’t get me wrong: I sympathize with this guy and I’m not trying to be dismissive of his situation. And I don’t even know what his situation is; maybe he really does need a million dollars for medical bills or something. But I doubt it. What’s more likely is that he’s just down on his luck, struggling through a rough time, and sees a large pile of cash as the solution.
In The 4-Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss talks about an investment banker friend who was working 80 hours a week for a big payoff in ten years, when he’d be making several million dollars per year. When Tim asked what he’d do with all that money when he got it, his response was “Take a trip to Thailand.”
The sadness of this answer is profound; too many people have come to believe that it will cost them millions to really live the life they want. How many people do you know who wish they had a million dollars? Probably more than you think. But the sad part is that most people don’t even want a million dollars; they want the things they think a million dollars can buy.
The biggest thing on that list: freedom.
But freedom doesn’t cost a million dollars. You can change, learn to live on your income, save money, travel on almost nothing, live abroad, follow your dreams. The world is full of more and more possibilities every day. More and more people are discovering freedom and opportunity beyond what they really thought was possible. Gary Vaynerchuk does a fantastic job of detailing these opportunities in Crush It!.
I spent months traveling around southeast Asia on a shoestring budget. I work for myself, when I want, where I want, on what I want, and I’m not wealthy by any stretch. Ironically, I’ve seen huge increases in my earned income, passive income, and net worth in the three years since I took the risk of breaking free and trying to create the life I want instead of waiting for it to come to me.
Here’s the reality: if you’re not the type of person who can create freedom without a million dollars, you probably aren’t the kind of person who will get a million dollars. Because both take a certain kind of ingenuity, discipline, and proactivity that most people seem to lack.
If you’re really interested in knowing what the journey looks like, check out Crush It! and The 4-Hour Work Week. You might not find everything in these books to be useful to your situation, but I guarantee it will spark some curiosity and new ideas in you, no matter who you are. I think I’ll give a copy of each to the guy around the corner next time I see him.I can feel that my electric fan has been struggling these past few weeks but kept on ignoring it.Then, just a couple of days ago, I woke up and found out that it already had enough. It won't turn and was just stressing its "engine" :) Fortunately, I have been tinkering and fixing electric fans at home since I was 13 so dealing with this one wouldn't be a problem.
Please watch the video to see exactly what's happening. (Apologies for the poor video quality and my horrible voice :))As I've mentioned - as long as the motor still humms or you can |
by the way. Very nice resin kits, but I don't think they are in business anymore.These days, H.P. Lovecraft seems to appear in just as many works of fiction as Cthulhu. But I can’t imagine that Lovecraft, who held himself in such high regard, would be entirely happy with the new forms his literary immortality has taken. Paul La Farge’s new book The Night Ocean would appall its inspiration, and that’s one of the many reasons you should read it.
As Tobias Carroll wrote recently, it’s become very difficult to talk about the purveyor of the weird and master of the unnamable without bringing up the crank, the racist, and the misogynist who shared his body. Horror readers may remember the pompous “old-purple-prose” of Charles Stross’s novella Equoid; comics fans may have met the prissily vicious racist in Warren Ellis’s Planetary or the more sympathetic figure in Alan Moore’s Providence. Michel Houellebecq, best known in this country for being French and perennially controversial, wrote a biographical essay praising Lovecraft for the courage to be Against the World, Against Life.
Lovecraft’s protagonists have a tendency to disappear, though they tend to leave their manuscripts behind so that we, the readers, can find out what has happened to them. Usually “what has happened” involves some combination of nameless ritual, unutterable horror, degenerate cultists, and inhuman monster. The Night Ocean begins with a disappearance, but never once hints at the supernatural. Charlie Willett, writer, Lovecraft obsessive, and psychiatric patient, has fled a mental hospital, hitched a ride to a forest, and vanished into a lake. His wife, Marina, isn’t sure Charlie’s really dead, but she has no illusions of supernatural intervention. Cthulhu sleeps beneath the Pacific in R’yleh; he wouldn’t deign to rest beneath Agawam Lake in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
As Marina recounts the story from their first meeting to the plunge from grace that ended in icy New England waters, the clues to scandal, fraud, adultery, and betrayal that litter the first chapter gradually come into focus, though Marina and Charlie both learn that some questions are by their nature unanswerable.
Charlie’s downfall begins when he discovers the Erotonomicon, a privately printed book from the early nineteen-fifties that seems to be Lovecraft’s personal sex diary. The early passages of the Erotonomicon show Lovecraft buying sex from Providence dockworkers and pubescent boys. Despite the daytime author’s paranoia about inferior races, the nighttime Lovecraft of the Erotonomicon has no compunction about interracial sex. Just what Lovecraft is doing with his partners remains unclear, as he writes in a ludicrous Mythos-code: Just what does it mean to “perform a Yog-Sothothe,” to complete “the Ablo ritual”? The greatest portion of the diary concerns Lovecraft’s relationship with Robert Barlow, a sixteen-year-old fan that Lovecraft stayed with in Florida for two months.
Charlie, a talented writer currently in need of a subject, soon takes a research trip to Barlow’s home in Florida, where he finds compelling evidence for an incredible secret. I don’t want to go any further lest I spoil one of the many surprises this novel offers. The true nature Lovecraft and Barlow’s relationship remains unknown, but attempts to uncover it bring the book’s characters to some very strange places. Great revelations turn out to be false and are then found to be possible after all; there are lies embedded in lies and truths denied; we are tossed by the waves of The Night Ocean until we no longer know which way is up.
Though the Erotonomicon is, thankfully, a La Farge invention, Barlow, like most of The Night Ocean’s characters, really lived. After Lovecraft’s death, he moved to Mexico City, where he became one of the world’s authorities on Aztec culture. He killed himself in 1951 after being blackmailed for his homosexuality. It’s a shocking ending to a sad life, and La Farge examines and re-examines the circumstances surrounding and the motives for Barlow’s suicide.
At first, The Night Ocean may seem to be a novel about Lovecraft; then it seems to be about Barlow, but as Charlie’s investigations proceed and as Marina struggles through her loss, the book grows beyond either man. The horror writer and his young friend are only two of the many lonely and demanding men in the novel. They all lie to themselves, deceive others, and remain solitary no matter what attention or affection they receive. These men suffer, it’s true, but as Marina finally remarks, they’re also capable of quite astounding acts of evil. Nyarlathotep are Cthulhu monstrous for their grandiose indifference, while La Farge’s men become monstrous by their grubby self-obsession.
Enjoying The Night Ocean requires no prior knowledge of H.P. Lovecraft, but readers who know their sff and their fan history will find in Paul La Farge a kindred spirit. Very early in the book, we learn how a youthful Charlie demonstrated his enthusiasm for Lovecraft: “We sewed ourselves black robes, and walked up and down Broadway in the middle of the night, holding signs that read THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH—GIVE TO THE CULT OF CTULHU.” After reading this novel, with its vast knowledge of and evident love for “the weird,” I am not at all surprised to learn that Paul La Farge drew this incident from his own life. While it hasn’t been marketed as such, La Farge may have written the first great novel of fandom. There’s a memorable account of the first WorldCon; multiple appearances by Frederik Pohl, Donald Wollheim (founder of DAW Books), and William S. Burroughs; and cameo roles for Isaac Asimov, S.T. Joshi, Ursula Le Guin, Hannes Bok, Robert Bloch, and August Derleth. There’s also a snooty European nihilist modeled on Houellebecq; his lecture on “posthuman jellyfish” is one the book’s funniest moments.
While “fannish” readers will enjoy reading a novel by a fan and about fans, La Farge is too honest a writer to show only the genre’s best face. From the bitter disputes conducted by mimeographed fans and angry telegrams to contemporary Twitter fights and doxing campaigns, La Farge gives us eighty years of fans behaving badly. Fandom is a lifeline that is all too often twisted into a chain or a noose.
For a novel about H.P. Lovecraft, The Night Ocean is surprisingly moving; for a story about the recondite back alleys of science fiction, it is surprisingly accessible; for a historical fiction, it is surprisingly contemporary; and for a novel about the unknowable and the mysterious, it is remarkably satisfying. The Night Ocean deserves the highest praise.
The Night Ocean is available from Penguin Press.
Matt Keeley reads too much and watches too many movies; he is helped in the former by his day job in the publishing industry. You can find him on Twitter at @mattkeeley.U.S. officials have confirmed to several media outlets that the Malaysia Airlines passenger plane that crashed near the Ukraine-Russia border Thursday was shot down by a surface-to-air missile.
The origin of the missile remained unclear, and both government officials and pro-Russia separatists fighting in the region denied responsibility.
There were 298 people on board, 283 passengers, including 3 infants, and 15 crew members. Ukrainian authorities told U.S. Embassy officials that everyone on the plane was "believed dead" and that the aircraft debris was scattered over a 10-mile swath of land, ABC News reported.
Malaysia Airlines posted a list of passenger nationalities on its website for the 298 passengers and crew: 154 Dutch, 27 Australian, 43 Malaysian (including 15 crew and two infants), 12 Indonesian (including one infant), 9 British, 4 German, 4 Belgian, 3 Filipino and one Canadian. The airline said it did not yet know the nationalities of the remaining 41 passengers.
An aide to Ukraine's interior minister quoted by Interfax claimed the total number of dead in the crash was more than 300 and included 23 U.S. citizens.
[Related: Biden: 'Apparently' Malaysian plane ‘shot down … blown out of the sky' for post-PUB CE]
President Barack Obama said the White House was working to determine whether there were U.S. citizens aboard the plane.
Speaking at a conference in Detroit, Vice President Joe Biden also commented on the crash, saying the aircraft "apparently had been shot down. Shot down. Not an accident. Blown out of the sky.
“We have seen reports that there may have been American citizens on board, and obviously, that’s our first concern," he said. "We’re now working every minute to confirm those reports as I speak. This is truly a grave situation.”
In an interview with Charlie Rose, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "there does seems to be some growing awareness that it had to be Russian insurgents. How we determine that will require some forensics. But then, if there is evidence pointing in that direction, the equipment had to come from Russia."
Clinton said if there is evidence linking Russia to the attack, "that should inspire the Europeans to do much more" to support Ukraine.
[Related: Planes rerouted after Malaysia Airlines crash: What you need to know]
Meanwhile, the head of Ukraine's emergency services told Reuters that search efforts at the scene of the crash were being hampered by "armed terrorists."
Anton Gerashenko, an adviser to Ukraine's interior minister, wrote on Facebook soon after the crash that the plane was flying at an altitude of 33,000 feet when it was hit by a missile fired from a Buk launcher.
Separatist leader Andrei Purgin told the AP that he believed Ukrainian troops had shot the plane down, but did not say why he was certain. Witnesses quoted by Russian media outlets said they saw a plane being hit by what they thought was a rocket, according to the news service.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said Ukraine's military was not responsible for the reported attack, which he called an “act of terror."
"We do not exclude that this plane was shot down, and we stress that the Armed Forces of Ukraine did not take action against any airborne targets," Poroshenko said. "We are sure that those who are guilty in this tragedy will be held responsible."
Malaysia Airlines earlier tweeted that it had lost contact with Flight MH17 over Ukrainian airspace:
Malaysia Airlines has lost contact of MH17 from Amsterdam. The last known position was over Ukrainian airspace. More details to follow. — Malaysia Airlines (@MAS) July 17, 2014
The airline later confirmed the crash, approximately 25 miles from the Russia-Ukraine border:
Flight MH17 operated on a Boeing 777 departed Amsterdam at 12.15pm (Amsterdam local time) and was estimated to arrive at Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 6.10 am (Malaysia local time) the next day. The flight was carrying 280 passengers and 15 crew onboard.
The plane crashed near a village called Hrabov in the Donetsk region, an area that has seen clashes between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russia separatist rebels in recent days.
On Wednesday evening, a Ukrainian fighter jet was shot down by a Russian plane, Ukrainian authorities told the AP.Former F1 team owner Jean-Pierre Van Rossem, whose Onyx outfit raced in the late 1980s, has formally asked to be euthanised at a time of his choosing in his home country, Belgium.
Van Rossem, a flamboyant character with the appearance of a 1960s hippie who held a degree in economics, had allegedly devised a computer-based system called Moneytron which could endlessly predict winning trades in the stock market.
Unfortunately, it all turned out to be nothing but a huge ponzie scheme. But before the operation was shut down, Van Rossem lavishly spent millions, acquiring Onyx and running the team in the 1989 world championship with Stefan Johansson and Bertrand Gachot.
Van Rossem later dabbled in Belgian politics but was equally unsuccessful and quickly discredited.
In a recent interview published on Youtube, the former millionaire and con-man said the time had come to put an end to his life.
"I've had a very tumultuous life, but now it's enough," explained Van Rossem.
"I am declining and I want to decide on my own when I will stop living. I hope to be able to say before the end of the year: 'Now is enough'."
"I've had beautiful women and owned beautiful women cars. At one point, I was worth $891 million, and I lost everything by betting against my own system. I will confer with my two sons about my decisions, and I hope they will understand."
GALLERY: F1 drivers' wives and girlfriends
Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter2NE1 kicked off TV appearance by performing “CRUSH” and “COME BACK HOME” in SBS “INKIGAYO” on the 9. Now, 2NE1 is to show a new appeal by performing “GOTTA BE YOU”, one of the double titles, this week.
“GOTTA BE YOU” was co-produced by YG producer TEDDY and PK. This light-tempo song has a popular appeal which especially comes from the strong impression created by the main part’s melody where MINZY and BOM cry ‘GOTTA BE YOU’. The song was selected as one of the double title tracks of 2NE1’s new album along with “COME BACK HOME”, for such an appeal.
After the release of 2NE1’s second full-length album on the 27 last month, they have been proving a big popularity by sweeping No.1 places in major music-streaming websites, as well as by making ten songs in their new album take top ten places in charts at the same time. As of today (12), two weeks after the disclosure of the new songs, “COME BACK HOME” and “GOTTA BE YOU” are still in the second and third places in the chart of Korea’s biggest music website Melon, proving a continuing popularity.
Even though a flood of new songs are poured into the music market every day, 2NE1 is creating multiple hits from one album simultaneously, which is a very rare case for a girl group. This confirms 2NE1’s status as Korea’s leading girl group.
“COME BACK HOME” also drew a big attention when its music video was disclosed and 2NE1 presented the song’s performance with the choreography directly created by YG’s head Yang Hyun Suk for 2NE1.
The performance of “GOTTA BE YOU” is to be first disclosed on TV this week and its music video has not been released yet. However, the song is creating a big sensation, so fans are all the more looking forward to seeing the performance of the song.
What choreography and style 2NE1 will show on the TV stage of “GOTTA BE YOU”, following the performance of “CRUSH” and “COME BACK HOME” disclosed last week, is exciting fans now.
2014. 3. 12.Voice control and other assistive technologies are on hundreds of millions of PCs and smartphones.
Voice-control features designed to make PCs and smartphones easier to use, especially for people with disabilities, may also provide ways for hackers to bypass security protections and access the data stored on those devices.
Accessibility features are there for a good reason—they make it possible to control what’s happening on the graphical user interface without typing. But if they aren’t designed carefully, these features can be abused.
Researchers at Georgia Tech found that they could sidestep security protocols by using voice controls to enter text or click buttons. In a paper on the work, the researchers describe 12 ways to attack phones with Android, iOS, Windows, or Ubuntu Linux operating systems, including some that would not require physical access to the device. The paper will be presented next week at the CCS’14 conference in Scottsdale, Arizona.
One attack showed how a piece of malware could use Windows Speech Recognition to talk its way into running commands that normally require a higher level of privilege, demonstrated on a laptop here.
Another demonstration showed how malware could attack a smartphone. It exploits the fact that Google Now, a voice-controlled assistant that comes with the Android operating system, can use a voiceprint in lieu of a typed passcode. The researchers show how an attacker might record the authentication phrase on a Moto X phone, and then use a generic text-to-speech program to issue other commands as if it were the user. The attack is shown here.
“This is an important wake-up call for major OS vendors: Microsoft, Apple, and the Linux community,” says Radu Sion, director of the National Security Institute at Stony Brook University.
Wenke Lee, the Georgia Tech computer scientist who led the work, says the problems appear to be the result of incorporating speech recognition and other features into phones late in the development cycle.
“I think there are fundamental issues here that are hard to fix,” says Lee. “These features were added after the OS had been implemented, so these features don’t have the same kinds of security checks.”
Hackers could exploit the vulnerabilities remotely to initiate or escalate an attack on a device, Lee says. Although a phone that starts speaking to itself could be fairly obvious to the user, a malicious app could keep track of motion data and wait until the phone was not moving for a long period, indicating that the user was probably not nearby, Lee says.WASHINGTON – The Miami Heat’s playoff hopes might be on life support entering tonight’s game against the Wizards, but don’t expect them to be looking for sympathy.
Even with reality setting in and it looking like Miami’s stunning second half of the season rally may fall short, coach Erik Spoelstra will not allow this team’s character to be defined by whether it is playing beyond Wednesday or not.
“Let’s go,” he said when asked how difficult it will be to return to the court tonight after a demoralizing 96-94 loss in Toronto on Friday.
“This is the life we chose. This is what these guys want. Competition is what defines these guys in that locker room. They’re not going to feel sorry for themselves, we’re not going to feel sorry for ourselves. We’re just going to lick our wounds and get onto the next battle.
“But there’s nothing better than getting into another competitive game. So much of this regular season there’s been talk about games being meaningless and everybody is just waiting for the playoffs. Well, come tune into the Miami Heat, you’ll see something different. These games are extremely competitive. Our guys are laying everything out on the floor. It’s really just a joy to watch and be a part of it.”
Friday’s game was, in a way, a snapshot of the season – slow start, make a frenetic push, come up just short. Unable to make shots, the Heat fell behind by 18 points in the second quarter. But they recovered, evened the score for 22 seconds in the fourth quarter, but never were able to get over the hump.
“Go there with no excuses and just play,” Goran Dragic said about tonight. “Through the whole season we never used excuses if somebody was hurt, if we were tired. We don’t care about that. We just want to do our job. It’s back-to-back but we’re playing a good team so we have to show we can do this.
“This season has been ups and downs, hills and mountains. It’s just one of those games we need to have it.”
[Hassan Whiteside accuses Raptors of flopping but his disappearing act was more harmful to the Heat]
[Five takeaways: Miami Heat rally falls short in 96-94 loss at the Toronto Raptors]
[Want more Heat news sent directly to your Facebook feed? Make sure to like our Heat Facebook page]This website is archived for historical purposes and is no longer being maintained or updated.
Press Release Embargoed Until: May 14, 2014; 12:01 a.m. ET
Contact: CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics
(301) 458-4800
About half of all Americans reported taking one or more prescription drugs in the past 30 days during 2007-2010, and 1 in 10 took five or more, according to Health, United States, 2013, the government’s annual, comprehensive report on the nation’s health.
This is the 37th annual report prepared for the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. The report includes a compilation of health data from state and federal health agencies and the private sector.
This year’s report includes a special section on prescription drugs. Key findings include:
About half of all Americans in 2007-2010 reported taking one or more prescription drugs in the past 30 days. Use increased with age; 1 in 4 children took one or more prescription drugs in the past 30 days compared to 9 in 10 adults aged 65 and over.
Cardiovascular agents (used to treat high blood pressure, heart disease or kidney disease) and cholesterol-lowering drugs were two of the most commonly used classes of prescription drugs among adults aged 18-64 years and 65 and over in 2007-2010. Nearly 18 percent (17.7) of adults aged 18-64 took at least one cardiovascular agent in the past 30 days.
The use of cholesterol-lowering drugs among those aged 18-64 has increased more than six-fold since 1988-1994, due in part to the introduction and acceptance of statin drugs to lower cholesterol.
Other commonly used prescription drugs among adults aged 18-64 years were analgesics to relieve pain and antidepressants.
The prescribing of antibiotics during medical visits for cold symptoms declined 39 percent between 1995-1996 and 2009-2010.
Among adults aged 65 and over, 70.2 percent took at least one cardiovascular agent and 46.7 percent took a cholesterol-lowering drug in the past 30 days in 2007-2010. The use of cholesterol-lowering drugs in this age group has increased more than seven-fold since 1988-1994.
Other commonly used prescription drugs among those aged 65 and older included analgesics, blood thinners and diabetes medications.
In 2012, adults aged 18-64 years who were uninsured for all or part of the past year were more than four times as likely to report not getting needed prescription drugs due to cost as adults who were insured for the whole year (22.4 percent compared to 5.0 percent).
The use of antidepressants among adults aged 18 and over increased more than four-fold, from 2.4 percent to 10.8 percent between 1988-1994 and 2007-2010.
Drug poisoning deaths involving opioid analgesics among those aged 15 and over more than tripled in the past decade, from 1.9 deaths per 100,000 population in 1999-2000 to 6.6 in 2009-2010.
The annual growth in spending on retail prescription drugs slowed from 14.7 percent in 2001 to 2.9 percent in 2011.
Health, United States, 2013 features 135 tables on key health measures through 2012 from a number of sources within the federal government and in the private sector. The tables cover a range of topics, including birth rates and reproductive health, life expectancy and leading causes of death, health risk behaviors, health care utilization, and insurance coverage and health expenditures.
The full report is available at www.cdc.gov/nchs.
###
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES8 SHARES Share Tweet Email *
Interview by Matthew J ( @IamJamesMatthew
BSCI: Before we start talking about the business aspect of your company and building process I want to ask you, who are the individuals that make up BLOCK BY BLOCK? How did this entire movement come to being?
We can start with me: my name is Sizeo and I am the creator of Block By Block ink. I'm born and raised in Toronto and have been involved in graffiti since '96.
As far as building the brand goes, it has been a two year process; set off from the influence from some friends of mine, but keeping it as local and homegrown as possible seemed only right as there was no real Canadian brand. It seemed like the right time to come out with a high quality product(s) that could be sold at a reasonable price for EVERYONE involved – from the people buying it to the dudes selling it. I got tired of seeing kids split their lunch money three ways to buy a pen only to find out that these [expensive pens] sucked and the guy who sold them could barely make a profit due to the high price.
After some serious research everything was set to go and the name BLOCK BY BLOCK just seemed right…it’s how you see the best a city has to offer…by getting out there and walking it BLOCK BY BLOCK, it’s how you build a solid foundation, and I’m not just talking about houses…could be your rep, career or brand, it doesn’t matter…..you start with a single block of ideas and expand upon that!
I couldn’t be doing this without the support of a number of people, and at the risk of forgetting someone I won’t try to name them all, but the daily operation comes from me but with massive support from Dazem with the web/IT shit!!! Designs and additional nerdy stuff has come from Herbs, Bien and Cody Finney.
BSCI: In Canada, it's not always easy to get "our own" artists and businesses off the ground, especially when looking at the art world, because so many people would rather support the American or other foreign bodies. Despite being its own sub-culture, I find that Canada has a tendency to be slow when it comes to supporting its own. For example: Banksy and Revok can get more love in Canada than EGR or Elicser. How supportive have Canadians -both individual and market wise- been to the Block By Block brand? How important is it for Canadians to get behind their own kind?
It’s of the utmost importance that we as Canadians throw our support behind our local artists and brands! We’re the second largest country in the world with the populist of the State of California spread over its huge land mass. At times, it can be difficult here BUT the support Block has received is HUMBLING on all fronts! We appreciate it.
BSCI: How important is word of mouth (advertising) concerning your product? I ask because unlike many American or European brands, BBB is not using slick-product ads or buying spots on websites. So how would you define your marketing strategy?
Word of mouth is so important as to what’s going on with Block; everyone wants to be the one to put the next dude on to some shit…were all guilty of it But using some slick promo ads would be sweet. If the money was there maybe there would be some high budget block AD…..but that wouldn’t be BLOCK, hard work from the network of friends that have been accumulated throughout the years of painting graffiti and social media have been kind to us! Our strategy is to be out there and to be honest. If Block wasn’t around prowling streets would still go on in my daily life!
BSCI: Let's do some a quick networking (roll call) and tell the readers where they can find Block By Block products?
Vancouver: SHARKS AND HAMMERS
Calgary: LE ROCK
Toronto: JOE HUFFERS, HOME BASE
Hamilton: BLAZEN
Ottawa: FALL DOWN GALLERY
Kingston: ROCKIT BOUTIQUE
Montreal: LE ROCK, SUB V
Houston, Texas (USA): REAL713
Of course at WWW.BOMBINGSCIENCE.COM and our site, www.blockbyblockink.com
BSCI: Your brand is steadily picking up momentum and gaining supporters, but do you feel -at this point- it is too early to say whether or not you're successful? From a business-world prospective, BBB (Block By Block) is one year old and considered "brand new" however -as a writer and crew- you have been around for quite a while and I suspect that reputation affords you a bit more clout and recognition than the typical start-up company. How would you define your success?
The measure of success differs person to person. Right now the main goal has been getting the product out to the people and they are taking notice – it’s amazing. Does that mean we’re successful and can hang out? Fuck no! Working hard is what’s up. Sitting around thinking about what you did seems like a waste. Pushing on; staying focused is the mo.!!!
Graffiti has given me an amazing network of friends, which I’ve used to promote the product and to reach out to shop owners through friends of friends etc. Using my own graffiti career wouldn’t get me that far….I’m not a talented artist, just a dude that’s honest about what I’m doing and willing to work hard for it.
BSCI: What kind of satisfaction do you get from knowing there are people using your ink to express their ideas? I imagine that would be an intense feeling.
Vandalism facilitation has been the most satisfying and stressful project I have been a part of. But while going out and walking the blocks and I can point out who’s using BLOCK and it drives me to walk that extra five blocks. That motivates me to stay up all night and get the boxes packed for the next day. Seeing those drippy tags make all the hard work worth it.
BSCI: BBB (Block By Block) seems to embody a true hustler's ideology of hard work and blue-collar effort paying off in the end. We all know the amount of work one puts into a task will reflect on its outcome-whether it be graffiti or business, the effort is essential. I want to know more about the effort; the work that goes not only into establishing your brand but also establishing yourself as a writer. What goes on behind-the-scenes to make this who thing a reality? How does that process work??
Block as a reality is fucked (hectic). It’s not my full time job so after being a productive member of society I spend a few hours each day- in the grind- filling bottles, completing orders and doing whatever I have to do in the office. Some days it takes three hours, others it’s over 16. To be honest, I don't always notice the time because this is like painting to me; it’s fun and seems natural to work hard at something.
The hardest part of branding Block has been documenting all it. It’s hard for me to stop and document things and be like, “LOOK! LOOK! THIS IS US!”
I feel nothing is cornier then seeing some douche writer be just that, a douche writer. So honesty has been the main format for not only my graffiti but for my brand, it’s really easy to be yourself…..it has awarded me some great things and limited a lot, as I will always speak my mind and do what seems right.
BSCI: Another way you have promoted BBB is through your Tumblr page which comes across as being very authentic to both your brand as well as the culture. How would you describe the content on this platform and what are your online intentions?
Tumblr is awesome; been slacking because of a lot of time is being spent on Instagram, too. I respect anyone on Tumblr that can keep the content 100% THEIRS. The guys at Mook Life have done an outstanding job at that! I like old paint, music and chicks with fat asses. If you can relate and like graffiti then follow us at, www.Blockbyeblockink.tumblr.com. Using the internet to help showcase our product and spread the word is the goal, we’re in a golden age of DIY marketing based on the internet that’s so close to the fundamentals of what graffiti was based on that it’s stupidly easy for someone with right attitude and a little bit of know how to push anything……that being said it will become a shit show of watered down consumer B.S. soon enough…….so ride the wave in the meantime, but don’t expect anything else but honesty from us!
BSCI: Apart from the production of new colors, which will be coming out soon, what else can we expect from the company in 2012? Do you have any big projects on the way?
NEW PEN JUST CAME OUT!!! A squeezer just dropped, working on a larger more Kiwi-type-style of pen, too AND OF COURSE SILVER, WHITE AND YELLOW are here and being distributed. Be sure to keep an eye out of the Vimeo/YouTube clips. We’ve spent a lot of time walking blocks with the homies filming and are so excited to drop the rest of the footage!!!!
BSCI: What does the future hold for BBB regarding international business? Do you plan on taking your product to other markets? I know a lot of people would love to get their hands on the ink you're selling.
Yes we have broken in to some foreign markets; we are now available for sale on the Australian version of Bombing Science called OZ GRAFF, ozgraff.com. We are available for sale in a few shops in the US, we will ship anywhere from our online shop and our homies at BombingScience.com can handle any order anywhere. Brazil is the next market about to crack (the deal is being worked on as this is being typed). We are willing to work with anyone interested in trying or carrying our product. Spreading the disease [of graffiti] is the goal. Although it was unexpected to have grown internationally, I must admit, we’re all VERY EXCITED at all of the new opportunities coming our way!!!!
BSCI: Before we end this, is there any final message you'd like to leave with the folks reading this interview?
I want to say THANKS to homies in UNC, VC, KPS, LSD, 56, UFOS, GH, AOR, STS, NWK, ETC, POSITIVE APPROACH, UNDER PRESSURE, and PYRAMID SCHEME CLOTHING. There are too many people to mention, but believe us; we haven’t forgotten those who have helped!!
Respect to Bombing Science and Matthew Johnson for the opportunity to speak my mind and let the public see what’s going on here behind the scenes. Shouts out to all the shops and to everyone that’s tried our product – without you this wouldn’t be possible.
Until next time, we’ll be out there doing our thing, no doubt. See you on the block!Toronto's $358,000 Parking Spot
Yesterday, the City of Toronto released their 2015 parking ticket dataset detailing raw information on every parking ticket issued last year in the city. Inspired by the fantastic I Quant NY blog, I started exploring the data to search for interesting trends. I also used the 2013 and 2014 datasets to compare results year over year.
I decided to start by looking into the tickets issued for the city’s max fine of $450. These tickets are given for several variations of parking illegally in a handicapped zone. Some of the most frequently cited addresses make intuitive sense: 555 Rexdale Blvd (Woodbine), 1090 Don Mills Rd (Shops at Don Mills) and 3401 Dufferin St (Yorkdale). All are large crowded areas where drivers might try to get away with parking in handicapped spots.
But, most of the city’s biggest cash cows are more obscure spots that have consistently flummoxed Toronto drivers. Toronto’s undisputed king of max fine parking tickets, doubling any other address in the city, is 410 College St. In 2015 alone, 796 tickets were issued for a total of $358,200. This is not a one year aberration. The spot generated $401,850 in 2014 and $291,150 in 2013. It is tough to tell, but you can judge what is causing the issue for yourself with the Google Street View image below (in which a likely victim is parked in the spot).
410 College St
No other address in Toronto is as consistent a revenue producer as 410 College, but there are several other spots that seem to be a lock every year for $100,000+ in max fine ticket revenue. 18 Grenville St seems like another awkward place for a handicapped designation. In 2015 the spot averaged close to a max fine a day, 342 tickets for $153,900. Each of the last three years max fines at 18 Grenville have topped $145,000.
18 Grenville St
Another Google Street View image with a likely victim in the still shot. This is across the street from 35 Balmuto just outside an eastside exit from the Manulife Center. This spot has topped $100,000 in fines the last three years with 2015 seeing 326 tickets for $146,700.
35 Balmuto St
The last of Toronto’s prolific max fine spots, 60 Murray St just west of Mount Sinai hospital. In 2015 this spot produced 287 tickets for $129,150, its lowest total of the last three years.
60 Murray St
If you liked this post, you can share it with your followersWhile there is no doubt that we, as ostensibly civilized human beings, have come a long way since the Civil Rights Movement back in the late 1960’s, there is no denying, however, that racism and racial stereotyping is still very much alive and kicking today. We can certainly fool ourselves all we want into believing that racism/racial stereotyping hardly exists, due to the reason that many parts within North America has now become a melting pot of diverse ethnic races that are now seemingly “living in harmony”; yet, the fact of the matter is that intentional, as well as unintentional, forms of racism still exist, and it manages to leak into our everyday lives, despite our being an ‘enlightened’ and ‘progressive’ society.
More so, sadly, I sometimes hear colleagues, acquaintances as well as people I’ve barely met start conversations with, “I am not racist, but…” and it perturbs me because these people are fully aware of the blatant racist or stereotypical remark that they’re making, yet are completely oblivious to the fact that they themselves are in fact racist too, or have some sort of phobia against certain races. These are people who are unintentionally racist. They realize that what they are about to say will mostly likely be perceived as inappropriate and offensive, but they don’t mean to cause any harm; they may actually mean well –for the most part, at least. These are people who have, unfortunately, fallen prey to the uncanny societal stereotypes that currently exist in our society. They may or may not agree |
had moved off of the sub pen's roof and set down to form a small trench in the snow on the hill just to the north, wearing a wide grin. It'd taken the better part of today to get back and have everything set up, including allocating Extra Edition and the other newsponies that could make it to their own trench a short way away from ours, but it was all going to be worth it in the end.
Static sat down beside me, glancing up to the cameras that rested side by side and letting off a small grumble. "Well, they're set up now. Hopefully we'll get this in true enough color when it happens, this lighting isn't showing much through the viewfinder, and I don't want to be staring through eitehr of them at it. Wish I would've known we were going to be doing this back when we stopped at that hardware store, could've grabbed more goggles..."
Wearing a smirk, I pulled the pair I had out of my saddlebags, tossing them over to him. He fumbled with them for a moment, before finally holding them still and looking at them. Glancing over to myself, I let off a shrug, leaning back in the small trench. "Take 'em, I'm not using 'em. Was a trick I remembered seeing on those old test films my dad has, can see the blast and fireball much clearer if you do the wait ten seconds trick, and I'm gonna be able to see it in full glory while you're watching through a tinted lens.'sides, there's the cameras, too."
"I'm never going to understand why you like watching these things that can potentially injure you for life, or worse." Static let off a small chuckle as the rest of us settled in in the small trench, myself scooching over to the portable military radio we'd pulled from that training camp. Tuning in the dial, I poked my head over the sandbags, staring out towards the north at where the Battered-Sea Power Station stood, and where Shady Shores Biological Research sat beneath it. "So, almost ready for setting this thing off?"
"Almost, we just need the detonator. Scouring?" Looking to the power armored unicorn, he returned a nod, turning his helmeted head around to look towards his armor's stowage compartments. After a few moments of searching, however... well, needless to say this was starting to get a little worrying. "Eheh... um, you do have it, r-right?..."
Scouring looked towards me to speak, though was interrupted almost immediately by a cheerful Pearl levitating herself over. "Hiya guys! Sorry about taking so long, was just doing some touching up to the detonator. I have a label-maker on this chassis, useful! Oh, here you go." Wearing the smiling face on her screen-stalk, her pincher arm presented the detonator, which thankfully looked relatively unchanged and prompted a sigh of relief from Scouring, and myself. Taking it from her, I took to looking it over, eventually spotting her addition - a white sticker label, marked with the words 'SCIENCE BUTTON'. Well, she's got a sense of humor, I'll give her that.
"Alright, let's get this show started. Pearl, might want to keep down after it blows, don't want to know what the blast will do to that flat screen of yours." The robot gave a nod... I think, settling herself in the trench with the rest of us and giving one last glance over the sandbags. Wearing a smile, I turned back to the radio, pushing the button for the microphone. "Radio KAOS, come in Radio KAOS, we're all set here, what's your status?"
There was a moment of silence before White Noise came over the radio, the music coming from the other trench making it apparent we weren't patched in just yet. "Ahm, we're good and ready to go here, if you guys are. I'll just get the recording systems and feed-patch going... mmmnh... alright, good luck guys. Patching you into the broadcast in three, two, one."
The music went silent from the reporter's trench, myself pushing on the microphone talk button. Oh, this is so exciting! "Hello North Vanhoover, this is Night Strike of the Vanhoover Five, and we're coming to you live from a little makeshift trench just up the coast. We're going to be conducting a ground burst of a five hundred tons of TNT equivalent tactical megaspell, aimed to entirely destroy the hidden Shady Shores Biological Research facility and take all of the Anglerpony eggs there with it. And to indulge in something I've really wanted to do since we crashed down here... ahm, anyways, eheh. At this point I'd seriously suggest anypony without welding goggles on or a wish to be permanently blinded face in any direction other than the north or west, we don't know exactly how this thing will look but it'd be brighter than the sun during the daytime, so night can only be worse."
I picked up the detonator and rested it on the radio, with my hoof poised to push the tongue trigger on top of it. Ooooh, here it comes... "Countdown's starting now, so everypony brace yourselves. Twenty seconds to detonation... nineteen, eighteen, seventeen..." The chill night air blew over the trench, Static and Aerith adjusting their welding goggles one last time. "...sixteen, fifteen, fourteen..." There was some small scrambling over in the press trench, myself positively giddy with excitement. "...thirteen, twelve, eleven..."
"Ten." Another breeze blew over the trench, carrying some fluffy snow with it. "Nine." Cloudy breaths hung in the air as everyone who could watched out towards the north. "Eight." The breeze died down, everything becoming eerily quiet. "Seven." The earth pony beside me adjusted the artillery earmuffs he had on - C'mon, a little tinnitus never hurt anyone. "Six." Five seconds left to go...
"Five." A stupid grin was plastered on my face, staring down at the detonator on the radio.
"Four." Scouring's armor whirred slightly as he adjusted himself - or it could've been Crash Dive.
"Three." Okay, that might've come out as'squee', but I'm hyped, damnit!
"Two." Sweet Luna above, here it comes...
"One."
The detonator clicked as my hoof pushed it in, and a fraction of a second later the sky behind me lit up in a brilliant, blinding flash, brighter than the sun, brighter than the Solar Burst grenades, brighter than anything I'd ever seen before. The breath was sucked out of me as I slowly, agonizingly watched the intense light fade around me, scooting forwards to turn around. Still keeping my eyes below the trench line, I slowly lifted myself up, eyes wide and watering - if it was from the wind or the beautiful sight set before myself, I didn't know. I would like to claim the latter.
A gigantic, white-hot fireball was rising far off to the north right on the coastline, followed by a thick dark-brown stem as the head cooled off to a yellowish-orange color, rising high and mighty above the wasteland. What felt like an eternity later, the white wall of disturbed fluff in the shockwave's wake could be seen racing across the snowy wastes, heading straight for us. I kept my head above the trench as the shockwave finally struck us, thunderous and loud, making the ground vibrate violently and throwing myself against the back of the trench, a very wide and very stupid grin plastered clean across my muzzle. I let off a shuddering moan I hadn't realized I was holding in, letting my limbs fall limp as the mushroom cloud continued to rise and the snow started to settle back down.
Pearl stuck her screen-stalk up above the trench after the shockwave passed, and - in a way slightly different than me - couldn't contain herself. "YEAH! WE DID IT! SCREW MY HOUSE!!" I broke out into a bit of laughter as the robot beside me made her joyful exclamation, catching my breath. Alright... I've had my hoof on the microphone button this whole time. Whoops.
"Ah... heh... w-well, there you have it Vanhoover, the Battered-Sea Power Station and Shady Shores Biological Research are now no more than a glowing crater in the ground. Radiation showers are expected to fall upon Hornsworth, Happy Valley Camp Site, and Maple Station in the coming days, and for now... well, I hope you enjoyed the show as much as we did. I'll give the broadcast back over to Radio KAOS n-" A short scream came from the press trench, Aerith being the first to look over to it, myself shuffling around to see what she was looking at. Pulling the goggles off, she turned to stare out towards the north, myself glancing over the trench's edge and catching... something, in the air, heading closer to us and leaving a firey trail in it's wake. That... is not good. "U-uh... there's been a small development here... please stand by."
Releasing the microphone button with a click, the air was filled with a droning noise as the firey craft drew ever closer, some of the press ponies running away in the direction that the thing was crashing. Well... okay. Watching it as it drew ever closer, it kind of looked like an aircraft, with the same big propellers that the Seaddler has and two upright fins on the back, but the design was just... strange. I didn't think a circle could fly like that... well, I mean, it probably does do a better job when it isn't on fire!
The craft sent up a heavy spray of snow as it skidded along the coastal plain, eventually coming to a stop just shy of the trenches, the part that connected to the right propeller still on fire. Spreading my wings wide and giving them a flap, I darted up out of the trench, Aerith right behind me and the rest rushing on the ground. Oh, come on, please be okay... why do these propeller planes keep on falling out of the sky near us!?
Landing against the snow with a dulled thud, the strange pancake-shaped craft showed it's full size, Aerith already beginning to heft as much snow as she could manage with her magic onto the right propeller cover to stem the flames. I moved up and over to the cockpit, looking through the foggy glass at a stallion passed out at the controls, a trickle of blood coming down from under his leather cap and staining his greyish coat. Okay, really hope he is just passed out... A lever alongside the canopy caught my eye, myself pulling it and dragging the glass cover back, Aerith and the rest of the group coming over to meet me. The pilot let off a long groan - good, good, just passed out.
As we worked with getting the seat restraints undone and the stallion out, another pony came galloping up to us, her exhausted breaths causing heavy clouds in the frigid night air. Oh, right, of course... had to say the press is welcome to watch the bomb go off. Extra Edition spent a while catching her breath as Aerith and Scouring carefully pulled the pilot out, eventually forming a few words.
"Seriously... what is it with this coastline attracting crashing air craft!?"
Full Story Arc
Fallout: Equestria created by kkatmanWhy Fed Inflation-Phobia Mattered
Last week I posted an item summarizing Matthew O’Brien’s article about the just-released transcripts of FOMC meetings in June, August and September of 2008. I spiced up my summary by quoting from and commenting on some of the more outrageous quotes that O’Brien culled from the transcripts, quotes showing that most of the FOMC, including Ben Bernanke, were obsessing about inflation while unemployment was rising rapidly and the economy contracting sharply. I especially singled out what I called the Gang of Four — Charles Plosser, Jeffrey Lacker, Richard Fisher, and Thomas Hoenig, the most militant inflation hawks on the FOMC — noting that despite their comprehensive misjudgments of the 2008 economic situation and spectacularly wrongheaded policy recommendations, which they have yet to acknowledge, much less apologize for, three of them (Plosser, Lacker, and Fisher) continue to serve in their Fed positions, displaying the same irrational inflation-phobia by which they were possessed in 2008. Paul Krugman also noticed O’Brien’s piece and remarked on the disturbing fact that three of the Gang of Four remain in their policy-making positions at the Fed, doing their best to keep the Fed from taking any steps that could increase output and employment.
However, Krugman went on to question the idea — suggested by, among others, me — that it was the Fed’s inflation phobia that produced the crash of 2008. Krugman has two arguments for why the Fed’s inflation phobia in 2008, however silly, did not the cause of the crash.
First, preventing the financial crisis would have taken a lot more than cutting the Fed funds rate to zero in September 2008 rather than December. We were in the midst of an epic housing bust, which was in turn causing a collapse in the value of mortgage-backed securities, which in turn was causing a collapse of confidence in financial firms. Cutting rates from very low to extremely low a few months earlier wouldn’t have stopped that collapse.
What was needed to end the run on Wall Street was a bailout — both the actual funds disbursed and the reassurance that the authorities would step in if necessary. And that wasn’t in the cards until, as Rick Mishkin observed in the transcripts, “something hit the fan.”
Second, even avoiding the financial panic almost surely wouldn’t have meant avoiding a prolonged economic slump. How do we know this? Well, what we actually know is that the panic was in fact fairly short-lived, ending in the spring of 2009. It doesn’t really matter which measure of financial stress you use, they all look like this:
Yet the economy didn’t come roaring back, and in fact still hasn’t. Why? Because the housing bust and the overhang of household debt are huge drags on demand, even if there isn’t a panic in the financial market.
Sorry, but, WADR, I have to disagree with Professor Krugman.
The first argument is not in my view very compelling, because the Fed’s inflation-phobia did not suddenly appear at the September 2008 FOMC meeting, or even at the June meeting, though, to be sure, its pathological nature at those meetings does have a certain breathtaking quality; it had already been operating for a long time before that. If you look at the St. Louis Fed’s statistics on the monetary base, you will find that the previous recession in 2001 had been preceded in 2000 by a drop of 3.6% in the monetary base. To promote recovery, the Fed increased the monetary base in 2001 (partly accommodating the increased demand for money characteristic of recessions) by 8.5%. The monetary base subsequently grew by 7% in 2002, 5.2% in 2003, 4.4% in 2004, 3.2% in 2005, 2.6% in 2006, and a mere 1.2% in 2007.
The housing bubble burst in 2006, but the Fed was evidently determined to squeeze inflation out of the system, as if trying to atone for its sins in allowing the housing bubble in the first place. From January to September 10, 2008, the monetary base increased by 3.3%. Again, because the demand for money typically increases in recessions, one cannot infer from the slight increase in the rate of growth of the monetary base in 2008 over 2006 and 2007 that the Fed was easing its policy stance. (On this issue, see my concluding paragraph.) The point is that for at least three years before the crash, the Fed, in its anti-inflationary zelotry, had been gradually tightening the monetary-policy screws. So it is simply incorrect to suggest that there was no link between the policy stance of the Fed and the state of the economy. If the Fed had moderated its stance in 2008 in response to ample evidence that the economy was slowing, there is good reason to think that the economy would not have contracted as rapidly as it did, starting, even before the Lehman collapse, in the third quarter of 2008, when, we now know, the economy had already begun one of the sharpest contractions of the entire post World War II era.
As for Krugman’s second argument, I believe it is a mistake to confuse a financial panic with a recession. A financial panic is an acute breakdown of the financial system, always associated with a period of monetary stringency when demands for liquidity cannot be satisfied owing to a contagious loss of confidence in the solvency of borrowers and lenders. The crisis is typically precipitated by a too aggressive tightening of monetary conditions by the monetary authority seeking to rein in inflationary pressures. The loss of confidence is thus not a feature of every business-cycle downturn, and its restoration no guarantee of a recovery. (See my post on Hawtrey and financial crises.) A recovery requires an increase aggregate demand, which is the responsibility of those in charge of monetary policy and fiscal policy. I confess to a measure of surprise that the author of End This Depression Now would require a reminder about that from me.
A final point. Although the macroeconomic conditions for an asset crash and financial panic had been gradually and systematically created by the Fed ever since 2006, the egregious Fed policy in the summer of 2008 was undoubtedly a major contributing cause in its own right. The magnitude of the policy error is evident in this graph from the St. Louis Fed, showing the dollar/euro exchange rate.
From April to July, the exchange rate was fluctuating between $1.50 and $1.60 per euro. In mid-July, the dollar began appreciating rapidly against the euro, rising in value to about $1.40/euro just before the Lehman collapse, an appreciation of about 12.5% in less than two months. The only comparable period of appreciation in the dollar/euro exchange rate was in the 1999-2000 period during the monetary tightening prior to the 2001 recession. But the 2008 appreciation was clearly greater and steeper than the appreciation in 1999-2000. Under the circumstances, such a sharp appreciation in the dollar should have alerted the FOMC that there was a liquidity shortage (also evidenced in a sharp increase in borrowings from the Fed) that required extraordinary countermeasures by the Fed. But the transcript of the September 2008 meeting shows that the appreciation of the dollar was interpreted by members of the FOMC as evidence that the current policy was working as intended! Now how scary is that?
HT: Matt O’Brien
AdvertisementsLate Late Show host James Corden criticized President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender soldiers in a remake of a 1960s hit.
The CBS late night star rewrote the lyrics to Nat King Cole’s L-O-V-E – instead calling it L-G-B-T.
Corden took Trump to task for his ‘dumb knowledge’ and for ‘having hate for me and you.’
Late Late Show host James Corden on Wedesday criticized President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender soldiers in the best way he knows how – with a song
The CBS late night star rewrote the lyrics to Nat King Cole’s 1964 hit L-O-V-E – retitling it L-G-B-T
Corden took Trump to task for his ‘dumb knowledge’ and for ‘having hate for me and you’
He noted in the song that ‘transgender troops are not a huge expense’ – refuting Trump’s rationale for the ban.
‘Trump wants to seem like a manly man…overcompensating for his tiny hands,’ Corden sang.
The surprise announcement by Trump, who as a presidential candidate last year vowed to fight for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people, came in a series of morning Twitter posts.
It drew condemnation from rights groups and some lawmakers in both parties as politically motivated discrimination but was praised by conservative activists and some Republicans.
He noted in the song that ‘transgender troops are not a huge expense’ – refuting Trump’s rationale for the ban
‘Trump wants to seem like a manly man…overcompensating for his tiny hands,’ Corden sang
The surprise announcement by Trump, who as a presidential candidate last year vowed to fight for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people, came in a series of morning Twitter posts
It drew condemnation from rights groups and some lawmakers in both parties as politically motivated discrimination but was praised by conservative activists and some Republicans
The administration has not determined whether transgender individuals already serving in the military would be immediately thrown out, a point the White House and Pentagon have yet to decide, Trump spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.
A transgender ban would reverse Democratic former President Barack Obama's policy and halts years of efforts to eliminate barriers to military service based on sexual orientation or gender identity.Jaxx abruptly canceled its much-anticipated integration of Monero into its platform, citing “too many difficulties.”
The multi-coin wallet, which integrates across a variety of platforms with a focus on user experience, was slated to integrate the privacy-centric cryptocurrency last year, but faced repeated delays. CEO Anthony Di Iorio announced the cancellation news via Twitter:
Saddens me to announce we've halted @jaxx_io @monerocurrency near term integration plans. Too many difficulties. Need to refocus resources. — Anthony Di Iorio (@diiorioanthony) February 2, 2017
The integration was reportedly almost complete, with Di Iorio posting screenshots of the wallet with Monero integrated.
Issues hindering the integration
During the integration process, Jaxx reportedly came across technical difficulties with the currency Monero ecosystem, detailed in a blog post by Di Iorio on Dec. 19:
“We believe to have determined the critical issues that are leading to problems with Monero growth and that these problems are hindering the adoption and success of the Monero ecosystem. As such we are putting a call out for support from the Monero development community to help us break through these problems. We are confident that if these roadblocks can be bypassed, Monero has a great chance to flourish. We believe that unless solved, these issues will greatly hinder Monero’s ability to compete with projects that have similar features.”
Di Iorio outlined three major challenges facing the integration process, and potentially threatening any future integrations into similar light wallet systems:
Non-existing lightweight client library support - for a project as old as Monero its peculiar no dev has done this.
We would have to implement support for anonymization features.
There are RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) API Limitations that would require changes in the Monero daemon.
Hints at difficulties working with the Monero community
To speed up the integration process, Di Iorio worked closely with key Monero developer Fluffypony, though he stated that it was not sufficient to complete the process in a timely manner: “As mentioned in previous update posts, we’d like to thank Fluffypony for providing us with assistance with the integration. But we need more help than he’s been able or willing to provide.”
Di Iorio’s comments seem to hint at a possible conflict of interest on the part of Fluffypony, noting his role as both a main contributor to the Monero GitHub as well as running the popular Web wallet MyMonero, possibly giving an incentive to limit the amount of assistance provided:
“The issue is that his help has been limited as although he is a main contributor to Monero, he also owns MyMonero and has a profit incentive not to give away his “secret sauce” on the back-end. You see, MyMonero hooks right into the code and this coupled with him being one of the few main contributors on the Monero Github gives MyMonero an upper hand against other projects trying to create similar services.”
A key source of conflict seems to have been a difference in communication channels, with the Jaxx team preferring to conduct conversations on their own Slack channel in private, while the Monero community preferred public conversations on their own subreddit.
In a post in /r/Monero, which contains well over 100 comments and underscores the communication divide, Di Iorio underscored this conflict as a key factor in the decision to keep integration discussions off Reddit:
“We are re-evaluating our transparency and use of Reddit to communicate with the Monero community. The amount of venomous comments and lack of support in response to said comments are really disheartening and don't inspire us to continue working on the Monero integration...but maybe that's what some of those commenting want. After internal discussions, we've decided not to use Reddit anymore to discuss our Monero plans. Turning out to be more detrimental to our team then [sic] its worth. Moving the discussions fully to our Slack channel and our other social media avenues.”
Problems reconciling closed-source and open-source approaches?
In a comment on Reddit, Fluffypony maintained that he had given more than enough assistance to the Jaxx team, and expressed frustration at the way communication between the two teams had played out.
“I'm not sure what more you want, when the code to do EVERYTHING you need has been given to you, both in C++ for the backend/frontend, and in JS for the frontend,” he explained. “I'd also like to point out that some of your developers frequently took conversations to private message, despite me asking them to have the conversation in the channel so that all of the Jaxx developers in the channel could benefit from it.”
Fluffypony ultimately underscored a key sticking point of a closed-source versus open-source approach, and the challenges of reconciling the two: “Unfortunately we cannot write your closed-source proprietary tools for you, nor can I give you MyMonero backend source (even though I offered several times to structure something around that).”
Backlash against Jaxx
The response to the decision to halt plans for Monero’s integration was taken with a degree of hostility by the community on Reddit. Purported core team member Othexmr said: “Lol wut, they claimed they are finished with xmr integration. they were simply lying like all [censored] scammers in this space.”
“It was obvious they were full of [censored] after the delays started. Either they have the [censored]iest devs in the industry, or they were just doing this in a (failed) attempt to manipulate the market. Constant delays, blaming Fluffypony, etc.,” user Brilliantrocket said. “Please stick to making wallets for Bitcoin clones/scam coins, apparently that's all you guys are capable of.”
Fluffypony summarized the sentiment in a sarcastic reply to a comment criticizing the Monero community’s handling of the situation: “Yep 100% my fault. I didn't write code for them for free. It's because I'm only interested in Monero being used by a small group of elite.”
The Monero community remains optimistic about the future
Despite this temporary setback, several implementations are on the horizon to make Monero much more user-friendly and spur wider adoption. A mobile version of MyMonero is reportedly under development, set for release in under “3-5 years at most.” The Exodus platform is also reportedly working on a Monero integration, claiming that it is their “#1 requested feature.”
Virgil Vaduva, CEO of emergency response and ridesharing platform Cell 411 and longtime Monero fan, remains hopeful about the currency’s future, noting the significant improvement in usability provided by the recently-released beta graphical user interface (GUI) wallet:
"Monero has been long overdue for a GUI wallet and the Beta release delivers. While it is still a full-blown wallet that requires a full blockchain download, it is still a big step forward in usability and convenience for users who want to use Monero as an actual currency, beyond just an investment vehicle. These are exciting days for Monero."
Update: The Jaxx team clarified that they halted work on Monero due to recent protocol changes that caused difficulties, and because the integration had gone significantly over time and budget, and was therefore hindering development for the 1.2 release.Barely more than 24 hours into the World Baseball Classic and we’ve got our first team set to advance, and it’s one no one would have expected: Team Israel, which upset South Korea yesterday, walloped Chinese Taipei 15-7 today and is sitting pretty.
Maybe we all undersold Israel’s chances. Because it’s functionally a team of Jewish-Americans, it’s filled with a bunch of career minor leaguers, many with MLB experience. Israel got multiple RBIs from Ike Davis, Ryan Lavarnway, Nate Freiman (most recently in the Red Sox organization), and Tyler Krieger, a young fourth-round draft pick for the Indians. These are all guys good enough to play pro baseball, and that’s not nothing.
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Lavarnway put things more or less out of reach with a two-run dinger in the third:
Israel then added insult to injury by plating three on this Keystone Kops error in the seventh:
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With the win, Israel is 2-0 in pool play, and it’s hard to see that not being enough to advance. Here’s the bracket; the top two teams from each four-team pool will move to the second round. (You would expect a very good Netherlands team, populated largely by Aruban major leaguers, to sweep its games, and it’s a safe bet that Chinese Taipei, the true minnow of this group, will lose its remaining matchups.)
Korea, at 0-2 after being shut out by the Dutch today, needs a miracle to advance, and their first-round elimination would be a real surprise. (They were eliminated in pool play last year despite going 2-1, and medaled in the 2006 and 2009 WBCs.) But this was not as strong as team as in years’ past, with a number of the best KBO players missing the tournament with injuries, and the best Korean MLBers skipping it altogether.
If there’s a real knock on the WBC, it’s that the world’s true best players aren’t necessarily participating. This probably hits Team USA the hardest—the rotation of Chris Archer, Marcus Stroman, and Danny Duffy pales in comparison to what might have been if the likes of Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, Noah Syndergaard, and Chris Sale had elected to play. But it also opens up the field for unexpected successes and potentially deep Cinderella runs.A timeline of events following the catastrophic Gulf of Mexico oil spill belies the absurd media claim that the spill represents "Obama's Katrina."
April 20 (10 p.m.): Oil rig explosion. An April 21 ABCNews.com article reported, "An overnight explosion in the Gulf of Mexico rocked the Deepwater Horizon oil rig off the Louisiana coast, sending spectacular bursts of flame into the sky. The fires were still raging today." The U.S. Coast Guard's National Oil and Hazardous Substances Response System assigns primary responsibility for cleaning up oil spills to the spiller as the responsible party.
April 21: Deputy Secretary of Interior, Coast Guard dispatched to region. An April 22 White House statement noted that following a briefing with President Obama, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen, Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, EPA Deputy Administrator Bob Perciasepe, and FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, "Deputy Secretary of the Interior David Hayes was dispatched to the region yesterday to assist with coordination and response." The Coast Guard announced that four units were responding to the fire, with additional units en route.
Search and rescue efforts begin for 11 missing. An initial focus of the response was the search for 11 missing crewmembers. The search was called off April 23.
BP confirms U.S. Coast Guard was "leading the emergency response" In an April 21 press release, British Petroleum stated that it was "working closely with Transocean and the U.S. Coast Guard, which is leading the emergency response, and had been offering its help - including logistical support."
CNN.com: "The U.S. Coast Guard launched a major search effort." An April 22 CNN.com article reported:
The U.S. Coast Guard launched a major search effort Wednesday for 11 people missing after a "catastrophic" explosion aboard an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico engulfed the drilling platform in flames. Another 17 people were injured -- three critically -- in the blast aboard the Deepwater Horizon, which occurred about 10 p.m. Tuesday. The rig was about 52 miles southeast of Venice, Louisiana, said Coast Guard Senior Chief Petty Officer Mike O'Berry. As of late afternoon Wednesday as many as six firefighting vessels were working to contain the massive fire caused by the explosion. "It obviously was a catastrophic event," O'Berry said.
April 23: Coast Guard "focused on mitigating the impact of the product currently in the water." On April 23, the Coast Guard stated:
The Department of the Interior, MMS [the U.S. Minerals Management Service], and the Coast Guard continue to support the efforts of the responsible parties to secure all potential sources of pollution. Both federal agencies have technical teams in place overseeing the proposals by BP and Transocean to completely secure the well. Until that has occurred and all parties are confident the risk of additional spill is removed, a high readiness posture to respond will remain in place. Although the oil appears to have stopped flowing from the well head, Coast Guard, BP, Transocean, and MMS remain focused on mitigating the impact of the product currently in the water and preparing for a worst-case scenario in the event the seal does not hold. Visual feed from deployed remotely operated vehicles with sonar capability is continually monitored in an effort to look for any crude oil which still has the potential to emanate from the subsurface well. "From what we have observed yesterday and through the night, we are not seeing any signs of release of crude in the subsurface area. However we remain in a'ready to respond' mode and are working in a collaborative effort with BP, the responsible party, to prepare for a worst-case scenario," Landry stated early Friday morning.
April 25: Response team implements plan to contain oil spilling from source, weather delays cleanup.
Storms delay response efforts. An April 25 Associated Press article reported, "Stormy weather delayed weekend efforts to mop up leaking oil from a damaged well after the explosion and sinking of a massive rig off Louisiana's Gulf Coast that left 11 workers missing and presumed dead." AP further reported:
The bad weather began rolling in Friday as strong winds, clouds and rain interrupted efforts to contain the spill. Coast Guard Petty Officer John Edwards said he was uncertain when weather conditions would improve enough for cleanup to resume. So far, he said, crews have retrieved about 1,052 barrels of oily water.
Oil recovery and cleanup were to resume after adverse weather passed. On April 25, the unified command team responding to the spill stated:
The unified command is implementing intervention efforts in an attempt to contain the source of oil emanating from the wellhead at the Deepwater Horizon incident site Sunday. The unified command has approved a plan that utilizes submersible remote operated vehicles in an effort to activate the blowout preventer on the sea floor and to stop the flow of oil that has been estimated at leaking up to 1,000 barrels/42,000 gallons a day. Also, BP is mobilizing the DD3, a drilling rig that is expected to arrive Monday to prepare for relief well-drilling operations. Additionally, the oil recovery and clean-up operations are expected to resume once adverse weather has passed. These efforts are part of the federally approved oil spill contingency plan that is in place to respond to environmental incidents.
April 26: Response crews "to resume skimming operations." On April 26, the response team stated, "Sunday, an aircrew from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sighted five small whales during an over flight in the vicinity of the oil spill, which currently measures 48 miles by 39 miles at its widest points with varying levels of sheening, and is located 30 miles off the coast of Venice, La." The command team further stated, "Following adverse weather that went through the area, response crews are anticipated to resume skimming operations today," including 1,000 personnel, 10 offshore vessels, 7 skimming boats and more than 14,000 gallons of dispersant. At that point 48,384 gallons of oily water had been collected.
April 28: Federal officials realize spill was far more severe than BP led them to believe. An April 28 New York Times article reported, "Government officials said late Wednesday night that oil might be leaking from a well in the Gulf of Mexico at a rate five times that suggested by initial estimates." The Times further reported:
In a hastily called news conference, Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard said a scientist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had concluded that oil is leaking at the rate of 5,000 barrels a day, not 1,000 as had been estimated. While emphasizing that the estimates are rough given that the leak is at 5,000 feet below the surface, Admiral Landry said the new estimate came from observations made in flights over the slick, studying the trajectory of the spill and other variables.
An April 30 Associated Press article reported, "For days, as an oil spill spread in the Gulf of Mexico, BP assured the government the plume was manageable, not catastrophic. Federal authorities were content to let the company handle the mess while keeping an eye on the operation." The article continued:
But then government scientists realized the leak was five times larger than they had been led to believe, and days of lulling statistics and reassuring words gave way Thursday to an all-hands-on-deck emergency response. Now questions are sure to be raised about a self-policing system that trusted a commercial operator to take care of its own mishap even as it grew into a menace imperiling Gulf Coast nature and livelihoods from Florida to Texas.
April 29: Napolitano declares spill "of national significance"; BP insists its "plan can handle this spill." On April 29, BP official Doug Suttles appeared on ABC's Good Morning America and stated, "At this point, I believe our plan can handle this spill, and that's what we're doing." That day, Napolitano declared the spill "of national significance," explaining that "we can now draw down assets from across the country, other coastal areas, by |
You can wait in the truck and close the door you know, since it's not that hot,' the officer is heard saying to Nicholas in body camera footage later obtained by KOB.
However, in her report, Nicholas characterizes the officers words as an 'order' and the footage does not show her actually sitting in the hot car as police wrote her a ticket.
Sweating it out: Last year, Shelly Nicholas in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico was told to sit in her hot car after her dog was found locked inside with no ventilation. She filed a report against the officers, but body cam footage later revealed it was more of a request than an order
Declined to do it: Nicholas declined to sit in the the hot car with the door closed in spite of the officer's request
While this may not be a legitimate police practice, officers have reason for concern in these situations, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association.
While Nicholas argued she'd only been gone 10 minutes, the AVMA says that temperatures can rise 20F inside a car in that short amount of time.
In 20 minutes, the temperature can rise by nearly 30 degrees.
Even on a 70F day, writes the AVMA, the interior of a car can reach 110F after one hour.
Even short periods in such heat can cause heat stroke and irreversible organ damage in your dog.Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, speaks via video link during a press conference on the 10-year anniversary of the controversial organization. (Photo: Axel Schmidt/Reuters)
When documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras began work in 2011 on “Risk,” her portrait of WikiLeaks and its hugely controversial founder Julian Assange, the organization had spent months working with news outlets to publish stories based on more than 700,000 U.S. classified documents leaked by U.S. Army Pvt. Bradley Manning.
“It was so important to see publications that were exposing what was happening with U.S. foreign policy, which is something that I cared about and was working on in my own work,” Poitras, who had previously made documentaries on the American presence in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, said in an interview with Yahoo News.
Poitras said that the documents from Manning — comprising U.S. diplomatic cables and war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan — “opened up a more adversarial chapter in journalism” after “a decade of failure to report what the U.S. government was doing.”
By the end of filming in early 2017, WikiLeaks looked very different from an upstart operation devoted to bringing to light the inner workings of American diplomacy and overseas military activities.
Over the course of six years, two leading members of WikiLeaks, including founder Julian Assange, were accused of sexual assault; Assange hosted a show on Russian state television from his self-imposed exile in Ecuador’s London embassy; rogue NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided reams of classified documents to Poitras and others before settling in Russia with the help of WikiLeaks; Manning entered prison after being convicted under the Espionage Act (she later received clemency from then President Barack Obama); Russian intelligence leveraged WikiLeaks in an influence operation to damage Hillary Clinton; CIA chief Mike Pompeo called Wikileaks a “hostile nonstate intelligence agency”; and Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that the U.S. would pursue criminal charges against Assange.
Poitras, who moved to Germany in 2012, acknowledges the increasing turmoil facing WikiLeaks and its enigmatic leader. But she is more concerned about the U.S. government’s reaction to WikiLeaks over the last six years.
“The film feels a bit like a tragedy, which unfolds over many years, beginning with maybe a moment of optimism and ending at a moment of more despair,” Poitras said. “And I think it encompasses that. And I don’t mean that to surround WikiLeaks or Julian, but politically where we fit today.”
Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. (Photo: Courtesy of “Risk”/Laura Poitras) More
“Risk” is an attempt by Poitras to present WikiLeaks’ actions as a noble endeavor, while also providing intimate portraits of the people behind the organization. As the film unfolds, the actions of the primary characters put the organization in a less flattering light.
“Risk” begins in 2011, with Assange attempting to reach then Secretary of State Clinton to inform her that 250,000 diplomatic cables were about to be published, unredacted, on the open Internet. Jacob Appelbaum, known as the “American WikiLeaks hacker,” is shown confronting Egyptian telecom officials over the blocking of Twitter during the Arab Spring. Poitras introduces the two men as heroes on the front lines of the government transparency movement.
Then Assange is accused of sexually assaulting two women in Sweden. He is shown telling lawyers that the charges are part of a radical feminist conspiracy. He adds that it would better if it were only one woman, as that would make it easier to pressure the accuser by impugning her character. Later in the film, Appelbaum is accusedby former co-workers and acquaintances of sexual assault and bullying. The accusations led to Appelbaum being disowned by the privacy community. (Poitras notes that he denies any criminal conduct.)
Poitras acknowledges that she had to alter the story as the sex scandals tarnished the men behind WikiLeaks.LISTEN TO TLR’S LATEST PODCAST:
By Russ Read
A Swedish investment company is using the cryptocurrency Bitcoin to avoid U.S. financial sanctions, allowing investors to invest in the economy of one of the world’s foremost sponsors of terrorism.
Brave New World Investments, established by Mairtin O’Duinnin and Mikael Johansson, allows international investors to put money into the Iranian stock market without requiring a Swedish bank account.
European sanctions on Iran began to be removed in 2016 as part of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal, but Swedish banks do not allow investment in the Iranian economy because of U.S. financial sanctions, according to Johnsson.
“We got to think (sic) of the venture as the sanctions against Iran were starting to get dismantled in early 2016,” Johansson told Finance Magnates, a financial news site. “However, due to U.S. financial sanctions still in effect against Iran, none of the Swedish banks wanted to help us — despite there being no relevant sanctions against Iran in Sweden or the European Union stopping us.”
The U.S. maintained several sanctions against Iran after the nuclear deal due to the country’s continued sponsorship of terror and other aggressive provocations in the Middle East.
Johansson explained that his company simply “side-stepped” the Swedish banking system in order to avoid potential sanctions enforcement. The company does not use a Swedish bank account, but said they will have an Iranian one “for the equity investments.”
“We pay our bills, shareholder dividends, Iran deposits — everything — in cryptocurrencies,” explained Johansson.
Bitcoin is a form of digital currency, or cryptocurrency, which can be used as payment, effectively replacing regular currencies. Bitcoin is completely decentralized and works peer-to-peer, meaning there is no central bank or government administrator. All Bitcoin transactions are recorded in a public ledger called the blockchain. The lack of a central regulator means there is no way to effectively stop Bitcoin transactions.
Johansson added that his company is not breaking any Swedish or European Union laws, and that it “religiously” abides by anti-money laundering directives.
While the company’s process may be legal, it may not necessarily be effective.
“This effort is doable from a purely transactional point of view, but it’s probably not possible that this would be a practical conduit to increase Swedish or European investment in Iranian companies,” Yaya Fanusie, the director of analysis for Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “There’s a lot standing in their way given that only a small, almost fringe segment of investors are comfortable with using bitcoin for investing.”
Fanusie explained that the EU is in the midst of trying to find ways to regulate Bitcoin transactions and make it more difficult to transact anonymously, which could hamper Brave New World’s investment strategy. That said, it could be fruitful as Bitcoin continues to grow in popularity.
“But if we get to a point where bitcoin is widely adopted and well-integrated into the global financial community, then such models probably will be a more reliable way to get money into places where the U.S. dollar isn’t supposed to go,” said Fanusie.
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Watch this video on YouTubeThis campy frighteningly funny 80’s Sci-Fi horror film was adored by all the kids of the day. What kid wouldn’t want their overbearing and snooty step mother who is cheating on their father just turned to dust. Night Of The Comet stars the talents of Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Robert Beltran, Sharon Farrell, Mary Woronov and directed by Thom Eberhardt.
Not only do we see people turned to dust but we get all the great stuff of horror as well like zombies and people slowly being turned into zombie mutant monster creatures as well. Tales of cannibalization and the ripping off of body parts are talked about but not really seen, it was only a pg-13 film you know. It was thought back then that kids could not handle anything more then some tore up skin and dripping zombie flesh. Back then it was enough to give a kid and some parents nightmares.
Take all of this and then add in a corrupt group of scientists that are slowly turning into the zombies that our heroes have been running from all along. This government think tank of idiots wants to harvest all of the survivors so that they can make a blood serum that will keep them alive. All they care about is them selves and are willing to kill anyone and everyone so that they can make a cure just for themselves. The is one among them that just wants to see them fail, a female researcher and scientist that knows they are doomed and there is no way to change it. Only she is able to make sure that the survivors have a chance and then kills herself before she becomes the monster that she knows that she is turning into.
I doubt we will ever see a remake of this film but it is definitely one to have in your apocalyptic end of the world as we know it collections. We will see elements of this film in other horror and classic end of the world films for years if not centuries to come. In the end you just have 3 gals and 3 guys to save the world, at least that we know of in Southern California. You will enjoy the time spent watching this film, I know that I did.
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TumblrTHE man who turned the V8 Supercars from a “hell of a mess” into a global phenomenon now has equally bullish plans for the Gold Coast Suns.
Chairman elect Tony Cochrane plans to see the Suns become much more than just the leading sports club in the booming local area.
His ambition is for the Carrara-based side to rocket past the likes of mega brands Collingwood and the Brisbane Broncos to become Australia’s No.1 sporting club.
It’s a rather ambitious goal but when you’ve transformed a small touring car competition into one of Australia’s largest sporting exports and a multi-million dollar industry like Cochrane achieved with V8 Supercars you know he is not in the business of aiming low.
“We’re not here to make up the numbers,” the ex-Supercars executive chairman said.
“I’m here to tell you I will make sure we’re the No.1 sporting team – and not only on the Gold Coast, but hopefully in Queensland and ultimately in Australia.
“This is an aspirational business and you don’t get into this business if you don’t aim to be No.1.”
He will take over from founding chairman John Witheriff after Round 1 next season, with the latter then stepping away from the board at the end of 2016.
The succession plan has been six months in the making, with Witheriff approaching the AFL midway through last season to suggest a gradual change of leadership with Cochrane at the helm.
Witheriff was an outstanding leader for the formative years of the Suns helping establish their corporate governance and footprint on the Coast but now is the time for someone with Cochrane’s ambition and vision to take the club into the future.
Cochrane is confident of a bright future for the team, saying the platform he would aim to build on was light years ahead of where the V8 Supercars were when he took over in 1996.
“Everybody forgets when I took over V8 Supercars it was in a hell of a mess, it was a sport without even a marketing name,” Cochrane said. “This (the Suns) by contrast is in terrific shape.”
And he’s not afraid to take on the high-profile personalities chairing rival clubs such as Collingwood’s Eddie McGuire and Port Adelaide’s David Koch.
“We’ll have our moments but we’ll also have a lot of fun. All of those presidents of all those clubs do an amazing job,” he said.
While profitability and the ability to operate without financial support from the AFL isn’t viable in the short term, Cochrane is confident the decision to pour resources into the football department would pay dividends.
“It’s all about fan engagement and the best way to really get fan engagement is to get results on the scoreboard,” he said. “We’ve put a lot of time and effort into the health of our playing list and into the rehab side of the sport.”
Last season injuries to a series of key players including captain Gary Ablett plagued their on-field performance.
Cochrane joined the list nominating Ablett – whose leadership he said had “come on in leaps and bounds” – as the best man to continue leading from the front and drive a winning culture.
“We’ve moved on a couple of players who we thought were part of the problem rather than part of the solution and we’re very focused on making sure the environment is right,” Cochrane said.
“Gary is an outstanding footballer he’s really come on in leaps and bounds in terms of his leadership.”You must enter the characters with black color that stand out from the other characters
— Gov. Pat McCrory told a national radio audience Tuesday that state community colleges and universities should be funded based on how well they do at placing their students in the job market.
"Right now, we pay based upon how many students you have, not on the results of how many jobs you're getting people into," McCrory said. "I'm looking at legislation right now – in fact, I just instructed my staff yesterday to go ahead and develop legislation – which would change the basic formula in how education money is given out to our universities and our community colleges. It's not based on butts in seats but on how many of those butts can get jobs."
Speaking on Bill Bennett's "Morning in America" show, McCrory touched on themes similar to those he talked about during the campaign.
"I'm a big vocational training advocate," McCrory told Bennett. "I think some of the educational elite have taken over education, where we're offering courses that have no chance of getting people jobs."
University of North Carolina President Tom Ross said the 16-campus system is already transitioning its funding formula to include measures related to student achievement and academic and operational efficiencies. Still, he expressed reservations about gauging university success solely on the employment rate of students and graduates.
"The university’s value to North Carolina should not be measured by jobs filled alone. Our three-part mission of teaching, research and public service requires that we prepare students with the talent and abilities to succeed in the workforce, because talent will be the key to economic growth," Ross said in a statement. "Higher education plays a key role in ensuring a higher quality of life for all North Carolinians."
North Carolina Community College System officials need to learn more about McCrory's stance before commenting on it, spokeswoman Megan Hoenk said.
Legislative leaders also weren't quick to embrace McCrory's comments, but House Speaker Thom Tillis told reporters that it sounds like suggestions developed by a strategic planning committee of the UNC Board of Governors.
"What it really means is making sure that what we're teaching our students in community college and university systems are aligned with the market demands," said Tillis, R-Mecklenburg.
The General Assembly should not micromanage how the university system does its business but measure the outcomes for students, he said.
"One of the most frustrating things that we have as legislators is hearing the businesses out there saying we simply do not have qualified people to fill these jobs," he said. "We've got a 9 percent-plus unemployment rate, and we have hundreds, maybe thousands, of jobs that can't be filled because the right skill sets are not available."
Rep. Linda Johnson, R-Cabarrus, co-chairwoman of the House Education Committee, said the problem McCrory outlined is a national issue of matching graduate skills to business needs.
"That’s the sign that tells us we need to change what we’re doing," Johnson said. "I’m not thinking the degrees would change, but the content of the courses."
Because more than half of the General Assembly is serving in their first or second term, she said, members will need to learn about the state of education and talk among themselves before deciding on a course of action.
"We have to have sort of a conversation to find out where they are coming from," she said.
Sen. Josh Stein, D-Wake, a member of the Senate Higher Education Committee, said university campuses and community colleges should be evaluated on a range of criteria, including the employment rate of graduates.
"Universities are much more than job factories; they’re also about broadening minds," Stein said. "That doesn’t mean we can’t get more out of our universities and having them be stronger engines of economic growth."
On the radio with Bennett, McCrory talked about the dual gaps of North Carolina high unemployment rate and employers who can't find jobs as well.
"To me, that means we have a major disconnect between the education establishment and commerce," McCrory said. "So, I'm going to adjust my education curriculum to what business and commerce needs to get our kids jobs as opposed to moving back in with their parents after they graduate."
Elisya Mason, a senior marketing major at North Carolina State University, said a range of courses prepare students for life outside the university.
"I feel pretty confident I’ll be able to find a job after I graduate," Mason said. "I think there is a place, especially in the university, for those types of classes."
In response to a dig that Bennett took at gender studies courses, McCrory expanded on the theme of connecting classes offered to potential employment.
"You're right," McCrory said. "That's a subsidized course, and frankly, if you want to take gender studies, that's fine. Go to a private school and take it, but I don't want to subsidize that if that's not going to get someone a job... It's the tech jobs that we need right now."
The governor tied his train of thought into the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill athletics department scandal.
"It's even hit our athletic department at Carolina – our great basketball program," McCrory said. "They took Swahili on a night study course where they didn't have to do any work, and they got B-pluses. What are we teaching these courses for if they're not going to help get a job?"
McCrory said he believes in liberal arts education.
"I got one. I think there are two reasons for education. One is, as my Dad used to say, to exercise the brain, but the second is to get a skill."(Adds SunEdison-Adani deal, Kerry, Woodside quotes)
By Rupam Jain Nair and Aman Shah
GANDHINAGAR, India, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised on Sunday to pursue predictable policies and ensure stable taxes, in a speech that sought to address concerns for foreign investors in Asia’s third-largest economy.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry led a roll call of leaders, including U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and World Bank head Jim Yong Kim, converging on Modi’s home town of Gandhinagar for the Vibrant Gujarat business summit.
U.S. President Barack Obama visits India later this month.
Eight months into Modi’s rule, his failure to lift the economy from its longest growth slowdown in a generation has raised questions about how much substance there is behind his promise of “red carpet, not red tape”.
“We’re trying to complete the circle of economic reforms speedily,” Modi told the event that he founded when he was chief minister of the industrial state.
“We are also keen to see that our policies are predictable. We’re clear that our tax regime should be stable,” Modi said, speaking in English but making the occasional aside in Hindi.
Along with speakers from Japan, Canada and Singapore, Kerry praised his host and avoided direct criticism. But he hinted at the need to cut back India’s stifling bureaucracy.
“We no longer live in a world where a country is going to be competitive if its bureaucracy sends people from door to door and window to window and meeting to meeting,” he said.
PROMISED DEALS
Modi spoke on Sunday of the achievements he hopes will help lift hundreds of millions of Indians out of poverty, including the opening of more than 100 million bank accounts, a ‘Make in India’ campaign to promote manufacturing, and plans to expand the rail, road, energy and digital networks.
“We are planning to take a quantum leap,” the 64-year-old leader said.
Among the deals announced was a $4 billion agreement between U.S.-based solar power firm SunEdison and Indian conglomerate Adani Enterprises, to build one of India’s largest solar panel makers.
Vibrant Gujarat, held every two years, has yielded billions of dollars in investment promises, though only a fraction of the deals announced have come to fruition.
Modi aims to lift stagnant capital investment that has held back India’s growth to 5.3 percent. That is expected to accelerate this year to 6.4 percent, said the World Bank’s Kim, who called India a “bright spot” in a mediocre global landscape.
Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man with a fortune estimated at $19.7 billion, said his Reliance Industries conglomerate would invest 1 trillion rupees ($16 billion) in Gujarat over the next year to 18 months.
Sam Walsh, CEO of global mining giant Rio Tinto, flagged two potential projects including a $2 bln iron ore project in Odisha state. Woodside Petroleum <WPL.AX > CEO Peter Coleman, whose firm signed an agreement with Adani to explore sourcing and marketing of liquefied natural gas, said there were fiscal improvements to be made, though also potential.
“Is India open for business? We believe it is,” he said.
Modi has made headway on making it easier for outsiders to invest more in real estate, insurance and defence, but a rigid labour market and rotten infrastructure are huge deterrents.
India slipped to 142nd out of 189 in the World Bank’s latest Doing Business Index. Modi wants India in the top 50.
“Investors want credibility, stability and at the same time flexibility. Right now, India is a bit of an inflexible market,” said Kilbinder Dosanjh, a director for Asia at Eurasia Group, a geopolitical risk consultancy. ($1 = 62.3450 Indian rupees) (Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed; Writing by Douglas Busvine and Clara Ferreira Marques,; Editing by Angus MacSwan)EXCLUSIVE: We’ve learned that Amazon has picked up five new pilots. We hear they are drama Carnival Row, from the Pacific R im duo of Guillermo del Toro & Travis Beacham and Star Trek alum Rene Echeverria; dramedy The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel from Gilmore Girls creator Amy-Sherman Palladino; drama Strange New Things, from writer Matt Charman (Bridge of Spies) and director Kevin MacDonald; real-life superhero comedy The Legend of Master Legend, from writers Micah Fitzerman-Blue & Noah Harpster and pre-revolutionary Cuba drama Tropicana, from writers Josh Goldin & Rachel Abramowitz and producer Andrea Simon.
All five projects are from Amazon Studios; Carnival Row co-produced with Legendary TV; Strange New Things with UK’s Left Bank Pictures.
Carni val Row stems from a major development deal Amazon Studios inked in early 2015 for the project, a TV series version of Beacham’s cult 11-year-old supernatural feature spec script A Killing on Carnival Row. Amazon at the time ordered three scripts from the project, to be co-written by The 4400 co-creator Echeverria, del Toro, Beacham and Peter Cameron. Echevarria wrote the pilot script, which is going to production, and serves as showrunner. Del Toro, Beacham and Echevarria executive produce alongside Gary Ungar.
A Killing on Carnival Row is set in the future in a city called the Burgue, which looks a lot like 18th Century London. It is inhabited by humans and other creatures, and a serial killer is on the loose.
The Amazon pilot order caps an 11-year journey for Beacham, who originally sold his feature script to New Line and Koppelson Entertainment as a spec in 2005. Guillermo Del Toro and Neil Jordan flirted with the project while it was at New Line and then, following New Line’s absorption by Warner Bros., Arnold and Anne Kopelson tried shopping it to studios with Immortals helmer Tarsem Singh attached.
Associated Press
Sherman-Palladino’s dramedy The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which she wrote and executive produces, is about a 1950s housewife who decides to be one of the first female standup comics. Sherman-Palladino is currently in post-production on the four Gilmore Girls movies for Netflix, which serve as a sequel to her signature dramedy series.
Joshuah Bearman
The half-hour The Legend of Master Legend was written by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster based on Joshuah Bearman’s Rolling Stone article about real-life superheros. It centers on Master Legend and his sidekick, the Ace. Fitzerman-Blue and Harpster are executive producing with Bearman.
Tropicana, written/executive produced by Josh Goldin and Rachel Abramowitz and executive produced by Andrea Simon, is set in pre-revolutionary Cuba in and around the world of The Tropicana nightclub. With the club as a focal point, the series explores the intersection of entertainers, the mob, Batista loyalists, Castro revolutionaries and the American CIA.
Photograph by Eric Schwabel for AwardsLine
Strange New Things, which Deadline wrote about in April, was penned by Matt Charman, with Kevin MacDonald set to direct. An adaptation of Michel Faber’s prais ed 2014 book The Book Of Strange New Things, the story revolves around Peter Leigh, an English pastor who embarks on the journey of a lifetime into deep space that takes him light years away from his beloved wife, Bea. Described as “Heart Of Darkness in space,” Strange New Things is an epic with a heart-wrenching love story of a husband and wife with the universe between them at the center. Charman, MacDonald and Andy Harries exec produce.
Iconic musician Brian Eno will provide music and soundscape for the series, believed to be one of the most ambitious TV projects ever to emanate from the UK.Moreover, Sullivan’s prose is so gratuitous, so nearly unhinged, that it’s impossible not to wonder what he’s really enraged about. His pre-election writings about Clinton suggest an answer.
“I’ve done what I could in this space to avoid the subject of Hillary Clinton. I don’t want to be the perennial turd in the punchbowl,” Sullivan begins his column, then explains how he was compelled to write about Clinton after “a fawning, rapturous reception” for her at the recent Women in the World conference. Apropos of rumors that her daughter Chelsea is considering a political career, he laments “the hold this family still has on the Democratic Party—and on liberals in general.” He even mocks Michelle Goldberg, a liberal Slate columnist, for having the temerity to wonder how Clinton is doing after her crushing loss to Trump. He continues:
And everywhere you see not an excoriation of one of the worst campaigns in recent history, leading to the Trump nightmare, but an attempt to blame anyone or anything but Clinton herself for the epic fail. It wasn’t Clinton’s fault, we’re told. It never is. It was the voters’—those ungrateful, deplorable know-nothings! Their sexism defeated her (despite a majority of white women voting for Trump). A wave of misogyny defeated her (ditto). James Comey is to blame. Bernie Sanders’s campaign—because it highlighted her enmeshment with Wall Street, her brain-dead interventionism and her rapacious money-grubbing since she left the State Department—was the problem. Millennial feminists were guilty as well, for not seeing what an amazing crusader for their cause this candidate was. And this, of course, is how Clinton sees it as well: She wasn’t responsible for her own campaign—her staffers were.
Sullivan may be right that Clinton didn’t accept enough blame for losing. He’s certainly not alone in that opinion. Clinton’s culpability is the focus of a new book by reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, an excerpt of which Sullivan quoted in his column: “The blame belonged to her campaign team, she believed, for failing to hone her message, energize important constituencies, and take care of business in getting voters to the polls.” CNN’s Jake Tapper also recently said, “She doesn’t seem to have done enough introspection.... Putin didn’t tell you don’t go to Wisconsin, James Comey didn’t tell you [to] call one-quarter of the country ‘deplorable.’”
But in making his case that Clinton was a historically inept candidate, Sullivan focuses on her many advantages—claiming that everything was “stacked in her favor”—without wrestling with her deep disadvantages. Yes, she “had the backing of the entire Democratic establishment, including the president (his biggest mistake in eight years by far), and was even married to the last, popular Democratic president.” Her name recognition and fundraising prowess nearly cleared the Democratic field. And yet, Sullivan argues, she almost lost the primary to “an elderly, stopped-clock socialist.” Then, despite favorable demographics and a growing economy, she lost the general election to “a malevolent buffoon with no political experience.” “Whenever she gave a speech,” he adds, “you could hear the air sucking out of the room minutes after she started.”
There’s no doubt Clinton was stiff on the stump and must take responsibility for strategic errors such as campaigning in Arizona the week before the election (rather than focusing on unexpected battleground states like Michigan and Wisconsin). But even some of Clinton’s staunchest supporters aren’t blind to these failings: The day after Clinton’s loss, Goldberg called her “uncharismatic,” and a few days later New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister acknowledged that “Clinton was surely a flawed candidate”—the “bearer of way too much awkward baggage,” and “not a magnetic or inspiring speaker.” But, Traister added, “the argument that if Clinton had taken a firmer stand on trade, or spent more time in Green Bay, it would have mitigated the fact that 48 percent of voters chose a self-confessed sexual predator who was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, attempts to apply reason where there is only visceral incongruity.” That Trump “was a catastrophically awful” candidate—so obviously worse than Clinton—“is enough to make one wonder if she ever really had a chance.”Migration offices in Sweden. Photo: Marcus Ericsson/TT
The Local · 31 May 2016, 07:49
Published: 31 May 2016 07:49 GMT+02:00
Using figures from Sweden's employment agency Arbetsförmedlingen and migration authorities Migrationsverket, SVT reported on Tuesday that 494 asylum seekers who arrived in 2015 have managed to find a job to support themselves while waiting for their application to get processed.
A person who arrives in Sweden with valid identification documents and has applied for asylum is normally allowed to work despite not yet having a work or residence permit, if Migrationsverket grants them an exception.
Such an exception is called the 'at-und' and usually gets processed automatically, reported SVT. However, only a third of asylum seekers aged 20-64 were given one in a year when Sweden received an unprecedented number of asylum claims.
“It was an incredible number of people applying for asylum in Sweden and so that we would be able to register all of them, we had to de-prioritize certain tasks, and that was the matter of jobs,” Migrationsverket officer Lisa Bergstrand told SVT.
The centre-left Social Democrat-Green government wants to hand out mainly temporary residence permits in the next three years, which would step up the pressure on asylum seekers to find work. A permanent permit could be offered after the first expires, if the person is able to support themselves.
But figures suggest that the gap between Swedes and foreign-born is likely to grow. In April, the unemployment rate among people born in Sweden was at its lowest since before the global financial crisis in 2008, falling to 4.7 percent. The equivalent among residents born abroad was 14.9 percent.
Long waiting times for residence permits, today up to a year, makes the matter all the more pressing. But Arbetsförmedlingen has little means of supporting asylum seekers looking for work.
“They may be registered in our database as unemployed, but they are only entitled to basic services, that is using our online services and talking to advisers. But there are no programme-based alternatives, that is no courses and no traineeships,” Fredrik Möller, integration officer at Arbetsförmedlingen, told SVT.
Story continues below…
Meanwhile, other initiatives are slowly emerging in Sweden. Earlier this month The Local wrote about Sana Abdullah, 30, an IT engineer who got a job after only seven months in Sweden through Sync Accelerator, a recruitment agency helping startups connect with asylum seekers.Phillip Island, like Mugello, is one of the tracks which any motorcycle racer worth their salt puts at the very top of their list of favorite tracks. And rightly so: swooping over gently undulating ground sitting atop cliffs overlooking a bay on the Bass Strait, it is perhaps the greatest of the natural race tracks. It has everything a race track should have: a collection of fast, sweeping corners which richly reward bravery; a couple of hard braking corners fast and slow at which to overtake; a superb and treacherous combination of turns in Lukey Heights and MG at which to make a last ditch passing attempt, and a long enough run to the finish line to make drafting a possibility. Add in arguably the most breathtaking setting on the calendar, and you have just about everything.
Of course, the glory of Phillip Island also has its downsides. The flowing nature of the track and limited number of turns means that the bikes spend a lot of time on the left-hand side of the tire, often at very high speed. With very high loads on the left-hand side, and very low loads on the right, both producing and managing tires is difficult. Add in the fact that in October, the start of the Australian spring, it can be still be very chilly indeed, especially with the strong winds blowing off the Bass Strait, with next to nothing between them and the Antarctic, and it is a potential recipe for disaster. Tires cool quickly, and each right hander has to be approached with respect. Get it wrong, and your race is over very quickly.
Tires have always been an issue at Phillip Island, providing just the sort of challenge which tire manufacturers relish. That they are not always up to the challenge was demonstrated in 2013, when Bridgestone drastically underestimated the effect of the newly resurfaced circuit. Massive problems with overheating forced Race Direction to shorten the race and introduce compulsory pit stops, a workaround which produced a fascinating race, with the added spice of a disqualification, Marc Márquez being black-flagged for not making his pit stop in time.
Asymmetrical warfare
Last year saw another solution to the perennial tire problems at Phillip Island. Bridgestone brought an asymmetric front tire to the circuit, with much softer rubber on the right-hand side of the tire. The tire worked well enough during practice, but a dramatic drop in temperature during the race – some 10°C in less than half an hour – created severe problems for anyone who used the asymmetric front. Most crashed out, others circulated cautiously, and the rider order across the finish line changed many times before the checkered flag.
Bridgestone are bringing the asymmetric front tire once again this year, and that already has a number of riders spooked. "I'll tell you what, there is no way I am touching the asymmetric front," Cal Crutchlow said, speaking at Motegi. Things should be better this year, though, as the design of the tire has changed. The point at which the two rubbers meet has been modified, and the transition changed to make it easier to manage. Those who choose to avoid it could end up regretting that choice, if the new tire performs as expected.
Because the track places such a heavy load on tires, Bridgestone will not be bringing the edge-treated tires to Phillip Island. Contrary to popular fan mythology, that does not mean you can write Jorge Lorenzo off, however. Phillip Island is like Mugello in another way, not needing the edge treatment to make the tires work. At Mugello, Lorenzo walked away from the field, despite not having the edge-treated tires. At Phillip Island last year, Lorenzo qualified in third, and ran a strong pace early into the race until he ran into tire troubles. Not with the rear, the tire which gets the edge treatment, but with the front. Lorenzo had elected to run the extra soft front, and though the right side had worked perfectly, the left was destroyed. Probably as a result of the extra load Lorenzo places on tires from carrying corner speed.
King of Old
Valentino Rossi, using the same tire, did not suffer the same problems. Rossi took his second win of the year at Phillip Island in 2014, staying upright after Marc Márquez had crashed out in front of him. Rossi rode a strong race in the middle of a strong final stretch, and went a long way to securing second place in the |
C). HTC mimics natural coal formation within several hours.
“We found that poultry waste processed as hydrochar produced 24 percent higher net energy generation,” said PhD student Vivian Mau, who carried out the research project under the supervision of Prof. Amit Gross, chair of the department of environmental hydrology and microbiology at BGU’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research.
“Poultry waste hydrochar generates heat at high temperatures and combusts in a similar manner to coal, an important factor in replacing it as a renewable energy source,” she said.
For the first time, the researchers also showed that higher HTC production temperatures resulted in a significant reduction in emissions of methane (CH4) and ammonia (NH3) and an increase of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.
“This investigation helped in bridging the gap between hydrochar being considered as a potential energy source toward the development of an alternative renewable fuel,” Gross explained.
“Our findings could help significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with electricity generation and agricultural wastes. Field-scale experiments with HTC reactor should be conducted to confirm the assessments from this laboratory-scale study.”
The study was funded by the Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Rosenzweig-Coopersmith Foundation. Mau also received financial support from the Israeli Ministry of National Infrastructures, Energy and Water Resources, the Rieger Foundation and the Zuckerberg Scholarship Fund.
The Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research in the university’s Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research in Sde Boker conducts interdisciplinary research and graduate education in water sciences, aimed at improving human well-being through technologies and policies for sustainable use of water resources.As I was mindlessly perusing my facebook feed this week, I came across a bikini-clad Kate Upton floating weightless in microgravity. She was doing a photoshoot for Sports Illustrated and she looked marvelous, as always. [Insert recycled joke about body “literally defying gravity” - which was likely in the pitch to do the shoot in the first place]. A tip of the hat to ZeroG, because they are getting some great publicity out of this.
While this didn't actually take place in outer space, it’s definitely space-related, and it is part of the increasing trend of space and science news showing up from nontraditional outlets. I'm talking about everything from Bill Nye debating creationists and climate change-deniers, to Richard Branson’s suborbital flights for rich people, to the educational yet pithy posts from the "I Fucking Love Science" facebook page.
These are things that my friends who aren't trained as scientists or engineers are posting about. These are things that regular people find interesting and worth sharing.
But this hasn't always been the case. What changed? Why are science topics no longer something that only PhDs actively participate in and find intrinsically interesting? I believe there are three main reasons why this has happened.
1. Technical Information Has Been DemocratizedGirls' Generation's Hyoyeon revealed that she almost got into a fight with fellow member Tiffany over well-known TV personality Boom.
During the latest filming of SBS' 'Strong Heart', Hyoyeon happened to sit next to Boom on stage. She revealed, "The competition among the Girls' Generation members over who got to sit next to Boom oppa was fierce," shocking the entire studio with her unexpected statement.
No one believed the Girls' Generation member as she continued, "At the end, I almost fought with Tiffany."
Check out the broadcast of 'Strong Heart' featuring Girls' Generation as well as Gong Hyung Jin, Jung Hyun Moo, Kim Young Chul, No Hyun Hee, Choi Song Hyun, and more on the 5th at 11:15PM KST.
Do you have any guesses about why the members of Girls' Generation wanted to sit next to Boom?Show full PR text
Zenos Cars announces USA importer Zenos Cars USA, LLC
Zenos Cars announced today that its range of lightweight high performance sports cars will be sold in the USA market by its partner Zenos Cars USA, with the first model, the Zenos E10 making it into customer hands in early 2015.
The Zenos E10 made its first public appearance at the UK's prestigious Autosport International Show in January 2014 and received wide public acclaim and industry plaudits for its innovative E-platform chassis architecture, contemporary design, and unrivalled value for money for its sector leading performance. The E10 is a road legal, track focused, step-in two seater sports car with Lotus Elise type proportions. A 200hp mid-mounted transverse naturally aspirated 2.0-litre Ford GDI engine (customer supplied) drives the rear wheels and with a curb weight of just 1430 pounds, a power to weight ratio of 300hp/ton has been achieved. The low vehicle mass is achieved thanks to the innovative integration of a single 'backbone' aluminium extrusion with a carbon composite monocoque; this architecture delivers optimal torsional rigidity, and by utilizing recycled carbon fiber with a novel thermoplastic core for the tub material, the Zenos platform delivers world class mechanical efficiency without the production – and replacement – costs normally associated with carbon-based supercars.
Keeping to the theme of affordability, the front suspension connects directly to the spine/backbone – minimizing cost and mass – while the engine is encased in a rear extruded sub-frame that is removable to facilitate assembly and repairs. Given the performance of the car, driver and passenger safety is paramount: a fully encased steel safety cell comprising twin roll-hoops and side-impact bars is integrated within the carbon monocoque.
The E10 has been designed from the driver out, so simplicity and functionality is the order of the day. The cockpit's ergonomics accommodate persons ranging from 5'1 to 6'3 in height with both driver and passenger seated in bespoke Zenos seats. The E10's driver focus is further accentuated with a visual display directly behind the steering wheel that communicates essential driving information, while in the middle of the dash is another larger screen that will include a choice of road or track data display.
Chief Executive of Zenos Cars, Ansar Ali said, on making the announcement of Zenos Cars USA, "We have always hoped the essence of the Zenos brand and its products would sit easily with the US motoring community of "light is right" aficionados. Randy and Joe are the very epitome and we are delighted to be helping them establish Zenos Cars in the US."
"There is something special about the people that appreciate a pure driving experience and who understand what low vehicle weight translates to on the street or track. I can't think of a car that will more perfectly fit this niche than the Zenos E10. Ali and the team at Zenos also are truly car guys who get it. We are thrilled to be partnered with them" said Randy Chase, CEO of Zenos Cars USA.
The E10 will be first sold in a special Launch Edition which includes as standard, a Limited Slip Differential, In-board Bilstein dampers, 4 point racing harness, bespoke Zenos composite seats, quick release steering wheel, Launch Edition Red paint, and more. Pricing for the E10 will start at $39,500 plus domestic shipping and taxes and the E10 Launch Edition will start at $43,750 plus domestic shipping and taxes.
About Zenos Cars
Zenos Cars, co-founded by Ansar Ali and Mark Edwards, who previously were senior executives at both Lotus and Caterham Cars, specializes in the design, manufacture, and retail of lightweight razor sharp handling sports cars.
During Ali's and Edward's time successfully leading Caterham through a recession and then taking it into F1, and prior to that their time at Lotus Cars, they have observed increasing vehicle weights, higher entry prices, escalating repair costs and distant customer relationships; all this leading to the needs and wants of the true driving enthusiast being increasingly overlooked. So Zenos Cars intends to deliver thrilling, engaging and affordable lightweight sports car experiences that go beyond simply driving a car; the driver, the customer, the enthusiast, the supporter will be at the heart of Zenos.
The Zenos principle is to design, assemble, and retail high performance, ultra-lightweight and affordable sports cars, courtesy of intelligent vehicle engineering, efficient material technology, the application of 'form from function' design, and the adoption of a direct Customer Intimate sales and marketing approach.
About Zenos Cars USA
Zenos Cars USA was co-founded by Randy Chase and Joe Schroeter. Randy previously founded ChaseCam, a global supplier for rugged data and video recording products. He has been active in the online community founding Lotustalk.com and Britishspeed.com and is also involved with SCCA motorsports. Joe is Managing Director of The Adrenaline Gallery, an integrator and dealer for Russell Savory Engines, Sadev transmissions, Life ECUs, and more. Together they saw the need for a pure sportscar that was both light weight and affordable and Zenos delivers on all of these fronts.
Zenos Cars USA has offices on both coasts and intends on being active in community based car events.She's no dead fishy, folks! Though many are questioning her status as a vertebrate due to her lack of spine shown by not finishing what she started in the Land of the Midnight Sun. No, this live barracuda refuses to go with the flow--the path of 99% of most successful, satisfied, self-actualized people on the planet...and expired sea bait, apparently. No Zen Buddhist bullsh*t is gonna keep her from not fulfilling her compact with the people of Alaska! She made a promise and she is bound by her shattered inner-compass not to keep it, by golly.
She's not running away from concrete responsibilities and difficult decision-making, she is running towards her publishing deadline, major network pitch sessions and the fanatical love and adoration of her fractured fringe base sans the annoying albatross of things to do and accountability (outside of the meticulous maintenance of her trailer-trash-pedicured little piddies and shoppin for the perfect little mini to showcase her GILFY gams for her next inarticulate pressless-conference-backyard-block-party diatribe in Wasilla).
She is not a narcissist. She just has the good sense to realize she is better and more deserving than most people to rule the planet and prepare humanity for the end of days. No duh! It's obvious to any uneducated, backwoods creationist patriot that she was forced to endure the humiliation of merely being runner-up Miss Alaska because the Holy One, blessed be he, had bigger plans for his latter-day prophetess of perjured platitudes. Have any you read the story of Job or Abraham? You can't say she hasn't paid penance for the greater good, people! Did you see the talent portion of the pageant? She was robbed! And getting back to the Good Book, unlike ole Abe she actually went through with sacrificing her little Bristol Lynn Spears on the altar. Never hesitated. So don't you dare insinuate she lacks the get-up-and-gumption to actually follow through with anything.
Of course there are always the cynics and non-believers who insist that there is some devious underlying rationale for why she decided to release this bombshell of a story at the close-out of a news cycle on a holiday weekend (when most of the depressed populace had begun their bacchanal of binge drinking and consumption of high quantities of grill-charred, lard-filled, meat to numb their niggling concerns about mortgage foreclosures, gas prices, health care, the swine-flu pandemic, raging wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and that pesky impending threat of Nuclear Armageddon from our remaining arch-nemisi of the ole Axis of Evil trinity, and merely desired to sit on the couch like fat ticks and Tivo themselves out of existence until the pretty, multi-colored boom-boom lights appeared in the sky) but these faithless, jaded, naysayer heathens have obviously deadened themselves to the elevated spiritual concepts of synchronicity and serendipity. Everything isn't always coldly calculated and planned out. Sometimes you just need to go with the fl--um...never mind.
And really, so what if there were other factors involved in her shot-gun resignation? There are many plausible pretexts as to why she exercised her freedom of choice to abort her governorship before it came to full term. Its not like she was hiking the Appalachian Trail with Governor Sanford after all (not his type). Perhaps she's simply chosen this precious time to prepare for her inevitable 2012 presidential run by hunkering down and finally studying how to wink more effectively (and not like an epileptic who was recently exposed to a strobe light). Maybe she's utilizing some of her rumored contractor kickbacks to renovate her porch so she can keep a better watch on those Russkies (c'mon, you all saw Rocky IV, they will stop at nothing to break us!). Perhaps she is plotting further retribution against her Late Night adversary David Letterman by finding more myriad ways to increase his ratings share. And has anyone even considered the possibility that she has gotten some insider info on the impending Rapture? Hello! Perhaps she is simply working with the First Dude and fam to single-handedly start re-populating the planet with the Chosen as fast as humanly possible (clandestinely meeting with Nadya Suleman for pointers) and getting a healthy head start on constructing an Ark big enough to hold all God's creatures... and her Saks Fifth Avenue designer wardrobe ("Lose the platypuses, Todd, I'm not leaving my Jimmy Choos!").
One thing is for sure: she is no quitter... not if you're going by the non-dictionary definition of the word... which is... um... gotta go!Twenty-three bills have been introduced in 18 state legislatures this year to ban the practice of Islamic law – critics say the aim is to spread fear about Muslims
Anti-sharia legislation is spreading in state legislatures across the US, as Donald Trump’s hostile stance towards Muslims appears to be emboldening rightwing Islamaphobes.
Dearborn, Michigan: a divided city grappling with what it means to be Muslim and American Read more
In 2017 there were 23 new bills introduced in 18 states attempting to prohibit the practice of Islamic religious law, or sharia, in US courts. The rash of new bills brings the total number of such legislative efforts since 2010 to 217 in 43 states, according to the Haas Institute at UC Berkeley which monitors the anti-sharia movement.
Legal experts point out that the bills are superfluous, as the US constitution is the supreme law of the land and any foreign laws are subservient to it. Sharia itself is less a set of laws than religious guidelines, one of which requires Muslims to be law-abiding according to the rules of whichever country they find themselves.
But Elsadig Elsheikh, director of the global justice program at the Haas Institute that carried out the research, said the purpose of the bills was to spread fear about Muslims living in America and to portray them as untrustworthy and out of step with American values. “Even if these bills do not become law they help to subject Muslims to surveillance and other forms of exclusion and discrimination,” he said.
Of the 23 bills introduced to state legislatures this year, only two became law – in Arkansas and Texas. Four new states joined the growing list of legislatures where anti-sharia legislation has been attempted: Colorado, Connecticut, North Dakota and Wisconsin.
All but one of the bills were introduced by Republicans. The exception was in Idaho where a committee with an unknown party affiliation was behind the move.
Heidi Beirich, an expert on anti-Muslim hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center, sees the rash of state bills as signs that the provocative language coming out of Trump’s circle is having an impact. “At the state level, the number one push for anti-Muslim activists is anti-sharia bills. It’s a recurrent effort.”
Trump himself called for all Muslims to be barred from entering the US when he was a presidential candidate, a sentiment that he has only barely tempered in his drive for a travel ban on several majority-Muslim countries. Several of the individuals he chose as key advisers also have a controversial track record.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist in the White House, once wrote a film script that warned of the country turning into the “Islamic States of America”. The short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn called Islamism a “vicious cancer” inside all Muslims that has to be “excised”, while former White House aide Sebastian Gorka was once fired by the FBI as a counter-terrorism lecturer for his Islamophobic views.
Charles Turner, who is researching a doctoral thesis on anti-Muslim legislation at the University of Utah, said that the plethora of bills had been “enabled by Trump and his close team. This is an expression of rightwing Republicanism that chimes with their populist base.”
The anti-sharia movement became a force in the US after 2010 in the wake of the furor over the plan to open a Muslim community center in downtown Manhattan. Islamophobes led by Pamela Geller dubbed it the “Ground Zero mosque” and said it was a “beachhead for Islamic supremacism”.
Further fuel was poured on the anti-sharia fire by the Birther movement – with Trump as one of its most prominent advocates – that promulgated the conspiracy theory that President Obama was a Muslim.
Since 2010 a concerted network has been created pushing anti-sharia bills in state legislatures. An anti-Muslim lawyer, David Yerushalmi, gave a boost to the efforts by composing draft legislation called the American Laws for American Courts, Alac, that has provided the template for at least 140 of the bills that have been introduced.
Most of the recent bills are careful not to refer overtly to sharia or Islam, as to do so would be to expose the legislation to the scrutiny of federal courts on grounds of religious discrimination. Instead, they talk of “foreign laws” being banned in US jurisdictions.
None the less, they have the potential to wreak damage. Nikiya Natale, legal director of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that anti-Muslim sentiment was growing in Texas which this year passed its third anti-sharia law.
“These laws further marginalize and ostracize the Muslim community. Republicans are playing to their base, particularly in smaller rural white towns, and Trump has made Islamophobia normal, mainstream.”
Amid the ongoing push for legislation, observers of the trend see some cause for optimism. The fact that only two of the bills passed out of 23 this year is evidence in itself that the anti-sharia movement is fighting an uphill battle.
Many of the most virulent Islamophobes around Trump – notably Bannon, Flynn and Gorka – have all been forced out of the White House. “There’s something heartening coming out of all this,” Beirich said.
Given Trump’s controversial leadership, some monitors had expected to see an even greater surge in the number of bills in 2017 which increased from 14 last year but did not reach the 2011 peak in the wake of the Manhattan controversy of 56 pieces of legislation, according to the Haas Institute.
“Given the support coming from the highest office in the land, we expected to see an even greater increase in anti-sharia legislation at state level,” Elsheikh said. He added that a combination of legal challenges and popular protest not least by Muslims themselves was dampening the impact of the Islamophobe movement.
“There has been a healthy mobilization of the Muslim community who are becoming more engaged and less apologetic, especially second-generation Muslims. They are more determined to demand their rights,” he said.2017 INDIVIDUAL STATISTICS
Last Updated: 4/23/2018
Min: Total minutes played, including stoppage time, Solo: percentage of shots taken that were unassisted, Sht: Total shots taken, G: Goals scored, xG: Expected goals, G-xG: Goals minus expected goals, KP: Key passes, which are passes that directly led to a shot, A: Assists†, xA: The sum of expected goals off shots from a player's key passes, A-xA: Assists minus expected assists, G+A: The sum of goals and assists. xG+xA: The sum of expected goals and expected assists, xPlace: Difference between keeper xG model and shooter xG model, Shotsp96*: Shots per 96 mins, SoTp96: Shots on target per 96 mins, xGp96: Expected goals per 96 mins, G-xGp96: Goals minus expected goals per 96 mins, KPp96: Key passes per 96 mins, xAp96: Expected assists per 96 mins, A-xAp96: Assists minus expected assists per 96 mins, xG+xAp96: Expected goals plus expected assists per 96 mins, xPlacep96: Difference between keeper xG model and shooter xG model per 96 mins.
For more on what Expected Goals (xG) means, read our explanation.
†Assists here refer only to plays in which the passer made the final pass before the goal was scored. These numbers will differ from MLS's officials stats for this reason. This isn't hockey, we have standards.
*96 minutes is the average length of an MLS game. Here's why we do it that way.Brasil, also known as Hy-Brasil or several other variants,[2] is a phantom island said to lie in the Atlantic Ocean[3] west of Ireland. Irish myths described it as cloaked in mist except for one day every seven years, when it becomes visible but still cannot be reached.
Etymology [ edit ]
The etymology of the names Brasil and Hy-Brasil is unknown, but in Irish tradition it is thought to come from the Irish Uí Breasail (meaning "descendants (i.e., clan) of Bresail"), one of the ancient clans of northeastern Ireland. cf. Old Irish: Í: island; bres: beauty, worth, great, mighty.[1]
Despite the similarity, the name of the country Brazil, also spelled Brasil, has no connection to the mythical islands. The South American country was at first named Ilha de Vera Cruz (Island of the True Cross) and later Terra de Santa Cruz (Land of the Holy Cross) by the Portuguese navigators who arrived there. After some decades, it started to be called "Brazil" (Brasil, in Portuguese) due to the exploitation of native brazilwood, at that time the only export of the land. In Portuguese, brazilwood is called pau-brasil, with the word brasil commonly given the etymology "red like an ember", formed from Latin brasa ("ember") and the suffix -il (from -iculum or -ilium).[4][5][6]
Appearance on maps [ edit ]
Nautical charts identified an island called "Bracile" west of Ireland in the Atlantic Ocean as far back as 1325, in a portolan chart by Angelino Dulcert. Later it appeared as Insula de Brasil in the Venetian map of Andrea Bianco (1436), attached to one of the larger islands of a group of islands in the Atlantic. This was identified for a time with the modern island of Terceira in the Azores.
A Catalan chart of about 1480 labels two islands "Illa de brasil", one to the south west of Ireland (where the mythical place was supposed to be) and one south of "Illa verde" or Greenland.
On maps the island was shown as being circular, often with a central strait or river running east-west across its diameter. Despite the failure of attempts to find it, this appeared regularly on maps lying south west of Galway Bay until 1865, by which time it was called Brasil Rock.
Map gallery [ edit ]
Searches for the island [ edit ]
Expeditions left Bristol in 1480 and 1481 to search for the island; and a letter written by Pedro de Ayala, shortly after the return of John Cabot (from his expedition in 1497), reports that land found by Cabot had been "discovered in the past by the men from Bristol who found Brasil".[7]
In 1674 a Captain John Nisbet claimed to have seen the island when on a journey from France to Ireland, stating that the island was inhabited by large black rabbits and a magician who lived alone in a stone castle, yet the character and the story were a literary invention by Irish author Richard Head.[8] Roderick O'Flaherty in A Chorographical Description of West or H-Iar Connaught (1684) tells us "There is now living, Morogh O'Ley (Murrough Ó Laoí), who imagines he was personally on O'Brasil for two days, and saw out of it the iles of Aran, Golamhead [by Lettermullen], Irrosbeghill, and other places of the west continent he was acquainted with."
Hy-Brasil has also been identified with Porcupine Bank, a shoal in the Atlantic Ocean about 200 kilometres (120 mi) west of Ireland[9] and discovered in 1862. As early as 1870 a paper was read to the Geological Society of Ireland suggesting this identification.[10] The suggestion has since appeared more than once, e.g., in an 1883 edition of Notes and Queries[11] and in various twentieth-century publications, one of the more recent being Graham Hancock's book Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization.
In popular culture [ edit ]
Due to the similarity to Brazil, the name "Hy Brasil" is used to refer to South America in the Warhammer 40,000 science fiction franchise.
See also [ edit ]
Irish mythology in popular culture
Inisheer
Tech Duinn, a mythological island to the west of Ireland where souls go after death.
Great Ireland, a similarly west-of-Ireland place, Irish myths of which are believed to have influenced the Vikings.
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]From a World Class Filmmaker (who clearly also happens to be a huge Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers fan) and a World Class Band. Can you imagine being Peter Bogdanovich and his crew producing and directing this film? It would be like a having wet dream! This is getting to live your life all over again as you watch Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers' own professional and sometimes personal lives unfold on the screen. How many people get grow up watching the Beatles on TV then go on to not only become BIGGER than them but also gets to actually record music with a couple of them. What would it be like sitting in the studio with George Harrison and Ognir Rrats (a.k.a. - Ringo Starr)? How many people get to actually live "RUNNIN' Down the DREAM"? This of course is a MUST HAVE for any fan of music! You get to see and feel the passion of an average everyday ordinary group of guys reach the pinnacle of their profession with unimaginable succes. You'll be captivated for the entire four hours of music, interviews, rare footage, and live concerts this gifted filmmaker painstakingly enjoyed providing for all to see. We get an inside view, the front row seats if you will, of the band' professional lives at every stage of the Heartbreakers story. Steve Ferrone was clearly the missing link. He instantly made Heartbreakers a much better band the moment he walked in the door. He deserves recognition for his incredible contribution to this band. I need to correct a previous review, so please allow me. To Udey Hussein who wrote a review on 10/20/2007, to quote him, "The included concert is a superb finale to the Heartbreaker's career and is an awesome experience.". What finale? By ANY means this wasn't a finale to TP & the Heartbreakers! They've only just begun, the final chapter hasn't even been written. You should just wish you were among the priviledged few, okay a few MILLION, who actually have been fans for the entire 30 years of TP & the Heartbreakers. This set is something we'll all savor for generations to come!
Read more“…in the denial of global warming, we are witnessing the most vicious, and so far most successful, attack on science in history.” Those strong words are from James Lawrence Powell in his recent book The Inquisition of Climate Science. The book chronicles the campaign of denial which has resulted in the widespread failure of public understanding of climate science and the long delay in addressing what is now an urgent and pressing threat to the human future.
Powell, a former geology professor, college president and museum director who also served as a member of the US National Science Board for twelve years, is rightly disturbed at the treatment meted out to climate science. The evidence of global warming has accumulated over the past twenty years until it has become overwhelming. Yet climate scientists have been denounced and ridiculed, their ethics and honesty have been questioned, and Congressional committees have subjected them to Kafkaesque interrogation. A sustained attempt has been made to attempt to neutralise a whole field of science. Science denial is so widespread that “reason itself is threatened”.
The book explains the consensus that obtains in the scientific world on the reality of global warming. Powell offers a very useful description of the process of peer-reviewed publication of papers by which science advances. He quotes Dr James Baker, former head of NOAA, as saying that there’s better scientific consensus on the issue of climate science than on any he knows – except maybe Newton’s second law of dynamics. Powell then offers a brief account of the history of the science from Fourier in 1824 to the present and a description of the greenhouse effect as “one of the oldest and most thoroughly studied ideas in science”. He concludes that the core evidence for global warming is plain and fits on a single chart. It is backed by simple observation of “the abundant, incontrovertible, and growing evidence that the earth actually is warming”.
Enter the small group of scientist-deniers who have played such a useful role in the denial industry’s public relations campaigns. They turn up again and again among the “experts” the media use to “balance” mainstream science. They write the books that deny global warming. They speak at the Heartland Institute conferences. They are “research associates” of the denier organisations. Powell examines some of them. Fred Singer, one of the best-credentialed, has a record of denial that includes tobacco smoke, ozone depletion, acid rain and toxic waste. Patrick J Michaels is a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute; he claims that climate models have failed. Richard Lindzen has the most relevant credentials in climate science but does not hesitate to attack even colleagues as selling out their scientific integrity for grant money. He too denies any adverse health effects from second-hand smoke and questions the linking of smoking to lung cancer. Distinguished theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson scoffs at climate models, though his last acquaintance with them appears to have been in the 1970s. He is particularly critical of James Hansen who he claims has turned science into ideology.
Powell also highlights a few non-scientist deniers. Washington Post columnist George Will deals in cherry-picking and plain untruth in matters such as Arctic sea ice decline. Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear portrays the science of climate change as weak and disputed by the scientists themselves, presents scientists as willing to distort their findings in order to achieve their ideological goals, and posits a media and intelligentsia as suckers for the latest doomsday fad. Bjorn Lomborg now agrees that global warming is real and manmade, but claims it is not urgent and that trying to prevent it will be very expensive and not money well spent. The ubiquitous Christopher Monckton speaks nonsense with an air of authority. Powell marvels at the deniers’ assurance that they are right and the global community of scientists are wrong.
He offers a quick guide to the confusing array of “toxic tanks” modelled on and sometimes supported by the conservative think tanks which have become so influential an institution in American politics. The Global Climate Coalition, the Heartland Institute, the George C Marshall Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute are commented on. Myron Ebell, the spokesman for the last named recommends burning more fossil fuel to deal with global warming on the grounds that the more prosperous the energy industry becomes the more quickly it will be able to replace its fossil fuel plants with new technology. Like other deniers Ebell reserves special venom for James Hansen.
The most profitable company in history, ExxonMobil, has been a powerful funder of denier organisations, and continues in that role albeit claiming to have cut back on such funding. Powell juxtaposes his discussion of ExxonMobil with a report on the massive industry “that cannot afford denial” – the insurance industry, with revenues three times as large as Big Oil. It’s the big re-insurers in particular who may cause a realignment of the corporate response to global warming, as they demand attention to global warming from companies and industries which seek insurance at an affordable price.
The US media have played a key role in aiding the denial industry. Right-wing outlets like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal make no bones about their plain espousal of denial, but the media pillars, the Washington Post and the New York Times, are also guilty of complicity by their failure of understanding or their laziness or by a misguided attempt to be balanced. Powell details some of their failures to do simple fact-checks of what they publish, giving an unwarranted status and credence to the claims of deniers.
There are no research findings that falsify global warming. The denial industry is built on discredited claims and ultimately can only resort to the ridiculous notion that a global community of thousands of scientists have joined a vast international conspiracy without precedent in human history – “a corrupt criminal enterprise to dwarf the Mafia”. It is absurd, yet it is openly entertained by prominent US politicians and voiced by eager propagandists.
Climate science is to be trusted. Powell is sure of this. It has been assembled by thousands of scientists “plying the deep oceans, forbidding deserts, icy poles and torrid jungles” as well as working in their laboratories. It has been through all the self-correcting work that peer review demands. The evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable. The western world has trusted science and achieved a standard of living and a life expectancy unimaginable even two centuries ago. Why distrust it now, for no good reason and at the very moment it warns of the greatest threat ever to face humanity? Powell is absolutely right to see that as the abandonment of reason and of our uniquely human ability to imagine the future.
Powell’s book covers ground that is becoming familiar as others also delve into the background of the denial campaign. But his treatment is comprehensive while remaining compact and accessible and he brings his own independent researching to the story. Above all he brings a stout defence of the science with an underlying warning of how profound are the implications of the attacks it has suffered. For me they raise the spectre of a society which has lost its intellectual bearings and surrendered to irrationality.
Like this: Like Loading...SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — It’s not every day that a TV station’s general manager has to sign an expense report for $600 in pot, but this is California, and this is 2014, and this is a serious consumer story.
KPIX 5 reporter Mike Sugerman, who has a medicinal marijuana card, was concerned that the exploding industry is under-regulated, and wanted to test the potency of the medicines that can be purchased, especially the medicinal marijuana that is meant to be ingested, including candy.
“There’s no regulation because the Feds consider it illegal,” Sugerman explained. “The FDA can’t get involved.”
He purchased different kinds of items at random at 12 locations in San Francisco and Oakland.
Sugerman said in testing for the upcoming story, a laboratory found that, “…labels on packages had nothing to do with what was in them. One candy was 1 percent of what it claimed!” And other products contained other chemicals that were not supposed to be there.
Station management encouraged the consumer report, even if it raises eyebrows when the finance department reviews the newsroom expenses.
Sugerman said, “They [the bosses] actually were cool with it. It turned out to be a great story and I think one that will really resonate in the community. We’re flying blind here. And it’s medicine.”
The big question several of Sugerman’s colleagues asked was what happened to the $600 in marijuana after the testing. Sugerman confirms, “The laboratory kept everything.”
To see what the tests revealed about the unregulated medicine, watch at 11 p.m. Pacific on KPIX 5 Monday, November 17th, on television, or streaming online at http://kpix.com/live
MORE NEWS:Radio Autonomía: Zapatismo in the Bay SEPTEMBER 2012 SHOW "Education & Anti-capitalism" radioautonomia [at] gmail.com)
Monday Sep 3rd, 2012 1:04 PM by Radio Autonomía
Complete audio archives of the September 2, 2012 broadcast of Radio Autonomía.
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EDUCATION & ANTI-CAPITALIST STRUGGLES
The capitalist model of education is failing. Student movements around the world are expressing this through mass protests and student revolts. In Mexico and Chile, Quebec and California students are occupying their schools, shutting down state institutions, and building alternative spaces of learning and politics.
From the autonomous Zapatista schools to the workshops that grew as a part of the Occupy movement, autonomous movements everywhere are radically rethinking the meaning and the form of learning, replacing the hierarchical model education most clearly embodied by state schools with more collaborative spaces for sharing and collectively producing knowledge. From Oaxaca, Mexico, Gustavo Esteva asserts that “education and capitalism are twins.” If we take up this provocative statement, then we are forced to consider a distinction between education and learning. In doing so, we ask: What is learning oriented towards? What are schools or “skools” for? Do they simply reproduce a system? Or do they generate and multiply radical politics? And what happens when learning is simply about survival?
On today’s show, we’ll hear updates from the massive student movements against privatization in Chile and Quebec, and our own student rebellions here in California. Shifting our focus to alternative learning spaces, we’ll be interviewing compañerxs from various projects here in Oakland, to explore the connections between anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian politics and education. We’ll wrap up the show with an interview with Mexican hip-hop artist and community organizer Bocafloja about the use of rap and poetry in radical pedagogy.This article is about the Fire Nation admiral. |
/ NYT )
Following Reyer’s death and facing a public backlash, GoDaddy removed its domain services from the Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website, saying that the website violated GoDaddy’s terms of service after a post that mocked her death. Google, which provided replacement domain services to the website, quickly followed suit. The Daily Stormer has since moved to the dark web, where it is more difficult to identify — and thereby pressure — its service providers. Relying on internet companies to act as regulators is appealing because they can move swiftly and decisively to push undesirable actors and content out of sight to most people. When their actions target groups as dangerous and reprehensible as white supremacists, it is tempting to simply cheer this as a victory.
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However, it also raises difficult questions about the extent to which we as a society are increasingly relying upon a handful of major internet companies to police a broad array of social problems, not all of which rises to the level of violent hate speech. GoDaddy and Google’s actions are significant because this is not an isolated example of large internet firms targeting some bad actors. Rather, they reflect a growing trend of large, mostly U.S. internet companies acting as global regulators of online activity, raising issues of accountability and the arbitrary nature of their actions. The appeal of relying on these companies to police bad behaviour is obvious. These companies have become go-to regulators for legislators around the world because they have significant regulatory latitude through their terms-of-service agreements to remove any speech or ban any users they deem in violation of their rules. Because these companies can work through their terms of service, government officials are calling upon them to address social problems ranging from illegal gambling, copyright infringement to child sexual abuse content, hate speech and “fake news.” Crucially, however, in many cases, these internet firms are removing content and terminating their services in the absence of actual specific legislative requirements; that is, “voluntarily,” and in the absence of any judicial process.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a U.S.-based digital-rights group, has critiqued such efforts as shadow regulation that can have the force of law, but not its transparency or accountability. The violence in Charlottesville demonstrates again that companies respond to public criticism, especially in high-profile cases. But is rule by public protest, which at its worst is mob mentality, where one website or group is arbitrarily targeted while another is overlooked how we want to govern the internet?
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Industry-led enforcement campaigns also often lack rigorous accountability measures. Devolving enforcement responsibility to internet companies is useful for government wishing to sidestep public demands for regulatory oversight. However, internet firms’ internal rules and enforcement practices can be troublingly opaque and prone to arbitrary interpretation. Facebook’s leaked rules reveal the company’s complex processes for determining content as hate speech and highlight its dependence on overworked, underpaid content moderators who have only seconds to flag objectionable material. As a result, internet firms are inaccurately removing lawful, inoffensive content. While we may welcome enforcement action against violent hate speech, we should recognize that internet companies have too-often acted to stifle peaceful, inoffensive speech criticizing governments and law enforcement. Rules first enacted against the most reprehensible behaviour — terrorism, child sexual abuse, and hate speech — are often expanded to target other forms of speech. What will we do when the censors come for controversial or confronting speech that we support? To be absolutely clear, I do not support white supremacists. My argument here is that there is a broader role for government to play in determining how content and behaviour on the internet should be regulated and by whom. There is also a critical role for public debate to determine how the internet should be governed. Simply off-loading responsibility to companies like Google and GoDaddy to react to public pressure may have gotten the job done in this specific case, but in the longer term, it represents a troubling, potentially dangerous policy choice. Natasha Tusikov, author of Chokepoints: Global Private Regulation on the internet is an assistant professor of criminology at York University in Toronto.
Read more about:During International Special Operations Forces Week, troops staged a demonstration in Tampa, Fla., on May 25, where they rescued the mayor from a simulated hostage situation with helicopters, gunships and hundreds of blank rounds of ammunition. (United States Special Operations Command)
TAMPA — On Wednesday, Special Operations troops from more than a dozen countries jumped out of helicopters, rappelled from buildings and expended hundreds of rounds of ammunition as they attempted to rescue the mayor of this Florida city.
The operation was, of course, an exercise, but it was also a public spectacle for a force that has tried desperately to remain in the shadows despite now being at the forefront of America’s wars.
[U.S. Special Operations units are using faulty rifle sights]
Aside from U.S. Special Operations forces, including Navy SEALs, Marine Raiders and Army Green Berets, countries such as Ireland and Jordan also participated in the exercise. Many of the participants covered their faces, and only a select few were allowed to speak to the media afterward.
“A lot of what we do is a bit secretive, we don’t really advertise much of what we do and there is a reason for it,” U.S. Special Forces Lt. Col. Chris Robeshaw told reporters following the event. “I think … this is maybe a stark reminder that there are young men and women out there putting themselves at risk.”
Special Operations forces participate in a capabilities demonstration at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference in Tampa on May 25. (Brian Blanco/European Pressphoto Agency)
The exercise is put on each year as a part of the Special Forces Industry Conference, a 12,000-strong, three-day meeting of Special Operations personnel and companies showcasing the latest technologies available to both U.S. troops and their international allies.
Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn is captured by pirates and held ashore near the convention center here. Soon after, as thousands of spectators watched from nearby rooftops, party boats and bar patios, Black Hawk helicopters supported by smaller gunships and fast-moving riverine craft descended on the area.
[Photos, details emerge of U.S. commandos working off new combat ship]
In the background an announcer narrated the operation. “This type of mission would be undertaken during the cover of darkness,” the voice says with a tone that would be fitting for the master of ceremonies for a high school graduation. “The sniper overwatch team is equipped with high-powered rifles that can hit a target from more than a mile away.”
Role players, dressed in black and carrying Kalashnikovs, feigned gunshot wounds as the coalition of commandos swooped in. Luckily, no one had to throw a red smoke grenade to mark the landing zone for a MEDEVAC helicopter or improvise with black Hefty trash bags instead of using body bags; in fact, there were no U.S. or international casualties at all.
For the faux mission’s finale, a rescued Buckhorn was ferried back to shore, firing one of the riverine craft’s blank-shooting.50-caliber machine guns as if he were Rambo incarnate, a smile plastered on his face while being flanked by some of the United States’ most elite war fighters.
With the last blank round of ammunition expended and the clean-up crew quietly picking up shards of a fake rocket-propelled grenade explosion that went off near the deck of a waterfront bar, some of the Special Operations troops came ashore, disembarking from their rigid hull inflatable patrol craft to a throng of people eager to take pictures with them.
[Why the Marines have failed to adopt a new sniper rifle in the past 14 years]
According to Special Operations Command officials, the entire 30-minute operation took four days to plan, rehearse and execute. The preparation, for what many in the U.S. military would call a “dog and pony show,” likely took time and resources from a community that is currently deploying at a rate not seen during the last 15 years of war.
“I would say there appears to be a heavy reliance on Special Operations forces, not just us but all of our international allies,” Robeshaw said of current operations around the globe. “I think the deployments really push people to their limits … and I’m always amazed at the perseverance that we all share.”Play Facebook
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Multiple hecklers shouting “Bill Clinton is a rapist” interrupted President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at separate rallies after a pro-Donald Trump radio host offered a cash reward to anyone carrying out such a stunt.
Three separate protesters disrupted Hillary Clinton’s election campaign rally with Al Gore in Miami, while three others — including two wearing “Bill Clinton rapist” T-shirts — cut into Obama as he addressed a crowd in North Carolina.
The Clinton campaign linked the incidents to Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and right-wing radio host who founded the Infowars website.
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Jones, who has prayed for Donald Trump on his show, on Friday offered $1,000 to supporters pictured on television for at least five seconds wearing a “Bill Clinton rape” T-shirt and $5,000 to anyone who can be heard shouting “Bill Clinton is a rapist” while wearing such a garment.
Jones, who believes the Sandy Hook shootings were a hoax, also says Obama and Hillary Clinton are demons who smell like sulfur.
Obama appeared unfazed by the interruptions at his event in Greensboro, joking to the crowd that “those folks are auditioning for a reality show” as one pair was escorted out of the amphitheater.
He responded to a later disruption: “Go get your own rally!”
Hillary Clinton urged her audience to “focus on what’s really important in the election” as the crowd drowned out the interlopers with boos.
It followed similar scenes on Saturday, when Bill Clinton himself was interrupted by a protester who shouted “you're a rapist!" at a rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
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The former president urged the crowd to applaud his protester, saying: “You gotta feel sorry for him. They had a bad day yesterday, so they're trying to make it up. Give him a hand. When other people pour poison down your throat, don't drink it. Give back good.”
Trump’s campaign has sought to capitalize on the support of women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual abuse and invited them to sit in the family area close to the center of Sunday night's presidential debate.
Three women — Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey — accuse Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct dating back decades including a rape allegation, all of which the former president has denied.
A fourth, Kathy Shelton, is a child rape victim and critic of Hillary Clinton who, as a lawyer, conducted the defense of her rapist.
Jen Palmieri, director of communications for the Clinton campaign, told reporters that Tuesday’s rally interruptions were organized by Jones and Infowars.
A protester interrupts Hillary Clinton during a Tuesday night rally in Miami, Florida. Monica Alba
However, disruptions have also taken place prior to Jones’ cash reward offer.
On Thursday, vice-presidential hopeful Tim Kaine was interrupted by a man wearing a shirt with a picture of Bill Clinton and the word “RAPE.”
Bill Clinton has denied all the allegations lobbed by his accusers and was never charged with any crimes, but the claims resonate with Trump voters.
Related: Nasty Campaign Talk Puts Parents, Teachers in Tough Spot
At a Trump rally late Tuesday in Panama City, Florida supporter Tammy Wilson held a sign saying “Bill Clinton is a rapist.”
She told NBC News: “Bill Clinton is a rapist, and his wife enabled him, and that's not what we need in the White House. She allowed it to happen, she tore down the women that accused him of rape... We need someone who is going to stand up for women in this country, not tear them down.”
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Asked about Trump’s lewd comments on the Access Hollywood bus, she said: “A man is a man, and sometimes they make bad mistakes, just like women do, but a woman does not downgrade another woman who has been a victim of rape.”
“Saying something but then downgrading a victim is two totally different things,” said Wilson, who is from Chipley, Florida.It’s been kind of an exciting couple of weeks, with 3 major new SLRs released and a couple of more on the way. There are plenty of people out there who are doing in-depth reviews, touting the greatness of the new cameras, and trashing them online without having touched one (My favorite so far is the guy who, after looking at online jpgs, stated it was obvious that the 5D Mk III and D800 weren’t a bit better than his T2i, so he wouldn’t be upgrading). I don’t have much to say regarding image noise, ergonomics, autofocus accuracy, image processing, etc. There are plenty of people doing that more thoroughly and accurately than I could.
But there was one question that was really eating my lunch and I was in a position to take a look at it: just how much better would the Nikon D800, with that gazillion megapixels, really resolve? Would it be 3 times better than a D700, and 50% better than a Canon 5D Mk III, which the pixel count would suggest? Would the lenses we have really be able to take advantage of that resolution? I wasn’t sure.
So when we got a bunch of Canon 5D Mk III’s and a few Nikon D800s in last week and I was able to divert a few over to our Imatest lab for a few hours. There wasn’t enough time to do exhaustive testing (generally the cameras arrived at 10 a.m. and had to be in packing to ship out by 3 p.m.) but I was able to get enough done to make some preliminary observations.
Comparing Camera Resolution
I arbitrarily chose two lenses to do the camera comparisons: the Zeiss 100 f/2 Makro Planar and Zeiss 25mm f/2.0. I chose Zeiss lenses because it let us put identical lenses in front of both Canon and Nikon cameras. These two particular lenses because both are exceptionally high resolution lenses and I wanted to be able to test at two different focusing distances, since that could make some difference. The copies used for this test had previously been tested and were known to be excellent and free of optical issues.
We tested each on D800, 5D Mk II, and 5D Mk III cameras (and one run on a D700 just for comparison). Otherwise things were kept as equal as we could make them: lighting and setups weren’t changed, etc. Time constraints prevented doing what I would have loved to do: testing a half-dozen copies of each lens on a half dozen copies of each body. But this should be fairly accurate.
I should note that we initially ran the Canon files through DPP to convert the raw images, since Imatest can’t directly convert the 5D Mk III files yet, but the results we got showed DPP was obviously doing some manipulation to the files as it converted them, making the results invalid for comparison since we test on unsharpened raw images. We then used Adobe’s DNG converter which handled the files with no problems and didn’t manipulate them at all, so we used RAW-to-DNG conversions for all the cameras to make sure things were equal.
The Zeiss 100 results first. The Vertical axis is the peak (center) MTF 50 (in line pairs / image height), the Horizontal axis aperture, and the cameras identified in the legend. The D700 and 5D Mk II results agree exactly with what we’ve seen testing these combinations for several months.
Results with the Zeiss 25mm f/2.0 lens were very similar. I left off the D700 after the first test. I saw no sense beating a dead horse and, as I mentioned, time was short.
The results certainly weren’t surprising: I expected the 5D III to be a bit better than the II and it was. I expected the D800 to be better than any 35mm camera we’d tested, and it was. Previous, only the Leica M9, with its no-AA-filter, CCD-sensor, using the $6,000 Leica 50mm f/1.4 Summilux lens and gets up in this range among 35mm cameras. For the couple of people, though, that seem to think the D800 is a medium format camera in 35mm clothing, I would point out that a Hasselblad H4D-50 with kit lens tests out at about 1,600 lp/ih, so no, we’re not quite there yet.
At Higher ISO
The above results are taken at ISO 200 which should theoretically giving best, or near-best, performance for each camera. I was curious how the D800’s resolution would hold up at higher ISOs so I repeated the ZF 25mm on D800 series at ISO 400 (where I do most of my shooting – it’s my test after all) and also at ISO 1600 and ISO 3200.
Again, this is done from raw images with no (as best I can determine) post image sharpening, although you can never be sure what is happening in-camera. But at any rate, there really is an amazingly small amount of resolution fall off at reasonably high ISOs. I was really surprised at this, especially at how well 3200 compared to 1600. Obviously I should have gone further, and need to do the same comparisons for the 5DIII, which I should get to next week.
What About Lenses?
Ah, now that is the question. At least it’s the question now. Lloyd Chambers had already mad some good suggestions for Zeiss and Nikon lenses that should be able to handle the D800’s resolution based on his experience. I’m not sure I agree with all of them, but it’s certainly the best starting list. I plan on testing each lens on the D800 and getting a list of our own together, but I was able to get some of the usual players tested before the last D800 left the shop.
The first graph plots peak (center) MTF 50 comparing the ZF 25, Nikon 24 f/1.4G, Nikon 14-24 f/2.8, and Nikon 70-200 f2.8 VR II. There’s a pretty significant difference between the primes and zooms at f/2.8. It’s not surprising, since the zooms are wide open there, but I thought the point was worth making: if you want best resolution with the D800, shooting at f/4 or f/5.6 is going to be necessary with most lenses.
The second plots average resolution of the center, halfway to the corners, and corner MTF 50. It becomes apparent that center resolution doesn’t mean corner resolution: the 70-200 VR II does much better in the corners than the 24 f/1.4. The Zeiss 25mm does superbly well, but I should point out that this lens seems to do it’s best work at close and medium distances (like where it is when we do Imatesting) and may not be as good at infinity.
Obviously, there are a lot more lenses that we’ll need to test just to make recommendations based on resolution. The only message I think to take away right now is that the D800 is playing up in the range of maximum resolution of even the best lenses. Putting anything less in front of it is going to limit the camera.
Conclusion:
For the fanboys who don’t like the results: This concludes our test of the Emergency Resolution Testing Service. This was only a test. If this had been an actual Fanboy emergency you would have been instructed where to tune in your area for official Fanboy disinformation and complete manufacturer sponsored reviews.
For everyone else, there’s no question the D800 can actually get those pixels to show up in the final product (assuming your final product is a big print – they’re going to be wasted posting on your Facebook page). But you’d better have some really good glass in front of it if you want to demonstrate all of that resolution.
In the real world, highest possible resolution is nice to know about and talk about, but usually not of critical importance compared to other factors. You’ll be able to make superb images with any decent lens for an 8 X 10 or even 11 X 16 print. But if you’re getting the camera because of the resolution, it makes sense to know which lenses will allow all of that resolution to be utilized. Just in case you get that job that needs billboard sized prints.
Roger Cicala
Lensrentals.com
March, 2012In a flood of lawsuits, Roman Catholics, evangelicals and Mennonites are challenging a provision in the new health care law that requires employers to cover birth control in employee health plans — a high-stakes clash between religious freedom and health care access that appears headed to the Supreme Court.
In recent months, federal courts have seen dozens of lawsuits brought not only by religious institutions like Catholic dioceses but also by private employers ranging from a pizza mogul to produce transporters who say the government is forcing them to violate core tenets of their faith. Some have been turned away by judges convinced that access to contraception is a vital health need and a compelling state interest. Others have been told that their beliefs appear to outweigh any state interest and that they may hold off complying with the law until their cases have been judged. New suits are filed nearly weekly.
“This is highly likely to end up at the Supreme Court,” said Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia and one of the country’s top scholars on church-state conflicts. “There are so many cases, and we are already getting strong disagreements among the circuit courts.”
President Obama’s health care law, known as the Affordable Care Act, was the most fought-over piece of legislation in his first term and was the focus of a highly contentious Supreme Court decision last year that found it to be constitutional.The morning after the terrorist attack in Nice, France, which left 84 dead and 50 wounded, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared that the country is “going to have to live with terrorism.”
Valls delivered his speech by the Élysée Palace in Paris Friday morning, The New York Times reports.
“We would like to tell the French people that we will never give in,” he said. “We will not give in to the terrorist threat. The times have changed, and France is going to have to live with terrorism.”
He added that the attack took place July 14 on Bastille Day was no coincidence.
“France, once again, has been hit in its soul, on the 14th of July, our national day. They wanted to attack the unity of the French nation.”
Users on social media in France have absolutely exploded in response to his comments, with some calling him to resign.
Tunisian terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who regularly ran afoul of the law, gunned people down in a crowd Thursday evening before driving his truck straight through a throng of people, killing dozens upon dozens. The death toll is likely to rise.
Police were successful in killing the driver, but not before he racked up a serious death count.
“We cannot deny that it was a terror attack,” French President Francois Hollande said.
The state of emergency, which was implemented following the Paris attacks in November and set to expire at the end of the month, will now continue at least for three more months.
The Department of State has confirmed two Americans died in the attack: Sean Copeland and his 11-year-old son from Texas.
Since the attacks, French police have raided Bouhlel’s home in Nice. Although Bouhlel was involved in petty crime, he was not under surveillance by any intelligence services in France.
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Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.Last weekend was all about London’s obsession with France: read my reviews of Bistrot Bruno Loubet and the cocktail bar Baranis.
After working in front of it for nearly three months, I managed to have lunch at Bistrot Bruno Loubet before it closes to explore pastures new on April 6th. The carrots, chickpeas, coriander, lime and sultanas salad with goat’s curd (£6.5) was small but at the same time fresh and filling, perfect to eat with a side like the cauliflower cheese (£4).
The Bistrot will be replaced by a short-term venture still hosted by Loubet, called The Grain Store Unleashed, focusing on vegetables like his restaurant in King’s Cross.
Hidden underground at 115 Chancery Lane, Baranis is an extremely popular venue in between the City and Fleet Street, right next to the Royal Courts of Justice. It’s as lively as it is tiny, but this time the food and the drinks are not the coolest thing about the venue.
What’s awesome about Baranis is the chance to play pétanque, a form of boules where the goal is to throw hollow metal balls as close as possible to a small wooden ball. It felt like being back to Sardinia… minus the beach.
Pictures: Carolina Are
Ho passato lo scorso weekend all’insegna dell’ossessione inglese per la Francia: ecco le mie recensioni del Bistrot Bruno Loubet e di Baranis.
Nonostante ci lavori davanti, ho avuto la possibilità di pranzare al Bistrot Bruno Loubet solo lo scorso weekend, giusto in tempo prima della sua chiusura il 6 Aprile. Ho scelto un’insalata di carote, ceci, lime, uvetta, formaggio di capra e coriandolo (£6.5), piccola ma fresca e perfetta per essere accompagnata da contorni come il cavolfiore al formaggio (£4), una versione meno pesante degli onnipresenti macaroni al formaggio (“mac & cheese”) per cui gli Inglesi vanno matti.
Il Bistrot sarà sostituito da un ristorante temporaneo sempre capeggiato da Loubet. Il nuovo ristorante si chiamerà The Grain Store Unleashed e preparerà piatti a base di verdure come il Grain Store di Loubet a King’s Cross.
Nascosto in un sotterraneo al 115 Chancery Lane, Baranis è un bar popolarissimo tra la City e Fleet Street, vicino alle Royal Courts of Justice. E’ piccolo e affollato, ma non sono il cibo o i cocktail a rendere questo locale speciale.
Baranis offre infatti la possibilità di giocare a pétanque, la versione francese delle nostre bocce. Mi sembrava di essere tornata sulle spiagge della Sardegna!
Foto: Carolina Are
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Like this: Like Loading...HealthDay News — A new synthetic drug called U-47700 has been linked with at least 50 deaths across the United States, and several states are trying to halt the spread of the drug, which can be bought online.
Georgia, Ohio, and Wyoming have taken action to ban the drug, and Kansas law enforcement agencies are seeking an emergency ban. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is analyzing the drug but hasn’t yet moved to control it, a spokeswoman told the Associated Press.
U-47700 is an opioid that is nearly 8 times stronger than morphine. It comes in different forms and can be swallowed, snorted, or injected.
The drug — being made by chemical companies in China — was developed by pharmaceutical company UpJohn in the 1970s, and the recipe for making it is easy to find, Barry Logan, PhD, chief of forensic toxicology at NMS Labs in Pennsylvania, which provides lab services for government and private clients, told the AP.
More InformationYes, Trump is taking office today. But, as Snowden pointed out, this is not a particular reason why you should worry about your privacy. Prior to being elected in 2008, Obama promised to shut down the warrantless wiretapping programs that were going on at the time. He never did.
Now a new president comes into office, and many are worried that surveillance will get even worse. But even if it does - does that make a difference? The technology to monitor the entire Internet traffic is already there, and state authorities as well as companies are using it against us. Today we are living in a surveillance state worse than it had once been imagined by George Orwell. Will a new President really make a difference? Snowden rightly said: "If we want a better world, we can't hope for an Obama, or fear a Trump. We should build it ourselves."
Take back your data with encryption
What he means by that is easy: You should think about your own security and privacy rather than relying on a politician to make changes. Snowden said that Americans need to think about how to "defend the rights of everyone, everywhere," rather than defending against Trump in high office. And this is true for all people around the world.
Because state surveillance is not only a threat in the US, but sadly all around the world. Surveillance has grown in almost every country these past few years, and the open and widely unencrypted use of the Internet has made it very easy for the authorities to watch our every step. Now, more than ever, is the time to change that!
"I have nothing to hide" is a false statement - for everybody.
Fortunately there are more and more services allowing you to encrypt your communication end-to-end so that you can protect yourself and your family and friends. Of course there are always the people who say "I have nothing to hide". This might be true - for the moment, at least - but the scope of such a statement has a much wider impact.
If you have nothing to hide, you also have to accept that freedom of speech and a free press are impossible to maintain wherever there is no possibility to gather information or to meet sources in secret. Privacy is our basic human right because it is necessary to protect our freedom.
If you live in a surveillance state, it does not matter who controls it. The ruler or the ruling class might benefit from limiting free speech of its citizens. And the possible consequences should not be underestimated. Authorities are putting pressure on journalists in many countries, and Trump has been showing such a tendency as well. The question is: Does this reconcile with democratic values?
The NSA knows it all
Taken into account that the NSA by monitoring the Internet knows where you are, who you talk to, what you buy, and what you post or like online, it is worrying that they operate in complete secrecy.
No one can feel secure anymore because it is just impossible to predict who future targets might be: immigrants, Muslims, liberals, journalists?
That a new president is taking office today just makes clear what should have been obvious all along: When a state authority has the power - by laws and by technology - to monitor their own citizens, it is a threat to everybody's freedom. At the moment all we have left is self-defence with encryption.
Loss of privacy can have dire consequences
Even if you take the NSA out of the equation, giving up your privacy can have dire consequences for lots of people in their daily lives. Imagine you want to get a job within a public authority. What if you fought for the rights of minorities in the past? Could this be a reason why you don’t get the job?
Imagine you need money to buy a house or to pay your medication. Unfortunately you are friends on Facebook with people who don’t seem very trustworthy to creditors, maybe because they have debts. Sorry, no credit for you.
There is only one way to avoid these problems: encrypt your data.Super-slow-motion footage from recent Florida storm
From the FLORIDA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
MELBOURNE, FLA. — Scientists at Florida Institute of Technology used a high-speed camera to capture an amazing lighting flash from a May 20 storm near the university’s Melbourne campus.
The flash was recorded at 7,000 frames per second (FPS). The playback speed seen in the video is 700 FPS.
The video was captured as part of the process of testing the camera for its ultimate use, which will be centered on capturing and studying the dynamics and energetics of the upward electrical discharges from thunderstorms known as starters, jets and gigantic jets.
Principal Investigator Ningyu Liu from the Geospace Physics Laboratory in Florida Tech’s Department of Physics and Space Sciences is available for interviews.
The lightning flash captured here happened during a May 20 storm not far from the Florida Tech campus in Melbourne. It was recorded at 7,000 frames per second using a high-speed camera.
Video courtesy of the Geospace Physics Laboratory, Department of Physics and Space Sciences, Florida Institute of Technology.
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RedditGreat news, everybody! Today’s the day you’ll be falling in love with your new favorite metalcore act, Curses. Why’s that you ask? Well, in anticipation of their face-meltingly heavy LP Chapter I: Introspect hitting stores this Friday, the West Virginia natives have teamed up with The Noise to stream their debut album in full.
That’s right! Essentially – in case you aren’t totally sold yet – if you’re a fan of breakdowns that could make the elderly slam dance again, sweetly-sung choruses that could most likely resurrect Harambe (RIP big guy) and guest vocals from Periphery’s Spencer Sotelo, this new record is perfect for you.
Still don’t believe Curses is your next favorite band? Here’s some insight into the quintet’s new release via guitarist Davey Nicewander:
“Chapter I is a musical snapshot of a point in all of our lives where we were asking ourselves questions about who we are and what our purpose is. It means something different to each of us and we feel like the entire process of getting this album out has facilitated growth in us all. We hope that our fans can listen to this record and find a sense of home within it and, ultimately, within themselves."
See, there you have it: Kind-hearted musicians putting out music you’re going to want to bang your head to. Sounds like the best kind of combination to us. To check out Chapter I: Introspect in full, be sure to look below. Afterwards, album pre-orders are still available and can be found physically here and digitally here.Story highlights Jonathan Koppenhaver leaves behind a suicide note
His ex-girlfriend says he assaulted her in August
"I'm so cursed," he says after the alleged assault
Mixed martial arts fighter Jonathan Koppenhaver, who is accused of beating up his ex-girlfriend, tried to kill himself in a Las Vegas jail, authorities said.
Koppenhaver, 32, is known as War Machine on the MMA circuit. He allegedly beat adult film actress Christy Mack and a male friend on August 8 -- then went on the run.
Police captured him a week later in his hometown of Simi Valley, California. He's been held at the Clark County Detention Center since then.
JUST WATCHED MMA fighter caught after manhunt Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH MMA fighter caught after manhunt 01:07
A corrections officer conducting checks at the detention center found him unresponsive in his cell on Tuesday, according to CNN affiliate KSNV.
Suicide note
He was found seated on the floor with a torn piece of linen around his neck, which was attached to his bunk, Officer Jose Hernandez told the affiliate. Koppenhaver, who was unresponsive and struggling to breathe, had left behind a suicide note.
Hernandez cut the linen and called medical personnel, who later cleared the fighter and put him on suicide watch at a medical isolation unit. Details of his suicide note were not released.
The incident occurred on the same day he was supposed to appear in court to discuss a plea deal, according to the affiliate.
'I'm so cursed'
Koppenhaver has said that he'd gone to surprise his ex-girlfriend with a ring when he found her with another man.Washington, DC, July 10 – The government of the last country to use saturation bombing in combat is admonishing Israel to exercise restraint in its handling of the current offensive in the Gaza Strip.
In 1965, the Unites States Air Force commenced a carpet-bombing campaign against North Vietnamese targets, adapting a WWII strategy of saturating a small area with bombs to the point that no person or structure would survive. Through the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, American B-52 Stratofortress bombers over Vietnam dropped tens of thousands of tons of high explosive bombs on each mission, which often consisted of dozens of such aircraft. The commander-in-chief of those armed forces is now counseling Israel to act “responsibly” in its attempt to remove the menace of rockets fired from the neighboring Gaza Strip.
Each B-52 payload, exceeding 50,000 tons of bombs, has been compared in potency to a tactical nuclear weapon. The American fleet of such aircraft repeatedly released such payloads over Communist targets in Southeast Asia. The Israel Air Force, in the absence of strategic bombers, employs precision-bombing aimed at minimizing civilian casualties. American President Barack Obama and other world leaders who support Israel’s right to defend itself have nevertheless demanded or requested that Israel not engage in military moves that might make the situation more destructive.
Carpet-bombing was first employed by the Luftwaffe during the Spanish Civil War, but its first battlefield success came in 1940 when 90 German tactical bombers dropped bombs on the Rotterdam city center, killing 900 and rendering tens of thousands homeless. A threat to repeat the move on the city of Utrecht prompted the Dutch to surrender. Heavy bomber aircraft were thus proved not necessary for carpet-bombing, meaning that Israel is capable of conducting such operations but chooses not to. However, that level of restraint appears insufficient to international leaders, who call for a level of Israeli retaliation short of effective.
Allied forces adopted carpet-bombing as both a strategy and battlefield tactic during WWII, leveling German cities and killing hundreds of thousands. The US was not the only county to use saturation bombing, and other leaders whose forces used the murderous strategy, such as Britain, have similarly called on Israel to exercise restraint.We, at |
chosen to function within the normal east Mediterranean rainfall pattern, in which good rainy years create enough surplus to sustain farming communities during drought years. In the authors’ view, climate change is unlikely to induce major cultural changes. Their thesis is published online in Springer’s journal Vegetation History and Archaeobotany.
Climate-based explanations for the beginning of new agricultural practices give environmental factors a central role, as prime movers for the cultural-economic change known as the Near Eastern Neolithic or Agricultural Revolution (about 8500 B.C., 10500 cal. B.P.*). Dr. Abbo and team studied the traditional farming systems which existed until the early twentieth century in the Near East, looking for insights into the agronomic basis of the early days of Near Eastern farming, and to shed light on the possible role of climatic factors as stimuli for the Agricultural Revolution.
Their detailed analysis demonstrates that climate change could not have been the reason for the emergence of grain farming in the Near East. They find that farming requires a relatively stable climate to function as a sustainable economy and therefore is not a sustainable option in times of climatic deterioration.
The authors conclude, “We argue against climate change being at the origin of Near Eastern agriculture and believe that a slow but real climatic change is unlikely to induce revolutionary cultural changes.”
*calibrated years before the present
Reference
1. Abbo S et al (2010). Yield stability: an agronomic perspective on the origin of Near Eastern Agriculture. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany; DOI 10.1007/s00334-009-0233-7
The full-text article is available to journalists as a pdf.
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RedditIn this article, you’re going to discover ayurvedic skin care procedure. Before going for any skin treatment, you should know your skin type.
Know Your Skin Type
According to Ayurveda, there are broadly three skin types.
1. Vatta
This kind of skin is dry, delicate, thin and cool to the touch. It gets easily dehydrated.It is more affected by dry, windy weather.
It is more affected by dry, windy weather.
Vatta skin is prone to be dry, rough and flaky.
2. Pitta
This type of skin is of medium thickness, fair, soft and warm. It is prone to problems like freckles and moles.
That sort of skin is most prone to acne, rashes or sunspots, when out of balance.
3. Kapha
This kind of skin is oily, thick, pale, soft, cold and more tolerant to the sun. It ages slower than other skin types and forms fewer wrinkles.
Problems with this kind of skin are mainly pale complexion, blackheads, pimples and excessive oil.
There can also exist a combination skin, which can be Vata-Pitta, Kapha-Pitta or Vata-Kapha skin.
It mainly depends on the seasonal and environmental factors.
Vata Pita skin is both dry and sensitive. Kapha Pita skin, on the other hand, is oily and delicate, and Vata-Kapha skin is dry with some oily zones.
The ayurvedic skin care for combination skin type depends on the seasonal factors.
Vata- Pitta skin behaves like Pitta skin in summer and Vata skin in winters.
Kapha- Pitta type acts like Pitta in summer and Kapha in winters.
Vata- Kapha type acts like Vata only but requires extra cleaning of oily zones.
Depending on the skin behavior the care should have been taken.
Vata Skin Care
For Vata Skin Care, it is essential to go to bed on time, to eat regular meals and follow a daily routine.It is also important to eat food that helps balance and nourishes the Vata skin.
Vata skin types people should eat more warm and unctuous foods. They should favor the sweet, sour and salty tastes that help in balancing the dry and rough Vata dosha.
It is essential to provide added nourishment to the skin by including organic milk and green leafy vegetables in the diet. Drinking lots of lukewarm water every day for internal hydration is beneficial.
Eating plenty of sweet juicy fruits help cleanse the body from within and provide hydration. Including a little healthy fat such as Ghee (clarified butter) or olive oil in diet adds lubrication.
Self-massage with warm oil is excellent for keeping skin lubricated. Get plenty of rest so your mind, as well as your body, can recharge.
Also Read: 10 Amazing Ayurvedic Herbs For Beautiful Glowing Skin
Pitta Skin Care
For Pitta Skin type, cooling and nurturing is critical.
Pitta, skin type people, should thrive on astringent, bitter and sweet tastes. It is mainly found in sweet juicy fruits, rose petal preserve and cooked greens. They should avoid hot and spicy foods.
It is better for them to stay away from harsh, synthetic cosmetics as they can damage the sensitive skin and cause breakouts.
They should avoid an excess of deep-fried foods as it acts like adding heat to an already fiery constitution.
Lots of sweet juicy fruits and some rose petal jam in cool milk every day will help Pitta skin types. The rose is considered as a coolant for the mind, body, and emotions. Cooling oil like coconut oil can be used for the daily massage.
Cooling spices such as fennel and licorice can be used for cooking. Extra care of skin is required when you go out in the sun.
Gentle and natural skin care products should be utilized for cleansing and moisturizing.
Kapha Skin Care
Kapha skin is thick and oily therefore it is more prone to accumulate ama i.e. toxins under the skin.
Kapha skin types people needs detoxification on a regular basis, both internal and external detoxification to flush toxins from the skin.
Scrubbing the skin with gentle exfoliating clay can help external cleansing. They may also need to take herbal formulations to cleanse the skin from within.
The Kapha type skin should have a diet that is lighter, less oily, warmer not containing heavy, hard to digest foods.
Eating pungent, astringent and bitterer tastes help stimulate digestion and also help balance the Kapha skin.
It is best to avoid too many sweet and deep-fried foods. They add to the oiliness of the skin. Exercising every day improves circulation. Daily warm oil massage can also serve the same purpose.
Eating plenty of organic vegetables and fruits helps to cleanse the body from inside. Cleansing skin twice every day and exfoliating with a mud-mask at least once a week helps reduce the oil.
Cooking with warm spices such as ginger and black pepper stokes the digestive fire and prevents the accumulation of ama inside the body.
You can use the marma points of Ayurveda on the body to stimulate the energy flow and give your face a flawless look.
I am sure if you are going to follow this Ayurvedic Skin Care Guide your skin will be healthy and get the required nourishment it needed. Comment below your thoughts on this. I ll love to hear from you.Insane Clown Posse is suing the US Justice Department and the FBI, for classifying their loyal fans – the "Juggalos" – as members of a criminal gang, the New York Times has reported.
In a suit filed on Wednesday, the Michigan rap duo claimed the decision to classify the Juggalos as a gang was "unwarranted and unlawful" and had led to fans being harrassed. Four fans – from Nevada, California, North Carolina and Iowa – have joined ICP founders Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler and the Michigan branch of the American Civil Liberties Union in the suit.
The four fans said in the complaint that they had been subject to police harrassment or punishment because of their association with the band. Mark Parsons, from Nevada, said he was detained by Tennessee state troopers for displaying an ICP insignia on his truck. Scott Gandy, from North Carolina, said he had spent hundreds of dollars having Juggalo tattoos covered with other tattoos after being told he could not join the army with "gang-related" body art.
The two band members said one of their concerts in Michigan had been cancelled after local police had "cited the federal Juggalo gang designation".
The gang designation had its roots, the NYT reported, in a 2011 report from the FBI's National Gang Intelligence Center, which described the Juggalos as a "loosely organised hybrid gang", and cited two incidents in which "suspected Juggalo associates" or members were involved in violent crime.
In the lawsuit, ICP say their music is actually laden with "hopeful, life-affirming themes about the wonders of life and the support that Juggalos give to one another".
The Juggalos are one of rock's most zealous fanbases – so much so that Whoop Dreams, a documentary about fans at the band's annual Gathering of the Juggalos, is set to be released this year.
Reading on mobile? Watch the Whoop Dreams trailer hereGame Update 2.7: Invasion is here! We discuss our initial impressions of the new content, along with other news from around the galaxy.
1. Introduction
2. Tip of the week
Congratulations to this week’s winner, Russ! Thanks to Raymond, GasGuy, Jay Connell, Mark, Fisk, Ben B and Bara-dur for entering.
ArticueGaming has a new channel that will be primarily PvP tips and video for SWTOR.
GasGuy recommends swtor-holo.net‘s guides for leveling your crafting skills.
Please send your tips to ootinicast@gmail.com by next Wednesday for a chance to win a M8-R3 code, courtesy of BioWare, and an OotiniCast-provided Cartel Market pack from the latest shipment.
3. Holofeed
Game Update 2.7: Invasion was deployed during regular maintenance on Tuesday. We recommend Dulfy’s various guides that comprehensively cover what’s in 2.7. Note that with their new delivery cadence, we can expect maintenance every three weeks, excepting the times when an emergency patch needs to be deployed.
You can see the analysis of the data associated with Ranked PvP Season 1 on our Leaderboards page for solo and group.
4. Community
5. Force Feedback
We discuss tweets, emails and comments from Gary (@wirapidsgamers), @TheMalgadar, ndbbm (Nobody’s Damn Business But Mine), Big of the Enmity Podcast, Matthew D (@mwdowns), Krackr (@JediKrackr), Laurie M (@Lawilc01), Brian Peters (@fnord3125), @MaterRex, Vigilanis (@SWTOR_Vigi), @_Casmas, @darksplat, Brian M (@lordnathanial), Jeff Dimbo (@Dimbo56, SWTOR Mayor), JB (@O_JohnnyBravo_O) and Goaster (@JeffyJaws).
Goaster recommends the video SWTOR – EMP field analysis for 2.6 for dedicated GSF pilots.
6. Outro
Thanks to Redna (@R3DN4, twitch.tv/r3dn4) for joining us this week.
Information about our guilds on The Harbinger, Ootini Knights (Republic) and Ootini Rage (Empire), can be found here.
You can email questions and comments about the show to ootinicast@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter via @OotiniCast. Check out our website, ootinicast.com, which has links to our presence on Google+ and Facebook. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, and listen to us on Stitcher.The British and Irish Governments must work together to resolve a long-running dispute over Lough Foyle, Ireland's Foreign Affairs Minister has said.
Claims over the vast estuary between Co Derry in Northern Ireland and Co Donegal in the Republic have been made since the island was partitioned almost a century ago.
After the Good Friday Agreement peace deal, a cross-border body called the Loughs Agency was handed responsibility for the waters, a key strategic naval base during the Second World War.
However, in the wake of the UK's vote to leave the European Union, Northern Ireland Secretary of State James Brokenshire has reasserted London's claim over the entire lough.
However, addressing the contentious issue after a meeting of the North South Ministerial Committee in Armagh, Charlie Flanagan said he did not accept the British claim.
He said: "This is an issue upon which there has been some disagreement for many years.
"I don't accept the claims that the whole of Lough Foyle is under the jurisdiction of the UK government. However, rather than dwell on the negatives, I think it is important that we look forward and see how best this issue might be resolved."
The Minister said officials from his department had been in contact with civil servants from the Secretary of State's Office in a bid to thrash out a resolution.
Min @CharlieFlanagan at the NSMC plenary in Armagh, where he briefed on his work in advancing Ireland's interests in Brexit discussions pic.twitter.com/NED3LLj520 — Irish Foreign Ministry (@dfatirl) November 18, 2016
"I believe it is important that we work towards solutions and both myself and my department are committed to reaching a successful conclusion on this outstanding issue which has been the subject of disagreement for many decades.
"I do believe that we should work together on reaching agreement," he said.
Meanwhile, Northern Ireland's First Minister Arlene Foster said a barrier on the seas would contradict the efforts to avoid a hard border on land.
Mrs Foster said: "Obviously if there's no hard border going to be on land we don't really want to see a hard border on Lough Foyle either.
"There has been a dispute over Lough Foyle and it is important that we find a solution that everyone can agree on."
Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, a keen fisherman who lives close to the lough, added: "Here, here Arlene. No hard border on the land; no border on the sea.
"This has been a debating point which hopefully can be resolved by some form of negotiation between the Irish government and the British government.
"My interest is to see the salmon and the sea trout flow without interruption up Lough Foyle into all of the tributaries."By Jacob Sullum
Growing familiarity with marijuana has been accompanied by growing support for legalization because people discovered through personal experience that the government was lying to them about the drug’s hazards. But it is easier to demonize less popular drugs such as crack cocaine and methamphetamine, which in the public mind are still linked, as marijuana once was, with addiction, madness, and violence. Any attempt to question the use of force in dealing with these drugs therefore must begin by separating reality from horror stories.
That is where Carl Hart comes in. Hart, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Columbia who grew up in one of Miami’s rougher neighborhoods, has done bold, path-breaking research that challenges widely accepted beliefs about crack and meth. In his inspiring and fascinating new memoir High Price, he describes both how he overcame his early disadvantages to secure a tenured position at an Ivy League university and how he came to question everything he thought he knew about drugs as he learned to think critically about the issue.
Before he became a scientist, Hart believed that people who use crack generally get hooked on it and thereby lose control of their behavior. But when he looked at the data on patterns of drug use as an academic, he could plainly see that only a small minority of people who try crack become heavy users. “Even at the peak [of] widespread use,” he writes, “only 10–20 percent of crack cocaine users became addicted.” According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, just 3 percent of Americans who have tried this reputedly irresistible and inescapable drug have smoked it in the last month.
Contrary to what anti-drug ads claim, Hart observes, addiction “is not an equal-opportunity disorder.” He notes that even rats, whose voracious consumption of cocaine in certain contrived conditions supposedly shows how powerfully addictive that drug is, tend to use it in moderation when they have other options, such as food, sex, or an interesting environment to explore.
Crack “gained the popularity that it did in the hood…because there weren’t that many other affordable sources of pleasure and purpose,” Hart writes. “And that was why, despite years of media-hyped predictions that crack’s expansion across classes was imminent, it never ‘ravaged’ the suburbs.”
Furthermore, Hart’s own research with heavy crack smokers found that, in contrast with the stereotypical addict who cannot help but immediately consume whatever crack is available, they frequently rejected the drug in favor of small cash payments or vouchers. He got similar results with meth snorters, even though he deliberately recruited frequent consumers who had no interest in stopping. These findings underline a crucial truth that Hart emphasizes: “The effects of drugs on human behavior and physiology are determined by a complex interaction between the individual drug user and her or his environment.”
Hart debunks various other misconceptions about crack and meth. He notes that the vast majority of violence attributed to crack grew out of black-market disputes, as opposed to the drug’s pharmacological effects. His studies found that cocaine and methamphetamine do increase heart rate and blood pressure, but the effect of typical doses is not dangerous in otherwise healthy people. He argues that research linking meth to brain damage confuses correlation with causation and fails to show that meth users’ cognitive capabilities are outside the normal range. And in case you were wondering, “There is no empirical evidence to support the claim that methamphetamine causes one to become physically unattractive.”
Hart is well aware of the hostility he is apt to provoke by challenging the myths underlying the war on drugs. He describes a 2005 meeting with journalists, arranged by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, where he tried to put the dangers of methamphetamine in perspective, noting that the drug is a government-approved treatment for narcolepsy and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He cited his own research finding that methamphetamine has “the same effects” as a more familiar ADHD drug, Adderall, which has a “nearly identical” chemical structure. He added that pilots and soldiers commonly use amphetamines to stay alert.
Yet for some reason amphetamine use in these contexts is not considered alarming, physically dangerous, dentally destructive, or apt to produce outbursts of irrational, murderous violence. Hart’s calm and accurate presentation contrasted sharply with the tales of chemical slavery, degradation, and monstrous mayhem told by the other “experts” invited to the meeting: a cop, a prosecutor, and a self-identified meth addict. “My fellow panelists were horrified,” he says.
Jacob Sullum (jsullum@reason.com), a senior editor at Reason magazine and a nationally syndicated columnist, is the author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use (Tarcher/Penguin). Follow him on Twitter: @jacobsullum.The joy of English pronunciation
The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité (1870–1946)
If your browser does not display the IPA part of Unicode correctly, here is a PDF version of the same thing.
The text
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.
Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it's written).
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say—said, pay—paid, laid but plaid.
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,
But be careful how you speak,
Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak,
Previous, precious, fuchsia, via,
Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
Woven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.
Say, expecting fraud and trickery:
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,
Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles,
Missiles, similes, reviles.
Wholly, holly, signal, signing,
Same, examining, but mining,
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far.
From ‘desire’: desirable—admirable from ‘admire’,
Lumber, plumber, bier, but brier,
Topsham, brougham, renown, but known,
Knowledge, done, lone, gone, none, tone,
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel.
Gertrude, German, wind and wind,
Beau, kind, kindred, queue, mankind,
Tortoise, turquoise, chamois-leather,
Reading, Reading, heathen, heather.
This phonetic labyrinth
Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth, plinth.
Have you ever yet endeavoured
To pronounce revered and severed,
Demon, lemon, ghoul, foul, soul,
Peter, petrol and patrol?
Billet does not end like ballet;
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Banquet is not nearly parquet,
Which exactly rhymes with khaki.
Discount, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward,
Ricocheted and crocheting, croquet?
Right! Your pronunciation's OK.
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Is your R correct in higher?
Keats asserts it rhymes Thalia.
Hugh, but hug, and hood, but hoot,
Buoyant, minute, but minute.
Say abscission with precision,
Now: position and transition;
Would it tally with my rhyme
If I mentioned paradigm?
Twopence, threepence, tease are easy,
But cease, crease, grease and greasy?
Cornice, nice, valise, revise,
Rabies, but lullabies.
Of such puzzling words as nauseous,
Rhyming well with cautious, tortious,
You'll envelop lists, I hope,
In a linen envelope.
Would you like some more? You'll have it!
Affidavit, David, davit.
To abjure, to perjure. Sheik
Does not sound like Czech but ache.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, loch, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed but vowed.
Mark the difference, moreover,
Between mover, plover, Dover.
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice,
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, penal, and canal,
Wait, surmise, plait, promise, pal,
Suit, suite, ruin. Circuit, conduit
Rhyme with ‘shirk it’ and ‘beyond it’,
But it is not hard to tell
Why it's pall, mall, but Pall Mall.
Muscle, muscular, gaol, iron,
Timber, climber, bullion, lion,
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor,
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
Has the A of drachm and hammer.
Pussy, hussy and possess,
Desert, but desert, address.
Golf, wolf, countenance, lieutenants
Hoist in lieu of flags left pennants.
Courier, courtier, tomb, bomb, comb,
Cow, but Cowper, some and home.
‘Solder, soldier! Blood is thicker’,
Quoth he, ‘than liqueur or liquor’,
Making, it is sad but true,
In bravado, much ado.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Pilot, pivot, gaunt, but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand and grant.
Arsenic, specific, scenic,
Relic, rhetoric, hygienic.
Gooseberry, goose, and close, but close,
Paradise, rise, rose, and dose.
Say inveigh, neigh, but inveigle,
Make the latter rhyme with eagle.
Mind! Meandering but mean,
Valentine and magazine.
And I bet you, dear, a penny,
You say mani-(fold) like many,
Which is wrong. Say rapier, pier,
Tier (one who ties), but tier.
Arch, archangel; pray, does erring
Rhyme with herring or with stirring?
Prison, bison, treasure trove,
Treason, hover, cover, cove,
Perseverance, severance. Ribald
Rhymes (but piebald doesn't) with nibbled.
Phaeton, paean, gnat, ghat, gnaw,
Lien, psychic, shone, bone, pshaw.
Don't be down, my own, but rough it,
And distinguish buffet, buffet;
Brood, stood, roof, rook, school, wool, boon,
Worcester, Boleyn, to impugn.
Say in sounds correct and sterling
Hearse, hear, hearken, year and yearling.
Evil, devil, mezzotint,
Mind the Z! (A gentle hint.)
Now you need not pay attention
To such sounds as I don't mention,
Sounds like pores, pause, pours and paws,
Rhyming with the pronoun yours;
Nor are proper names included,
Though I often heard, as you did,
Funny rhymes to unicorn,
Yes, you know them, Vaughan and Strachan.
No, my maiden, coy and comely,
I don't want to speak of Cholmondeley.
No. Yet Froude compared with proud
Is no better than McLeod.
But mind trivial and vial,
Tripod, menial, denial,
Troll and trolley, realm and ream,
Schedule, mischief, schism, and scheme.
Argil, gill, Argyll, gill. Surely
May be made to rhyme with Raleigh,
But you're not supposed to say
Piquet rhymes with sobriquet.
Had this invalid invalid
Worthless documents? How pallid,
How uncouth he, couchant, looked,
When for Portsmouth I had booked!
Zeus, Thebes, Thales, Aphrodite,
Paramour, enamoured, flighty,
Episodes, antipodes,
Acquiesce, and obsequies.
Please don't monkey with the geyser,
Don't peel 'taters with my razor,
Rather say in accents pure:
Nature, stature and mature.
Pious, impious, limb, climb, glumly,
Worsted, worsted, crumbly, dumbly,
Conquer, conquest, vase, phase, fan,
Wan, sedan and artisan.
The TH will surely trouble you
More than R, CH or W.
Say then these phonetic gems:
Thomas, thyme, Theresa, Thames.
Thompson, Chatham, Waltham, Streatham,
There are more but I forget 'em—
Wait! I've got it: Anthony,
Lighten your anxiety.
The archaic word albeit
Does not rhyme with eight—you see it;
With and forthwith, one has voice,
One has not, you make your choice.
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say: finger;
Then say: singer, ginger, linger.
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, age,
Hero, heron, query, very,
Parry, tarry, fury, bury,
Dost, lost, post, and doth, cloth, loth,
Job, Job, blossom, bosom, oath.
Faugh, oppugnant, keen oppugners,
Bowing, bowing, banjo-tuners
Holm you know, but noes, canoes,
Puisne, truism, use, to use?
Though the difference seems little,
We say actual, but victual,
Seat, sweat, chaste, caste, Leigh, eight, height,
Put, nut, granite, and unite.
Reefer does not rhyme with deafer,
Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Dull, bull, Geoffrey, George, ate, late,
Hint, pint, senate, but sedate.
Gaelic, Arabic, pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific;
Tour, but our, dour, succour, four,
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Say manoeuvre, yacht and vomit,
Next omit, which differs from it
Bona fide, alibi
Gyrate, dowry and awry.
Sea, idea, guinea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean,
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion with battalion,
Rally with ally; yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, key, quay!
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, receiver.
Never guess—it is not safe,
We say calves, valves, half, but Ralf.
Starry, granary, canary,
Crevice, but device, and eyrie,
Face, but preface, then grimace,
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Bass, large, target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, oust, joust, and scour, but scourging;
Ear, but earn; and ere and tear
Do not rhyme with here but heir.
Mind the O of off and often
Which may be pronounced as orphan,
With the sound of saw and sauce;
Also soft, lost, cloth and cross.
Pudding, puddle, putting. Putting?
Yes: at golf it rhymes with shutting.
Respite, spite, consent, resent.
Liable, but Parliament.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew, Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, clerk and jerk,
Asp, grasp, wasp, demesne, cork, work.
A of valour, vapid vapour,
S of news (compare newspaper),
G of gibbet, gibbon, gist,
I of antichrist and grist,
Differ like diverse and divers,
Rivers, strivers, shivers, fivers.
Once, but nonce, toll, doll, but roll,
Polish, Polish, poll and poll.
Pronunciation—think of Psyche!—
Is a paling, stout and spiky.
Won't it make you lose your wits
Writing groats and saying ‘grits’?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel
Strewn with stones like rowlock, gunwale,
Islington, and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Don't you think so, reader, rather,
Saying lather, bather, father?
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, bough, cough, hough, sough, tough?
Hiccough has the sound of sup.
My advice is: GIVE IT UP!
Phonetic version (British pronunciation)
ˌdɪəɹɪst ˈkɹiːʧəɹ ɪn kɹɪ.ˈeɪʃn̩
ˌstʌdɪ.ɪŋ ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ pɹəˌnʌnsɪ.ˈeɪʃn̩
ˌaɪ wɪl ˈtiːʧ jʊ ɪn maɪ ˈvɜːs
ˈsaʊndz laɪk ˈkɔːps ˈkɔː ˈhɔːs ənd ˈwɜːs
ˌaɪ wɪl ˈkiːp jʊ ˈsuːzɪ ˈbɪzɪ
ˌmeɪk jə ˈhɛd wɪð ˈhiːt ɡɹəʊ ˈdɪzɪ
ˈtɪəɹ ɪn ˌaɪ jə ˈdɹɛs wɪl ˈtɛə
ˈkwɪə ˌfɛə ˈsɪə ˈhɪə maɪ ˈpɹɛə
ˈpɹeɪ kənˈsəʊl jə ˈlʌvɪŋ ˈpəʊ.ɪt
ˈmeɪk maɪ ˈkəʊt ˌlʊk ˈnjuː ˌdɪə ˈsəʊ ɪt
ˌʤʌst kəmˈpɛə ˈhɑːt ˈhɪəɹ ənd ˈhɜːd
ˈdaɪz ənd ˈdaɪ.ət ˈlɔːd ənd ˈwɜːd
ˈsɔːd ənd ˈswɔːd ɹɪˈteɪn ənd ˈbɹɪtn̩
ˈmaɪnd ðə ˈlætə ˌhaʊ ɪts ˈɹɪtn̩
ˈmeɪd həz ˈnɒt ðə ˈsaʊnd əv ˈbæd
ˈseɪ ˈsɛd ˈpeɪ ˈpeɪd ˈleɪd bət ˈplæd
ˌnaʊ aɪ ˈʃɔːlɪ wɪl nɒt ˈpleɪɡ juː
ˌwɪð sʌʧ ˈwɜːdz æz ˈveɪɡ ənd ˈeɪɡjuː
ˌbʌt bɪ ˈkɛəfl̩ haʊ juː ˈspiːk
ˌseɪ ˈɡʌʃ ˈbʊʃ ˈsteɪk ˈstɹiːk ˈbɹeɪk ˈbliːk
ˈpɹiːvɪ.əs ˈpɹɛʃəs ˈfjuːshə ˈvaɪ.ə
ˈɹɛsəpɪ ˈpaɪp ˈstʌnsl̩ ˈkwaɪ.ə
ˈwəʊvn̩ ˈʌvn̩ ˈhaʊ ənd ˈləʊ
ˈskɹɪpt ɹɪˈsiːt ˈʃuː ˈpəʊ.ɪm ˈtəʊ
ˈseɪ ɪkˈspɛktɪŋ ˈfɹɔːd ənd ˈtɹɪkəɹɪ
ˈdɔːtə ˈlɑːftəɹ ˌænd tɜːpˈsɪkəɹɪ
ˈbɹɑːnʧ ˈɹɑːnʧ ˈmiːzl̩z ˈtɒpsl̩z ˈaɪlz
ˈmɪsaɪlz ˈsɪməlɪz ɹɪˈvaɪlz
ˈhəʊllɪ ˈhɒlɪ ˈsɪɡnl̩ ˈsaɪnɪŋ
ˈseɪm ɪɡˈzæmɪnɪŋ ˌbʌt ˈmaɪnɪŋ
ˈskɒlə ˈvɪkəɹ ˌænd sɪˈɡɑː
ˈsəʊlə ˈmaɪkə ˈwɔːɹ ənd ˈfɑː
ˌfɹɒm dɪˈzaɪ.ə dɪˈzaɪɹəbl̩ ˈædməɹəbl̩ fɹəm ədˈmaɪ.ə
ˈlʌmbə ˈplʌmə ˈbɪə bət ˈbɹaɪ.ə
ˈtɒpsəm ˈbɹuː.əm ɹɪˈnaʊn |
and contribute to enhancing the safety of Canadians.
Investing in Infrastructure for Security Agencies As part of the federal infrastructure initiative in Chapter 2—Growth for the Middle Class, Budget 2016 proposes to provide more than $128 million over two years on a cash basis, starting in 2016–17, to improve the physical infrastructure that is relied upon by law enforcement and intelligence agencies across the country on a daily basis. This investment will contribute to the rehabilitation, construction and modernization of facilities of the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Canada Border Services Agency. The investment will address health and safety concerns for officers, ensure the continuity of mission-critical operations, repurpose existing spaces to better meet program requirements and upgrade training facilities, in particular those at the RCMP Depot Division located in Regina, Saskatchewan.
Reopening the Kitsilano Canadian Coast Guard Facility
The Canadian Coast Guard is responsible for ensuring public safety on the water and protecting the marine environment along Canada's coasts, including in the Greater Vancouver area. Port Metro Vancouver is Canada's busiest port, with $187 billion of annual commercial shipping activity, in addition to being one of the busiest recreational boating areas in Canada.
Budget 2016 proposes to provide $23.6 million over five years on a cash basis, starting in 2016–17, to reopen the Kitsilano Search and Rescue Lifeboat Station in Vancouver as a Coast Guard Base with enhanced marine emergency response capacity. This will restore search and rescue services in the area. In addition, activities at Kitsilano will be expanded to include environmental response capacity, as well as emergency response training for regional stakeholders and response partners, including Indigenous groups. The facility will also serve as a Regional Incident Command Post in the event of a significant marine incident, as recommended in an independent review of the response to the fuel oil spill from the M/V Marathassa in April 2015.
The reopening of the Kitsilano Base is an important investment in a stronger Coast Guard and a critical step towards improving marine safety off Canada's east and west coasts. Options will be developed over the coming year to enhance search and rescue capacity in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Strengthening Marine Communications and Aids to Navigation The Canadian Coast Guard oversees the safe and efficient movement of ships through Canadian waters. To achieve this objective, it operates an extensive network of aids to navigation such as beacons, buoys and lighthouses. The Marine Communication and Traffic Services program also makes available distress and safety communications services to mariners and monitors vessel movements to ensure a safe and orderly flow of marine traffic. As part of the federal infrastructure initiative in Chapter 2—Growth for the Middle Class, Budget 2016 proposes to provide $45.9 million over two years, on a cash basis, to the Canadian Coast Guard to improve the dependability and efficiency of aids to navigation and structures that support Marine Communication and Traffic Services, such as aging towers. Improvements will include modernizing power generation at Marine Communication and Traffic Services and aids to navigation sites by replacing older diesel generators with cleaner and greener technologies.
Strengthening the Security of Government of Canada Networks and Cyber Systems
The Government of Canada has an obligation to protect the personal and corporate information that Canadians provide to the government to deliver public services. Budget 2016 proposes to provide $77.4 million over five years, starting in 2016–17, to implement new measures to improve the security of government networks and information technology systems. These measures will ensure that the government can better defend its networks and systems from cyber threats, malicious software and unauthorized access.
Enhancing the Safety of Railways and the Transportation of Dangerous Goods
Many cities and towns across Canada were established because of the railroad, and our communities have grown around railway infrastructure over time. Railways remain critical to the Canadian economy, carrying more than one third of Canada's trade to and from border crossings and marine ports. The tragic incident at Lac-Mégantic, on July 6, 2013, highlighted the importance of rail safety and the regulation of the transportation of dangerous goods. Following recommendations from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, a number of actions have been undertaken, including the implementation of amendments to the Railway Safety Act along with new regulations and standards, and increased frequency of inspections of high-risk dangerous goods operations. Rail traffic volumes are expected to continue to increase, and there are further Transportation Safety Board recommendations to be implemented. Canadians expect industry and government to take action to mitigate the risks associated with the movement of goods by rail through their neighbourhoods.
Budget 2016 proposes to provide $143 million over three years on a cash basis to sustain existing measures and support new and expanded activities to strengthen oversight and enforcement, and to enhance prevention and response capabilities related to rail safety and the transportation of dangerous goods. New measures will include: increased inspection capacity and improved training for stronger and more consistent oversight across the country; enhanced systems for testing, classifying, registering and mapping dangerous goods and their movements, to support better risk management; increased federal contributions for local investments in safer railway crossings to help prevent accidents; and additional support for first responders to provide better tools and the information required to better protect communities.
Improving Motor Vehicle Safety
Transport Canada works with industry and government partners to make Canada's roads the safest in the world. This includes setting safety standards for the design, construction, and importation of motor vehicles.
Budget 2016 proposes to provide $7.3 million over two years to increase inspection capacity and support the development of a regulatory framework for emerging technologies such as automated vehicles.
Investing in Motor Vehicle Testing As part of the federal infrastructure initiative in Chapter 2—Growth for the Middle Class, Budget 2016 proposes to provide $5.4 million, on a cash basis, to the Motor Vehicle Test Centre in Blainville, Quebec to enhance testing capacity at the facility. Through these actions, the Government is taking concrete steps to ensure Canada's transportation system remains safe.by
Last week, listening to activists and allied academics at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Mumbai’s Tata Institute for Social Sciences (TISS), the magnitude of the responsibility faced by the BRICS’ leadership suddenly became clearer to me. The Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa network’s incorporation into global economic governance is looking tattered after hollow victories last month, first in restarting the long-stalled World Trade Organization (WTO) in Nairobi and then in the long-standing International Monetary Fund (IMF) “voice and participation” dispute over voting shares.
In Nairobi, the key player arranging the BRICS’ co-optation into the pro-Western trade deal was a Brazilian, Roberto Azevêdo, the institution’s director-general. Indian peasants needing rudimentary state support are probably the main victims.
But BRICS neoliberals cannot chortle about the WTO, because as Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett recently admitted, “the patterns of modern trade and global growth are not behaving in 2016 as western and emerging market financiers might have expected, or as they did during earlier booms.” The main measure of trade vitality, the Baltic Dry Index, is now more than 90% lower than its 2010 peak.
Global finance is even more chaotic what with corporate securities crashing from eastern China west to New York and Chicago. The lack of faith in Beijing’s management of stock markets and of its vast debt load is palpable, a reversal from the 2008-13 period of Western over-confidence in Beijing’s authoritarian capitalism.
Still, huge financial corrections now underway won’t restore healthiness to a world economy suffering vast over-production. According to a recent Goldman Sachs report, the energy, real estate and commodity sectors will receive between a third to a quarter less investment annually through 2017 than in 2014. The only sectors for which the bank projects growing capital investment are software, computer hardware and semi-conductors.
Without substantial real capital accumulation, more financial bailouts are likely in 2016, perhaps including a fourth money-printing “Quantitative Easing” spree in Washington. But as I feared, late last month, Republican Party members of the US Congress finally (five years late) agreed with President Barack Obama that China now can pay higher IMF dues and claim a 37% larger stake in the world’s most neoliberal economic institution, along with Brazil at +23%, India at +11%, and Russia at +8%. Thread-bare South Africa loses 21% and six other African states drop more than 25% of their IMF voting power as a result of the vote rejigging, including Nigeria (41%).
IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde will also this year seek re-election to an office only ever held by white Europeans (just as the World Bank presidency has been reserved for US citizens). She continues to face persistent corruption charges in the French courts based on the crony-capitalist generosity she exhibited towards a former Adidas sportswear owner who was also a major French Conservative Party donor when she served as Finance Minister in Paris before 2011.
Hope that rebellious Russians might delegitimize the IMF, instead of propping it up with new funds and support, vanished when Vladimir Putin bragged at his press conference last month, “Despite all limitations, we complied with all our [loan repayment] commitments to our partners, including international credit institutions. We pay everything due on time and in full.” Two weeks later, he began vicious budget cuts affecting Russia’s poorest people.
So perhaps it will be just in the nick of time that BRICS leaders meet in Delhi to shore each other up at some point in the second half of 2016 (the date is yet to be announced). Dilma Rousseff still faces a corruption-related impeachment threat; her chairing of the rancid state oil company Petrobas was negligent at best. Probably she will just have celebrated the Olympic Games in Rio, though the FIFA World Cup of soccer in 2014 did her no good.
And like Dilma, Jacob Zuma will, quite likely, sheepishly carry a fresh Moody’s ‘junk-bond’ credit rating status to Delhi, along with growing rifts in his party following further shrinkage of the post-1994 majority what with forthcoming municipal elections across South Africa. Indeed, Brazil, Russia and South Africa will again have below-zero economic growth per person this year, as Putin gets busier distracting his citizens from austerity using Syrian and Ukranian skirmishes. Xi Jinping’s economic problems will continue to multiply, as un-repayable bank loans cascade and “hard landing” becomes the Chinese economy’s description most commonly invoked.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attempts to normalize rampant proto-fascistic tendencies in his ruling BJP party, while hosting BRCS allies and posturing about alternatives to Western institutions, will be cherished by his religious-nationalist support base. Typical is the president of the BRICS New Development Bank, K.V. Kamath, whose reign at the Indian state development bank was a model for commercialization in contrast to its earlier industrialization mandate. I have not seen a better recitation of the damage done by Modi’s “Hindu supremacism, economic neoliberalism and social conservatism” than Nitasha Kaul’s recent catalogue.
Though it is the only BRICS economy deemed healthy by financial markets, so many aspects of life in India are deteriorating, and this was obvious at even the two elite campuses I visited, where political debates raged. One overarching problem is Modi’s withdrawal of nominal subsidies given to help pay for studies and living expenses (a problem now also re-motivating vigorous South African student protest once again).
Another that immediately hit me as I disembarked last Monday in Delhi, was durable caste discrimination. The catalyst was the suicide of University of Hyderabad PhD candidate and student activist Rohith Vemula (age 26) that morning, on a campus that suffered repeated much abuse of the Dalit “untouchables” and other castes for whom 12% of seats are reserved. Within hours, impressive demonstrations and class boycotts were called at JNU, TISS and many other campuses, with pressure growing on Hyderabad academic leaders to stand down.
The solidarity needed with Dalits and other oppressed castes, with these students and so many other Indians has a reverse mirror image in at least one recent friction, over Zuma’s firing of a neoliberal finance minister (Nhlanhla Nene) and replacement with an inexperienced politician regarded as a stooge. After investigating, Business Day publisher Peter Bruce last week suggested that Zuma’s initial move was mostly repelled by an awesome economic force, one usually credited with ‘non-interference’ and non-conditionality: “I have reliably learnt that the Chinese were quick to make their displeasure known to Zuma. For one, their investment in Standard Bank took a big hit. Second, they’ve invested way too much political effort in SA to have an amateur mess it up. Their intervention was critical.”
Still, global financial fragility should not distract us from the underlying forces behind the current capitalist crisis, in the tendency to over-accumulate and generate gluts. The Western elite’s hesitancy in fully co-opting ‘sub-imperialist’ BRICS elites, who are trying so hard to make the world system work for their own corporates, reflects how little room there is for manoeuver.
India’s progressive movements will also react to BRICS: probably with another counter-summit and protest, as happened in Durban in 2013 and Fortaleza in 2014. (A farcical pro-Putin ‘Civil BRICS’ was held in Moscow last year.) Though ‘anti-nationalist’ slurs will be hurled at them, activists can grab the opportunity to raise the stakes, at a time there is panic evident in BRICS and Western capitals.Mark Sands
Business confidence dramatically recovered in August according to new polling figures, but concerns remain on the broader direction of the economy.
Just one day after the government was boosted by reports of a huge return in manufacturing, new YouGov figures also show confidence returning.
According to the pollster's figures, while business confidence remains below levels recorded in advance of the referendum, the gap has markedly reduced, despite fears for the economy more broadly.
In research conducted with the Centre for Economics & Business Research, YouGov found its business confidence index surged back to 109.7 in August, meaning it has made up more than half of the loss endured in the aftermath of the Brexit vote.
Read More: Spending rises as Shoppers shrug off Brexit vote but uncertainty lingers
The increase in optimism is attributed largely to improved forecasts driven by revenues from domestic sales and exports.
Before the vote, 53 per cent of businesses said they were optimistic about their own prospects in the next 12 months.
This figure had dipped to 46 per cent in July, before recovering to 48 per cent.
And less than one in four businesses say they are pessimistic.
Head of YouGov reports, Stephen Harmston, said: “For the most part, the panic we saw straight after June 23 has been replaced by calm.
“In the short term at least, a more positive outlook from businesses and consumers will help grease the wheels of the economy – spurring spending and investment.”
Read More: One more measure of consumer confidence has come roaring back
However, the firm also noted that, while businesses may be optimistic on their own prospects, concern on the broader economy remains.
In June, one in four businesses told YouGov they were pessimistic about the 12 months ahead for the economy.
This also climbed to 49 per cent in January, but the return of optimism shown elsewhere in the latest figures is not reflected to the same extent.
Forty-five per cent said they remain pessimistic about the UK economy over the coming year.Somewhere, Ron Swanson is smiling.
California's Department of Parks and Recreation needs to cut $22 million in the fiscal year 2012/2013. So to plug this budget shortfall, the Golden State is closing some of its state parks. There are currently 278 state parks in California. But after July 1, 2012, 70 of them will no longer be financed by the state. Ruth Coleman, director of California's state parks system, outlines the doomsday scenario:
Our expectation in most cases is that we will have closed the bathrooms and locked them, closed any buildings and locked them, removed trash cans, so all services will be removed. We will have staff that drive periodically. But there won't be any services. So if you go into that park, you're in essence doing it at your own risk.
However, voters are opposed to raising taxes. In 2010, Californians rejected Proposition 21, which would have increased license fees on vehicles by $18. This would have raised $500 million that could have only been spent on parks and wildlife conservation in California. Yet the editorial boards of the Los Angeles Times and the San Franciso Chronicle (hardly bastions of fiscal conservatism) both criticized the measure. The Times criticized using the proposed revenues for parks, rather than health care or schools, while the Chronicle was worried that the fee "hits low-income drivers harder than others." In the end, Prop 21 lost by 14 points, 57-43 percent.
Of course, these budgetary problems could be avoided if the state parks were operated by private owners. Owners could charge visitors a reasonable price to enjoy the parks, which would incentivize conservation and quality service. Meanwhile, taxpayers would not be coerced to pay for something they do not want to fund, as seen by their rejection of Prop 21.
Me on why we should privatize America's national parks. Reason on Ron Swanson. Reason.tv on Prop 21.Government’s Antitrust Review of Time Warner-AT&T Merger Could Be Used as Leverage in Trump/CNN Feud
AT&T’s $85 billion proposal to acquire Time Warner, the media and entertainment conglomerate that owns CNN, HBO, and others, has been submitted to the government for antitrust review. Given the tension between CNN and US President Donald Trump, many fear that the White House will use the review process as political leverage against the news network.
However, Makan Delrahim, whom Trump appointed as head of the antitrust division of the Department of Justice, has said he does not see any significant dangers in the bill. If the bill does not violate any antitrust regulations, the Trump administration will have no legal avenue by which to impede it.
Economist Hal Singer, who specializes in antitrust and media issues, says he does not believe the Trump administration can make any “[legally] credible threat” to block the deal.
“I think the most you could do is extract some sort of concessions as to the merged entity’s dealings with independent networks and rival distributors,” he said.
AT&T, along with many economists, has argued that the deal would be a “vertical merger” because AT&T and Time Warner occupy different sectors of the industry, and are not direct rivals. Therefore, the merger would not pose a threat to market competition.
Some disagree. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden told POLITICO he has “serious concerns about the…merger because it stands to reduce consumers’ choices while increasing their costs.”
During a campaign in which he repeatedly bashed CNN, Trump pledged to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger, calling it “an example of the power structure I’m fighting.” Whether the “power structure” Trump refers to is corporate consolidation or the news media is up for debate.
Trump has taken a number of steps to reduce government intervention in the free market. The administration has eased regulations in the financial sphere, for instance, that checked the growth of banks.
So the president’s stance on the Time Warner deal is something of an aberration, and some wonder whether Trump’s opposition to the merger is motivated less by a desire to protect market competition than by an agenda to silence unwelcome voices in the media.
On Sunday, Trump posted a video on Twitter which shows him repeatedly punching a CNN logo superimposed upon a man’s head. The president did not include text with the video, but appended the hashtags “#FraudNewsCNN and #FFN” to his tweet.
When asked about the video at a news conference in Poland Thursday, Trump said that CNN has covered his presidency in a “very dishonest way,” “has been fake news for a long time,” and has “serious problems.”
So there is question as to whether Trump’s administration will impartially consider the merger request.
Minnesota Senator Al Franken, a Democrat who has reservations about the merger, recommends that an “independent antitrust division” evaluate AT&T’s proposal so that Trump’s “war against the media [does] not influence the transaction.”
Wyden encourages the reviewers of the proposal to consider the effect the deal would have on the business market, not the president’s personal agenda. To allow Trump’s attitude toward the media to influence the decision “would be illegal, and flies in the face of the First Amendment [proteting freedom of speech and of press],” he says.
According to The Financial Times, Trump’s transition team “reassured AT&T” in December that the merger request would be “scrutinized without prejudice.”
Time Warner subsidiaries like CNN would remain autonomous under the merger: AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson says his company is “committed to continuing the editorial independence of CNN.”
Hopefully, Mr. Trump and his administration share that commitment. Even if they do not, they may find it difficult to find substantial legal grounds to justify blocking the merger.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage SkidmoreI have a Chrysler Town and Country minivan. It isn't the best choice for a mobile solar power system but one must make use of what one has.
I purchased a number of new solar panels from a friend who had purchased a few pallets of them at wholesale prices. These large panels (6.5 feet long and 3.5 feet wide) produce 280 watts at around 45 volts. I measured my van roof and I can fit one of these large panels on it.
I removed my van's roof cargo rack and measured the screw holes. I bought some 2 inch steel angle iron and cut it to length so that it was about one-half inch wider and longer than the panel when a panel is placed inside the 'picture frame'. I welded the pieces together to make the frame along with 'tabs' that extend out and attach to the holes where the cargo carrier had attached. I painted the steel frame with a rust proofing primer and a black finish coat. Once the paint dried I added weather stripping to the inside of the steel picture frame to give the panel a bit of cushion. Bolts were added to hold the solar panel to the frame.
In order to attach the flat frame to the curved roof of the car I created spacers by drilling a hole through the center of rubber stoppers of various lengths. Using long bolts I attached the frame to the van roof using the rubber stoppers which can conform to the curved van roof.
I currently run the cables from the solar panel through the side window and into the rear of the cab. I resist drilling into the van roof at this moment to run the cables but I may consider this modification in the near future.Just a short follow-up to my recent post about the Wichita Horror.
Researching the details there, I noticed that Wikipedia has a handy page listing crimes of violence by nonblacks against blacks, headed: Category: Racially motivated violence against African Americans. James Byrd is there, the guy who got dragged to death in 1998, and there are a couple more less well-known black victims from recent years, like James Craig Anderson, killed in 2011, but the overwhelming majority of the 90 cases listed by Wikipedia are from fifty years or more ago, confirming my impression that violent crimes by nonblacks against blacks have been exceedingly rare for decades now.
Curious to see how Wikipedia records the other side of the issue, I tried to find their page headed Category: Racially motivated violence against European Americans. Strange to report, they seem not to have one. I tried replacing "European" by "White," "Caucasian," and "Nonblack," but no dice.
The Cultural Marxist encyclopedia does have a page headed Category: Racially motivated violence in the United States. Its list of 43 items includes one each for: the 2003 Beat Up A White Kid Day in Ohio, the Reginald Denny beating during the 1992 L.A. race riot, the 1993 Long Island Railroad massacre, the 2005 Brooklyn assaults by black teenage girls on white ones, the black inmate who killed Jeffrey Dahmer the white cannibal in 1994, and the Zebra killings of the early 1970s, when four blacks hunted and killed a dozen or so whites in San Francisco.
Just taking black-on-nonblack killings for the past twenty years, and leaving out the jail inmate killing, that's a total of … zero, according to Wikipedia. So no black killed a nonblack in the U.S.A. this past 20 years with racial hostility in his mind. I'm sorry, but I find that really hard to believe.
The Wichita massacre isn't listed. Neither is the 2008 murder of Marine Corps Sergeant Jan Pietrzak and his wife in Winchester, California. Pietrzak was white, his wife Quiana was black. They were murdered in their own home by four black Marines — following rape and torture, of course. Local law enforcement hastened to assure everyone that there was no racial motive, only robbery.
Sergeant Pietrzak's mother wasn't convinced. She wrote a letter to then President-elect Obama asking, quote:
If it was a robbery, why didn't they come when nobody was home instead of in the dead of night — armed to the teeth? Why did this happen? What motivated them? What was it about my son and daughter-in-law that inspired such hatred and loathing?
End quote. It's really hard to figure, isn't it?
Obama did not favor Mrs. Pietrzak with a reply. Why should he have? She's obviously just another racist cracker.
(I should say that Wikipedia does have a page on the Pietrzak killings, they just don't consider it racially motivated. They also make the page hard to find. If you put "pietrzak" in the Wikipedia search box, six names show up, but none of them is Sergeant Pietrzak. If you put "byrd" into the box, 35 names show up, incuding James Byrd the dragging victim. If you put in "martin" and go to the Names page, you see Trayvon Martin in the "Born since 1950" category. Ah, Wikipedia.)
So: A nonblack kills a black in self-defense — TV news people will doctor the 911 tapes to make it sound racial. Blacks kill nonblacks — nothing to see here.
That's crime reporting, Cultural Marxist style.By Lauly Li / Staff reporter
Like most of its global competitors, such as Apple Inc, Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) is also counting on China to grow its new smartphone business and to hit its ambitious shipment target of 30 million units this year, more than tripling last year’s 8.5 million units.
Ahead of its official launch in Beijing today, the PC maker has about 2 million pre-sale orders for its latest flagship Zenfone 2 in China. That is a huge step for Asustek, which only sold between 600,000 and 700,000 smartphones in China last year.
“We hope the contribution from China will rise from last year’s 7 to 8 percent to 30 percent of total smartphone shipments this year,” Asustek chief executive Jerry Shen (沈振來) told reporters before a product launch in Beijing on March 27.
That translates into a shipment target of 9 million handsets in China this year.
China shipped a total of 420.7 million handsets last year, market researcher International Data Corp (IDC) said. Shipments are expected to grow 10 percent year-on-year to more than 462 million units this year, IDC said.
Asustek’s shipment target of 9 million units could help the firm gain nearly a 2 percent share of the Chinese market this year.
The company has raised its global smartphone shipments forecast three times in two months because of its optimism about the Chinese market.
At an investors’ conference in February, Shen said the smartphone business would become profitable when the firm ships more than 12 million units and that it expects to sell more than 17 million units by the end of this year.
During a Zenfone 2 product launch in Taiwan last month, Asustek chairman Jonney Shih (施崇棠) said the firm aims to triple its global smartphone shipments to 25 million units this year.
Two weeks later, Shih said he sees the company selling 30 million handsets this year.
Asustek chief financial officer David Chang (張偉明) told the Taipei Times that Shih raised the shipment target to 30 million units mainly because the company believes its new flagship product will be a great success in China.
“Zenfone 2 is the first and only smartphone that offers 4GB RAM globally. That unique spec has caught the eye of consumers,” Chang said, citing an enthusiastic response to the handsets in China, Taiwan and Europe.
Chang said 80 percent of global demand for the Zenfone 2 is for the 4GB RAM model, which is a good thing for the company because the model is priced higher and has a higher margin compared with the firm’s other handsets.
To gain a market share in China, Chang said Asustek last year launched the sub-brand Pegasus smartphone, which uses chips made by Qualcomm Inc and MediaTek Inc (聯發科), targeting the lower-priced segment of the market.
Expanding to the higher-priced segment this year, the company expects the mid-range 5.5-inch Zenfone 2, which is equipped with an Intel Corp processor, to complete a range of smartphones in the market and drive the firm’s sales performance, Chang said.
Generally, Intel processors cost more than those made by Qualcomm or MediaTek, but Intel is the only firm capable of making 4GB RAM available at the moment. Asustek plans to adopt Qualcomm’s processor when it is able to match Intel’s technology, Chang said.
The cost of the processor affects a smartphone’s price strategy and the product’s margin.
The Pegasus is priced between 899 yuan and 999 yuan (US$146 and US$163), while the Zenfone is priced at 2,000 yuan, the company said.Sanctuary offered to asylum seekers facing removal to offshore detention by churches across Australia
Updated
Churches across Australia are invoking the historical concept of sanctuary, opening their doors to asylum seekers facing removal back to offshore detention centres.
Key points: 'Sanctuary' concept yet to be tested under Australian law
High Court rejects challenge to the legality of Australia's offshore detention centres
270 asylum seekers in fear of being returned to Manus Island or Nauru
The High Court has rejected a challenge to the legality of Australia's offshore detention centres, a ruling that means nearly 270 asylum seekers who came to Australia for medical treatment could be returned to either Nauru or Manus Island.
One of Australia's senior Anglican leaders said places of worship were entitled to offer sanctuary to those seeking refuge from brutal and oppressive forces.
Among the asylum seekers now at risk of being sent back to Nauru or Manus Island are 37 babies.
Advocates for the asylum seekers are running a public campaign to pressure the Government to let them stay in Australia, and now several religious leaders have come forward to offer them sanctuary in their churches and cathedrals.
Anglican Dean of Brisbane the Reverend Dr Peter Catt said he was opening up St John's Cathedral in Brisbane to the asylum seekers.
"Many of us are at the end of our tether as a result of what seems like the Government's intention to send children to Nauru," Dr Catt said.
"So we're reinventing, or rediscovering, or reintroducing, the ancient concept of sanctuary as a last-ditch effort to offer some sense of hope to those who must be feeling incredibly hopeless."
'Sanctuary' yet to be tested under Australian law
Sanctuary is a historical concept and Dr Catt said he would happily risk being prosecuted for offering it.
Churches provide lot of assistance to refugees and they feel very strongly about this issue... In the end, people have to abide by Australia law, regardless of who they are Immigration Minister Peter Dutton
"Sanctuary was a concept that was certainly alive in the Middle Ages when people could go to a church, and particularly to a cathedral, and claim sanctuary and the church authorities could really grant them safety against the civic authorities," he said.
"It was a way of saying I'm entering into God's territory, away from the civic authorities that are oppressing me, and the oppressors generally accepted that the church could offer sanctuary to people."
Dr Catt said the concept of sanctuary had never been tested under Australian law.
"But my hunch is that if the authorities chose to enter the church and take people away, it would probably be a legal action," he said.
"So this is really a moral stand and it wouldn't be a good look, I don't think, for someone to enter a church and to drag people away."
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton addressed the legality of sanctuary, telling 2GB radio there were a lot of well intentioned people, but even churches were not above the law
"Churches provide lot of assistance to refugees and they feel very strongly about this issue," he said.
"In the end, people have to abide by Australia law, regardless of who they are."
The Australian Churches Refugee Taskforce said the offers of help were coming from across Australia.
Taskforce executive director Misha Coleman said logistically it would be a challenge for the asylum seekers to get to the sanctuaries.
"But if they do, the relevant priest or vicar will manage that situation in a very sort of confidential way," Ms Coleman said.
'Alarming impacts of detention on children'
Getup human rights director Shen Narayanasamy said there was considerable public support for the asylum seekers.
"We know the Australian public responds with compassion when they can see and hear the fact that human beings are affected by what we're doing," Ms Narayanasamy said.
The Australian Human Rights Commission's new report reveals what Ms Narayanasamy describes as the "alarming impacts of detention on children".
The report is based on interviews and medical testing of children at Wickham Point detention facility, many of whom spent time on Nauru.
Topics: refugees, religion-and-beliefs, brisbane-4000, australia
First postedAdvertisers Come Out Of The Closet, Openly Courting Gay Consumers
Chevrolet YouTube
A recent Chevrolet ad made its LGBT-friendly message clear: Against a montage of different families, including single and same-sex parents, a voice-over intones, "While what it means to be family hasn't changed, what a family looks like has."
Of course, it's not entirely new for mainstream brands to participate in gay pride parades or advertise in LGBT media. But as Gay Pride Month comes to an end, ads like this drive home the fact the last year has seen a sharp uptick in gay representation in mainstream ad campaigns. And these new ads, like Chevy's "The New Us," don't rely on the coded messages of earlier gay-oriented ads.
The history of gay people in advertising isn't that long. Rich Ferraro, vice president of communications at GLAAD (an LGBT organization that watches the media), says back in the '80s brands like Bud Light and Absolut Vodka were among the first to include the LGBT community in their advertising.
It was "mainly spirit brands marketing directly to gay men at the time," Ferraro says. "You saw images running in gay magazines or at gay events that featured a lot of shirtless white guys on beaches, or drag queens, and played up on stereotypes of the community."
If you're not appealing to every minority community, be that racial or in terms of sexual orientation, you're missing out on market share.
Ferraro says this was before the Internet or social media, so brands didn't have to be as afraid of a backlash.
Then in the 1990s, as society changed, brands started testing the waters with coded ads.
Robert Klara, a staff writer for Adweek, compares it to a two-way mirror: The ads contained messages that straight audiences would miss, but gay audiences would pick up on.
"If you were a member of the gay community and you saw an ad you would say, 'They're talking to me,' " Klara says. "Like, you remember the famous VW 'Da Da Da' commercial?"
Volkswagen YouTube
The 1997 ad for the Volkswagen Golf, called "Sunday Afternoon," featured two guys driving around. It's been called memorably ambiguous.
"That's a textbook example," Klara says. "Heterosexuals who saw those two just assumed they were friends or roommates, whereas the gay community assumed they were boyfriends."
Klara says coded targeting worked at a time when brands would be afraid to admit they were targeting gays and lesbians. But GLAAD's Ferraro says just like society, advertising has changed.
"Within the last year we've seen advertising come out of the closet, and now use LGBT families or LGBT individuals in campaigns that reach mainstream audiences," Ferraro says.
The brands are big: Kindle. Marriot. Chevrolet. Target. Klara says the stakes are higher for these brands that appeal to more consumers, compared to the '80s, when only tobacco and alcohol that marketed to the LGBT community.
"Mr. and Mrs. Main Street Heterosexual USA may or may not drink Absolut Vodka," Klara says. "They may or may not fire up a Marlboro. But they probably are going to shop at Target."
The backlash those brands may have worried about hasn't really materialized. When Ellen DeGeneres was chosen as J.C. Penney's spokeswoman a few years ago, there was a boycott, but it faded. And Ferraro says there's more to be gained by marketing to gay people than by not marketing to them.
"There are traditional brands, like Johnson & Johnson, who are not only trying to reach those families who are raising children, but also trying to reach people like my mom, who open the magazine or who turn on the television and expect advertisements that reflect their world," he says. "And today that world includes LGBT families."
The push to get the LGBT consumer is example of how competitive the marketplace is now, says Adweek's Klara: "If you're not appealing to every minority community, be that racial or in terms of sexual orientation, you're missing out on market share."
Klara says it's tempting to think this is about social progress — but actually, he says, it's free market capitalism.No sooner did the Raiders get their top two 2013 draft picks signed, but they are put on the shelf. D.J. Hayden and Menelik Watson were both placed on the reserve non-football injury list. The designation is given to someone who is not healthy because of an injury the player suffered not related to football.
This isn't like being put on the PUP list because each player can be taken off the NFL list at any time pending passing a physical.
Hayden's status was in question all along due to the surgery he had two months ago to remove scar |
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